The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Race has surely been used to beat black folk into submission; through its power, they have been seduced into cooperating with their self-destruction. But race has provided positive terms for black folk to forge solidarity and to change their lives through concerted action. Nowhere has this hope been more powerfully expressed than with the election of Barack Obama as president. Blacks have also taken hold of race to tell the truth about their existence beyond the force of oppression. There are untruths that hamper our understanding of how race operates. What is not true about race is the alleged biological input that separates one group from another; what is true about race is that culture and identity are invented in space, and build, or erode, over time. What is not true about race is that the intelligence of members of a group is innate and tied exclusively to a group’s genetic structure; what is true about race is that different qualities in a group are born when opportunity marries environment. What is not true about race is that the information we gather about groups under the imperatives of stereotype is reliable; what is true about race is that stereotypes are a hazardous way to find out about cultures, and are poor substitutes for direct experience and wise reflection.

  Some have questioned whether race is a useful cultural fiction, or if, like other unstylish beliefs, it should be discarded. Fiction may not be the problem; the trouble may be our storytellers and the stories about race they are narrating. Race was undoubtedly invented to control groups and to justify others’ stake in their intellectual and moral inferiority. But the subjects of race have expanded and spoken back. It may be helpful to understand race not only as fiction but also as the language that fiction speaks. The problem is not the English language but what has been made of it—to what ends it has been put and for what purposes it is spoken. Both the NAACP and the Ku Klux Klan use English to express themselves. What is wrong or right is the moral vision being expressed, not the language through which it is expressed.

  The stories and storytellers of race can certainly stand some change. Barack Obama’s election promised at least to open up space for new narratives of race to be shared by new narrators. Those who have had the greatest amount of influence in our culture have anchored the story of race in dominant whiteness: white perspectives are taken for granted, white interests are given priority, white identities are seen as normal, white intelligence is seen as superior, and white morality is seen as universal. The white world was good and natural, and when things got out of line, whether because of moral decay or social pathologies, things were either corrected or purged. All other identities that took root in the white world—either because they had been conquered as the white world violently expanded or because they were forcibly transplanted—were viewed as fatally deficient and substandard. The only fix was to become white, or at least as white as possible, in behavior, outlook, and desire. To wish otherwise, that is, to wish to define oneself outside the ambitions of whiteness, was to risk the wrath of white folk who were willing to “save” nonwhites from their God-forsaken plight by killing them into shape—or, to put it crudely, to achieve redemption through genocide.

  For black folk and others, dominant whiteness reflects the distorted, defective uses of race, which is the very definition of racism. The problem is not race per se, especially since race cannot be easily, or cleanly, separated from the cultures black folk and others carved from their given circumstances in the white world. Such racial self-understanding and self-definition form the baseline of black cultures. That surely cannot and should not be destroyed, or got beyond, or over, or be forced to disappear or evolve into an amorphous, race-less entity. The problem, therefore, is not race; the problem is racism, or the artificial narrowing of racial identity to the size and shape of dominant whiteness. Black figures from Frederick Douglass to Barack Obama have challenged the narrative of dominant whiteness, which reads like so many bad novels of racist ideas whose narrators have corrupted the language of race to express their ingeniously destructive plots.

  Ironically, the success of black folk and others in the fight against dominant whiteness has caused race, and eventually racism, to be blamed on them. The very people who turned a liability into an advantage by redefining racial terms, and improving their destinies, have taken the rap for race. One of the privileges of whiteness is the ability not to appear white at all, but to be seen simply as “human.” It is as if to say to black folk—who claim that the point of all their protests, from Selma in 1965 to Staten Island in 2015, is to be treated like human beings—“Hey, we’ve been here all along waiting on you.” Whiteness is also a way of turning back black appeals to race—although the appeal to race was forced on them by white society—to suggest that blacks would all be better off by giving up race talk and racial history, and acting as if all persons are now equal. It is the brilliant courtship of plausible deniability and historical amnesia. It is black folk who are made to look obsessed with race. It is black folk out to defend themselves against dominant whiteness who are made to appear racist or, in the ultimate linguistic contortion, reverse racists. Thus when most whites hear “race,” they see black. Post-race is really black disappearance.

