The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  News stories and journal studies detail how white employers prefer hiring West Indian or African immigrants because employers believe they will work harder and more reliably than American blacks. Immigrant blacks do not make as big a stink about poor working conditions.9 They are also less likely to see race behind unfavorable treatment on the job. Immigrant blacks do not necessarily empathize with the burdens and responsibilities American blacks have borne. But few seem willing to give up the advantages they gain because of black American struggles for equality. Obama has admitted that he has few pieces of racial luggage stuffed with black anger. Often the mere presence of American blacks stirs guilt among whites because blacks symbolize the knowledge of past injustices and evoke resentment over the claim of lingering inequalities.

  There also seem to be huge cultural differences and conflicts between black people with lilting accents and black Americans whose tongues give them away as inescapably local. The attraction to exotic blackness often leaves domestic blackness in the dust. It is bad enough to endure such harmful comparisons in private, worse still to suffer such blows while some Africans and West Indians exploit their migrant status in the white world by joining the chorus of attacks on American blacks.10 But even more punishing may be for blacks to be seduced into voting for figures whose success could be used to reinforce their own degraded value.

  It is not difficult to imagine the reluctance of ordinary blacks to embrace a man who had the right color but lacked similar cultural references and social experiences. Every white ethnic community has been unashamed to make that distinction once they got power, as the Irish and Italians did, for example, in Chicago and Boston during the heyday of machine politics. Black voters did not want to get fooled by what Obama looked like rather than what he looked at when taking stock of the things that matter most to his constituents: the rates of incarceration for the nation’s poorest population, the schools black children often stumble through, and the police who too frequently treat black youth with murderous disdain. A leader who might dismiss all of these problems as the fault of black people themselves was either a staunch conservative or the kind of immigrant’s son who could not fathom why American blacks would complain about our land of plenty. It would be a sadly ironic gesture of powerlessness for American blacks: raise their voices, cast their votes, and seal their fates. Since they had not had the chance to learn more about Obama, most black folk initially welcomed the friend they knew in Hillary rather than the ally they only hoped they would have in Barack.

  There were signs that Obama in fact endorsed an immigrant blackness that was uncomfortable with native blackness, despite his having a foot in both worlds. Obama kept a cool distance from his black colleagues in Congress and rarely bothered with Black Caucus meetings. They seemed to return the favor of the snub by the Senate’s only black member. Obama was thrown a fat pitch down the middle of the plate when he was asked whether race played even a small role in the delay of resources to mostly poor black New Orleans residents after Hurricane Katrina struck. Instead of stroking it out the park, Obama was almost inexplicably tentative in his rhetorical swing: he claimed that Bush administration incompetence more than color ruined the day. I say almost inexplicably tentative because, even as a new senator, Obama was calculating how everything he said or did reflected not just on his political present but also on his bright political future, one that few could begin to understand, since he held the cards to the best hand a black political figure in America has ever been dealt. The example of Colin Powell surely played in his mind: you say or do the wrong thing, and the promise that glimmered on you like fresh dew will quickly evaporate and dull your shine.

  It was only as Obama proved to black folk that his story was similar to their story that he won them over. On the forty-second anniversary of the Selma voting rights march in 2007, candidate Obama, in his speech at Brown Chapel, faced off against Hillary Clinton, who gave a speech at nearby First Baptist Church, in what the media dubbed a “showdown” for the black vote. Obama directly addressed blacks’ fears that he would leave them twisting in the wind because he was not capable of grasping their greatest wishes and deepest pains:

  A lot of people been asking, well, you know, your father was from Africa, your mother, she’s a white woman from Kansas. I’m not sure that you have the same experience.

  And I tried to explain, you don’t understand. You see, my Grandfather was a cook to the British in Kenya. Grew up in a small village and all his life, that’s all he was—a cook and a house boy. And that’s what they called him, even when he was 60 years old. They called him a house boy. They wouldn’t call him by his last name.

  Sound familiar?11

  Obama’s speech gave him a critical boost in the polls among black Americans. It would not be the last time he used black vernacular and his personal pilgrimage to woo black voters.

  Torn Between Two Lovers

  But just as elements of Obama’s story earned him credibility, other aspects created doubt about whether he was black enough to truly understand the black plight. Some black people who worried over Obama’s blackness focused on how his biracial identity might be used to separate him from ordinary blacks. Not only was there a concern about exotic versus native blackness; there was, too, a fear of how black-plus would play against black-only.

  Obama cites his biracial identity as a bonus in a life whose unlikely success was possible only in America. But Obama has always been slight on the other side of that equation: his triumph here is so unlikely only because America has done more than almost any other nation to exaggerate and exploit racial identity. Race has gained such artificial importance in this country that one group could hog most of the resources for itself and leave all other groups gasping for legal and political air. Obama often takes the knowledge of racial division as his undeclared starting point. By not stating it too much, or too loudly, he can rush past the traumatic memory of race to its positive resolutions. Obama insisted late into his presidency that his biracial identity proved he had the goods to heal the nation’s racial wounds. He worked hard to resolve in his body and brain what remains to be fixed in the national body and will—the peaceful coexistence of black and white.