  As it turns out, many advocates of a post-racial world do not want to get beyond race; they want to get beyond blackness. Post-racial sounds forward-looking, but in truth it harks back to the troubling wish for Negro removal that fueled the movement to send blacks back to Africa in the nineteenth century. The same forces arguably lay behind so-called urban renewal in the twentieth century.35 The fantasy that blackness can somehow be done with, overcome, gotten rid of, quenched, quarantined, cordoned off, or finally resolved is what really lies behind the post-racial ideal. That may explain the desire of many Americans for Obama to be non-black, or at least only half-black.36 Some believed that Barack Obama had to stop being a black man to govern effectively; but America must continually overcome its brutal racist past to permit his gifts, and those of other blacks, to shine. Opening the door to Obama’s presidency was a big step in the right direction because black folk should not have to stop being black to be seen as fully human and completely American.

  Perhaps if we compare race to gender we might see the point. Enlightened women and their male allies do not want this to be a post-female society. We want this to be a post-misogynist society, a post-sexist society, and certainly a post-patriarchal society. We do not want women to stop being women. We want men and women to get past ill-informed beliefs about women. We want to overcome sexist behaviors that slight women’s humanity and trump their social equality. The same outlook should apply to race in our first black presidency.

  Barack Obama’s presidency, however, has hardly put a dent in the forces that pulverize black life: high infant mortality rates, high unemployment, atrocious educational inequality, racial profiling, and deadly police brutality. That does not mean that Obama’s presidency bears little symbolic value; there is huge meaning for his people, and the nation at large, in the fact that the leader of the free world is a black man. It shows we have matured as a nation. It proves that we can look beyond color to see character and credentials. Obama’s victory may one day spur us to slay the dragons of racism and inequality that continue to stalk the national landscape. But it does not mean that we have arrived in the racial Promised Land or that we are done with blackness. There is a new blackness in the nation that must be praised for its advances and scrutinized for its contradictions and weaknesses.

  ★| 3 |★

  Black Presidency, Black Rhetoric

  Pharaoh and Moses Speak

  President Obama regaled the audience in the spring of 2012 with his humor in what has to be one of the most enjoyable roles for any commander in chief: stand-up comedian at the annual dinner for the White House Correspondents’ Association. I had watched the event in previous years on my television screen, but the live version was far more entertaining. Professional comic Jimmy Kimmel nervously rushed through his jokes and even stepped on some of his own lines. Obama, by contrast, was sm
ooth and poised, confident that his zingers would find their mark. His swag quotient was high that night as well; he insisted that it was no fluke that he’d offered a pitch-perfect rendition of a line from Al Green’s R&B classic “Let’s Stay Together” at an Apollo Theater fund-raiser three months earlier.

  Obama’s version of the ordained minister and soul legend’s tune had gone viral in black communities. It demonstrated the president’s effortless embrace of black culture despite criticism that he had been keeping blackness at bay. After Obama drew house-rocking applause from his largely black audience at the Apollo, he addressed Green, who, along with songstress India Arie, had sung at the affair. “Don’t worry, Rev,” Obama said. “I cannot sing like you, but I just wanted to show my appreciation.”1

  At the correspondents’ dinner Obama again flexed his musical muscles, this time by displaying an aficionado’s grasp of hip hop culture.

  The setup for Obama’s hip hop coolness was a perfect storm of dissing conspiracy theories and embracing black cultural signifying. “Now, if I do win a second term as president,” Obama said, teasing his audience, “let me just say something to all my conspiracy-oriented friends on the right who think I’m planning to unleash some secret agenda.” He paused for a few seconds, then hit them with an affirmation of the conservatives’ worst nightmare: “You’re absolutely right!” Obama had a mischievous look on his face as he lowered his voice in faux-ominous fashion to clinch the conspiratorial conceit. “So allow me to close with a quick preview of the secret agenda you can expect in a second Obama administration. In my first term I sang Al Green,” the president deadpanned. “In my second term, I’m goin’ with Young Jeezy!”2 He accented the second syllable of Jeezy and stretched it out a bit in dialectical deference to black street pronunciation, so that it sounded like Gee-zeeee. The audience roared its approval of his self-confident reference to rap royalty, as much out of the desire to be hip right along with him as to reward his sure-handed grasp of hip hop culture. Everything about Obama’s linguistic charisma was on display that night: humor, signifying, self-deprecation, pop cultural references, vernacular verve, and effortless code-switching.

  To understand what Barack Obama does with language—how syllables sound and words crackle in his mouth, and how his voice elevates or dips, and the sentences simmer, or sometimes sing—one cannot simply turn to theories of rhetoric or listen to other gifted presidential communicators like John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton.3 As much praise as Obama has justly received for speaking in a way that does not assault the white eardrum or worldview, his rhetoric is firmly rooted in black speech, whose best rhetoricians marry style and substance to spawn a uniquely earthy eloquence.4 Obama’s oratory hums with the kind of speech he heard for years from black preachers in the church pulpit. His former pastor Jeremiah Wright took it on the chin with the charge that he was an anti-American racist when his words were taken out of context, but his sermons fed the sacred appetite of our first black president. If one likes Barack Obama, one has got to like some parts of Jeremiah Wright. As I lay out later in this chapter, the culture’s ignorance of the black church helped fan the flames of controversy that lapped at Wright’s words.

  Obama has relentlessly channeled the legendary life and outsize oratory of Martin Luther King Jr. Most observers believe that Wright and King have little theology in common and that their rhetoric and moral aims are in deep conflict. The truth is that Wright and King share the same prophetic outlook and read politics and history through a similar biblical lens. It is also true that Obama and Wright emphasize King’s split mind on race. King’s shifting views can be sorted by chronology and color: King at first thought whites could be persuaded to change, but he grew to believe in the later years of his life that transformation had to be forced. In contrast to his appearances before white audiences, the leader was far more angry and transparent among blacks. The earlier King is a hero to Obama’s heart and tongue. As a presidential candidate Obama benefited when his image appeared beside the martyr’s on posters plastered throughout black America.

  A central contradiction loomed from the start: Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of his people, prophesied social change as an American Moses; Obama sought to become the nation’s leader, America’s Pharaoh. The conflicting ends of each man have been amplified in the way they used black speech to advance their social and political visions. The tension between the two styles of leadership came to a head in Obama’s forced confrontation with his former pastor. He at first conditionally affirmed Wright by carefully endorsing a limited prophetic ambition while criticizing Wright’s particular prophetic style and reach. It was a hazardous balancing act between competing moral and social ends that exposed a monumental ethical shift in black life: the political, at least momentarily, trumped the prophetic. Obama eventually parted ways with Wright, but not before delivering one of the most eloquent, and one of the most troubling, speeches on race ever delivered by an American politician.

  The Black Religious Wellsprings of Presidential Oratory

  The way Obama speaks owes a debt to the cadence and the colloquialisms, and the humor too, of the black pulpit. Consider a campaign speech he gave in 2008, in Sumter, South Carolina.5 Obama was a bit peeved at how his ideas about taxes were being misrepresented by his opponents in the Democratic presidential primaries, and at how his acknowledgment of Ronald Reagan’s ability to get Democrats to vote Republican had been unfairly twisted into praise for the Great Communicator’s ideas.6 Addressing a largely African American audience, Obama let loose with the black tradition known as signifying—in which the speaker hints at ideas or meanings that are veiled to outsiders.