  Obama’s personal dilemmas have thus been turned to national benefit: they buoy him as he leads a country grappling toward a multicultural future and the slow decline of white dominance. But the question lingers whether Obama’s personal dilemmas work against black interests. Obama is willing to underplay evidence of persistent black suffering while promoting a naïvely optimistic view of the depth and pace of racial progress, as he did in the aftermath of the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson in August 2014 and Eric Garner a month earlier in Staten Island. Obama’s appeal to his biracial identity as a means of resolving racial conflict has at times only served to heighten anxieties and muffle legitimate concerns.

  The idea of biracial people makes folk on all sides of the racial divide sweat. The word “biracial” is a vast improvement over other terms that suggest interracial mixture, from “quadroon” to “mulatto,” or the slightly sexier “mestizo.” But the term “biracial” carries deficits too; when it comes to many ideas that begin with the prefix “bi-”—whether it’s biracial, bisexual, or bipolar—America attaches stigma. The most bitter racial abyss in this country savagely separates blacks from whites. Sexual and romantic unions that defy this monumental rift draw attention and outrage. The biracial impulse is doggedly individual; it refuses to give the group ultimate say over the heart or loins. And biracialism rides a paradox into existence: it is often willing to make new kin by ignoring the racial wishes or fears of existing kin. The idea, again, makes all parties nervous.

  Obama has written and spoken insightfully about how biracial folk are faced with split racial affinities and competing group loyalties.12 Because they are members of more than one primary group, biracial people often face an unsettling question: To what tribes and traditions do they rightly or truly belong? It is an inquiry
that raises the question of race by having begged off its stubborn restrictions. By giving birth to racial choice from their wombs, the parents of biracial folk cannot help but put flesh on politics. If, as anthropologist Carol Stack argues,13 black people in America make fictional kin of people not related to them by birth or blood, then biracial people have gone them one better: they create factional kin by blending two “races” that are fictions of the social order. Factional kin make both whites and blacks nervous because both “factions” fear a world where lines of purity and authenticity are blurred, though for completely different reasons.

  White culture owes a debt to the myth of superiority that most whites in their more honest moments know is absurd. But the fact that the myth is unworkable has not kept it from metastasizing across the culture. The opposition of enlightened whites and their nonwhite allies to the myth has not yet killed it. For unyielding purists, and for lots of rank-and-file folk too, race mixing undercuts the brand and compromises the quality of whiteness.

  Many blacks think that peers who hunt for acceptance outside the race really do believe that whites are superior. It is one thing to give in to whiteness at work, or even at play; whites dominate both worlds and have a large part to perform in the employment and recreation of black folk, whether working at Chrysler, cheering at a ballgame, or singing along at a concert. But to surrender to whiteness in love and procreation may suggest that blackness is simply not enough, or worse yet, just not good enough, and that blacks have collectively done what James Baldwin says his father did: believed the horrible things white people said about him.14 It is clear that the myth of white superiority enjoys an unsavory codependence on its despised twin—the lie of black inferiority.

  Some blacks believe that many biracial folk will never be satisfied with the blackness that they will almost always have to learn to make peace with. Even though it seems archaic to say so, the one-drop rule of black blood contaminating white identity still holds sway. Many blacks think that the temptation to despise or avoid blackness, even the blackness contained within one’s body, may be too hard for mixed-race folk to resist. In his memoir Dreams from My Father, a compelling and colorful story of his journey to blackness penned before his fame, Obama recalls a conversation he had with a multiracial woman named Joyce who rejected the idea that she was black. “That was the problem with people like Joyce,” Obama writes. “They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people.”15 That is why black folk applaud when Barack Obama acknowledges that even though he has white blood, he is a black man. It is also why black folk beam in pride when actress Halle Berry says she is comfortable with her blackness because her white mother told her she would be seen and treated as a black woman. It was also heartening to millions of blacks around the country when New York mayor Bill de Blasio admitted that he and his black wife, Chirlane McCray, have had many conversations with their biracial son Dante about how to behave when he encounters the police. And it is why blacks wince in painful empathy when Tiger Woods is skittish about his blackness and appears uncomfortable in his own skin as he downplays the fact that others detest or deride that skin.

  There is unfair pressure on biracial folk from both whites and blacks who root for one side or the other to prevail. Many biracial people would like to claim both sides of their racial inheritance. Such a desire has its complications. Black people know that blackness is not valued until it proves useful to mainstream culture, while whiteness is always at a premium. Biracial people do not usually get counted as at least half-white, versus half-black, until they do something positive or wonderful to make whites take notice. Before then those same biracial folk were black by default. That may be a lazy way to account for race, but it is a way that has prevailed for more than a century. It is easy for whites to claim Halle Berry, Alicia Keys, or Barack Obama after they make good. It is understandable why blacks who love and nurture biracial people might feel betrayed by a sudden and newfound interest in “black” people with mixed blood who, after their fame, become “biracial,” meaning half-white, or less-than-black. Some blacks fear that biracial folk who want to drink from all of their racial roots will as soon as possible spit out blackness and guzzle a prized whiteness. White superiority works hard to get a toe in the racial door, even if it is a toe on half a white person “compromised” by black identity.

  Obama’s conscious effort to be black clearly has a political more than a genetic meaning. Tiger Woods proves that a biracial man who looks black has little say in how the public sees him. But Mariah Carey’s success shows how blackness may be suppressed and not seen as a liability in a biracial person who looks white even if she “sounds” black. Black folk often do not acknowledge how biracial kids who want it must struggle for the blackness that black kids take for granted. Obama, as a biracial child, was born without the comparative black privilege that black kids assume. Black kids have to opt out of the black world by explicitly denying their roots, like those fair-skinned blacks who “passed” in earlier generations. Biracial children must at times actively campaign to prove their authentic black identity. Blacks are born with full racial coverage, while biracial children are often left uninsured. The hard work of arguing their way inside blackness may equip some biracial children with more knowledge of black roots and realities than many black children have. In Dreams from My Father, Obama recalls as an adolescent chiding a black friend who had not read Malcolm X’s autobiography, as the friend retorted, “I don’t need no books to tell me how to be black.” Like many studious black males, Obama writes, “I decided to keep my own counsel after that, learning to disguise my feverish mood.”16

  As Obama learned his way inside blackness, he did not simply have to explore the African kinship he shared with his father. He had to discover as well a black identity his father did not possess, that of an African American. Obama baptized himself in the black experience as if he were making up for lost time, which of course he was. He settled comfortably into the idea that he is a black man in America. It would be overstating the case to say that Obama did not make much of his biracial autobiography until he was well known, but it would not be wrong to say that he has made the most of it since he became famous. Obama’s white mother and grandparents got more airtime and ink as he struggled to win the white vote and the White House. New Yorker editor David Remnick has argued that Obama used his biracial story to try to unify the nation and revive American politics. “Obama made his biracial ancestry a metaphor for his ambition to create a broad coalition of support, to rally Americans behind a narrative of moral and political progress,” Remnick writes. “He was not its hero, but he just might be its culmination.”17 Obama seemed to be saying, “I’m one of you, too,” while feeling no need to proclaim the blackness that he and his audiences, black and white, could take for granted. It made some blacks, who likewise felt no need to broadcast their blackness, feel right at home; for whites, it did not make them feel singled out and picked on.

  The Politics of Race

  Barack Obama has tried to negotiate the clash of race and a broader domain of identity by insisting that he is “rooted in, but not defined by” black life. It is a distinction that has become more pronounced the higher up the political ladder he has climbed. Black life defined Obama’s world when his world was largely limited to his doings and strivings among black folk. He wanted to venture freely into the bigger world when his opportunities got bigger. Obama calmly insisted that critics who did not understand his complicated odyssey to blackness would not hold him hostage. He had movingly recorded his search for his African roots and a conscious and useful black identity in Dreams from My Father. He had engaged deeply entrenched poverty as a Chicago community organizer and had many blacks among his constituents as an Illinois state senator. He had joined a church with an Afrocentric liberation theology and had a broad circle of friends that included many blacks. As he blossomed in local and national politics, Oba
ma bravely embodied W. E. B. Du Bois’s wish for black folk to develop themselves in the white world without being spurned by their own group.

  Blacks eventually got over their suspicion of Obama’s experiment in free black identity. They grew to appreciate how he yearned to crush racial stereotypes and revel in a cosmopolitan American identity. Black folk at their best seek to drink from black roots without being strangled by them. It made perfect sense to blacks that Obama would resist being ghettoized as the “black” candidate in his efforts to win the White House. He stood firm in his views of race. And in that firmness he taught the nation how being black is not a distortion of American ideals but rather a celebration of them.

  Obama’s cosmopolitan views of race served him well as he began to swim in the political mainstream. He made quick work of the “Bradley effect,” whereby whites, for fear of sounding racist, say they will support a black candidate but fail to follow through in the voting booth. The most infamous and so namesake example occurred when Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley lost his 1982 bid for governor of California despite a healthy lead in the polls. When the Bradley effect loomed in a surprising primary loss in 2008 in New Hampshire, where Obama had been pegged to win, he dusted himself off, quickly retooled, picked up steam, and rarely looked back. Of course there were racially tinged worries: moderate white liberals might turn tail at the prospect of a radical shift in the world they had grown accustomed to, a change symbolized by the success of a black candidate whose beliefs they did not yet know. Whites who rode the fence between parties considered stepping onto Obama’s turf. But they temporarily had the devil frightened out of them by the vision of Jesus being preached by Obama’s longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright, about whom I say more later.