  “They’re trying to bamboozle you,” he said. “It’s the same old okeydoke. Y’all know about okeydoke, right?” he asked, as the audience erupted in laughter at his comic timing and vernacular charm. Keeping up the humor, he scorned the idea that he was a Muslim, insisting, in a spurt of black English, “I’ve been a member of the same church for almost twenty years, prayin’ to Jesus—wit’ my . . . Bible.” And he repeated his theme of political trickery: “They try to bamboozle you. Hoodwink ya. Try to hoodwink ya. All right, I’m having too much fun here.”

  Ironically, in style and substance, Obama’s flight of rhetoric recalled, of all people, Malcolm X, at least the one portrayed in Spike Lee’s biopic, who says in a memorable speech from the film: “You’ve been had. You’ve been took. You’ve been hoodwinked. Bamboozled. Led astray. Run amok.”7 Obama was making a risky move that played to inside-group understanding even as he campaigned in the white mainstream. While denying that he was Muslim, he fastened on to the rhetoric of the most revered Black Muslim, mimicking his tone and rhythm beat for beat. Obama’s seamless code-switching was a gutsy, playfully defiant gesture, rife with black humor and tropes. But if you were not familiar with black culture, most of what he said and how he said it went right over your head—and beyond your ears.

  For another example, take the 2012 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner speech, in which Obama, after teasing the crowd about singing the music of Young Jeezy in his second term, noted that his wife approved of his choice. Turning to First Lady Michelle Obama as she smiled broadly and signaled her affirmation at the head table, Obama offered a humorous ad lib: “Michelle said, ‘Yeah!’” After the laughter rippled across the room, Obama continued, “I sing that to her sometimes.” Michelle Obama bent her head and blushed at the public confession of private affection. President Obama flashed his famous pearls for the crowd in the hotel and across the globe.

  Obama’s gesture was replete with meaning. It was more than an inside joke, a fetching moment of affection between husband and wife played out for the world to see. We cannot forget that not all such inside exchanges had been fondly received by the outside world; during the ’08 campaign, the couple’s infamous fist bump, a love tap of camaraderie and an affectionate gesture signifying “We’re in this thing together, babe,” made the cover of The New Yorker and ea
rned the enmity of even the limousine liberal set as a sign of some kind of kinky black—and for some, terrorist—code.8 Now Obama may have been imparting an even more veiled message to hip hop’s constituency in the hood that America’s first black president, despite the claims otherwise, had not forgotten about them or their needs. The first thing Obama suggested about his administration’s second term, joking or not, was an explicit embrace of hip hop by the commander in chief. The humor could not ultimately diminish the spotlight Obama gave to the culture.

  Jeezy was not simply a protégé of Obama favorite Jay Z; he was the rapper who famously touted black pride during unofficial inauguration ceremonies in 2008 with his anthem “My President Is Black,” a tune he originally recorded with rapper Nas six months before Obama’s election. Given the racial lay of the land, Obama could hardly embrace all of Jeezy’s output without courting blowback and complication. It should be remembered that after the national tragedy of Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012, Obama could not even say that if he had a son, he would look like Martin, without the right wing venting its caustic rhetoric.9 In a harmless context where even plausible deniability seemed unnecessary, Obama returned the favor to Jeezy, saying, in essence, “Yes, beyond narrow views of race and blackness, and beyond the hate of the ignorant, your president is black.”

  To get a clear glimpse of his considerable rhetorical skills, hark back to the first time Obama caught our attention—with the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.10 Embracing Illinois senator Dick Durbin, who had introduced him, with a black man’s right-hand-dap-then-shake-and-left-arm-hugging-the-back swooping gesture, the little-known Illinois senatorial candidate waited for the strains of Curtis Mayfield’s “Keep on Pushing” to subside before he rode the rhythm of hope straight into the hearts of America. On that occasion he obeyed the black preacher’s dictum: “Start low, go slow, rise high, strike fire, and sit down.”