The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Obama argued that Wright’s racially charged comments distracted the nation from solving “monumental problems—two wars, a terrorist threat, a failing economy, a chronic health-care crisis, and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.” But race is a problem that confronts us all too; the proof is that nothing Obama said about these other issues, and nothing anybody associated with him said about these issues, threatened to derail his candidacy quite like Wright’s remarks, which touched the deepest and most sensitive nerve in the nation. Race is still the country’s most volatile issue and its greatest unhealed wound. Race and democracy grew together in the American imagination and were woven into its laws and braided into its beliefs and behaviors. Even Obama’s laundry list of crises is not immune to the shadow of race: if one was black or brown, the bad economy had been even worse, and the lack of health care had hit black and brown folk especially hard; as we saw, the initial debate over universal coverage sent the president and his allies running for cover from the bitter racial fallout over his proposed reforms.

  Obama later let on in his speech that race is a big problem, calling it “an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.” So it was not confronting race that was the problem with Wright’s comments; it was his divisive manner and his distorted philosophy of racism’s bleak persistence that were troubling. And yet Obama seemed to agree with Wright when he said we “need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.” To his credit Obama named some of them: segregated schools; legalized discrimination that kept black folk from owning property; barriers to getting loans to start businesses, securing mortgages, and landing jobs in police or fire departments; a vicious wealth gap and brutal poverty whose origins trace back to American apartheid; and the blight of economic inequality in black families, which is compounded by the lack of basic services in urban black communities. Though lacking the prophetic passion that streams through Wright’s dramatic blues complaints, Obama’s pointed analysis shows that he and Wright are not very far apart at all in their estimation of the structural forces that sweep over black America and diminish its stability and prosperity. Of course, the ways they emphasize its results surely vary and are dictated by their distinct vocations of prophet and politician. One hollers. One whispers. It is hard not to conclude that if Wright’s views of the matter are distorted, then so are Obama’s. Yet that hardly kept Obama from drawing distinctions between himself and his former pastor.

  The Politics of Anger

  Obama attempted to explain Wright by exposing a generational fault line beneath the ground of black existence: older blacks like Wright who came of age in the sixties are engulfed in bitterness and anger that are usually muted in white America but regularly flash at barbershops, kitchen tables, and black churches—a palpable force that is often, said Obama, “exploited by politicians to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.” The implication, of course, is that Obama is a new black whose racial politics are less heated and will not lead to divisive talk or appeals to race to make a point or win an election. The fact that such an approach could be seen as an effective way to untie the racial knot proves we lack sophistication in grappling with race, and that for their own benefit our politicians sometimes pretend that things on their watch are not as bad as they seem, while the nation continues to suffer.

  Obama aimed to get rid of one sort of racial difference while reinforcing another: he reassured white America that he shared neither the age nor the rage of blacks who witnessed the flight of Jim Crow up close. That nimble racial dance was brought on by the need to explain black anger without endorsing it; Obama would never get to the White House except as a visitor if he came off as too angry—or for that matter if he appeared angry at all. Obama’s cool demeanor took on political significance and boosted him beyond black leaders known to direct passion against prejudice. It may be that those who got many of the benefits that were fought for in the sixties can afford to be more hopeful, perhaps even cooler, while those who have been left behind, and the folk who speak for them, have more reason to complain about what did not get done.

  The need to prove that he was not an angry black man led Obama to deny the political usefulness of black anger and to draw questionable parallels between black and white anger, a move that curiously denied white anger’s political destructiveness. Black anger has surely been exploited and destructive, but it has also been productive and redemptive. If black folks’ humiliation has led to anger—and to doubt and fear—that anger also led to tremendous change. Malcolm X was palpably angry at the horrible conditions of black life and worked to translate his rage into the redemption of black communities. Martin Luther King Jr., too, poured a prophet’s rage on the war in Vietnam, and on poverty and racial inequality near the end of his brief but remarkable run in public life.

  Obama contended that black anger distracts black folk from “solving real problems,” from “squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change.” Obama may have been hinting at a black anger that is more cathartic than catalytic, one that is grounded in venting before it takes off on the wings of aimless speech or hurtful action with no real chance of changing the things that make us angry. The flip side is that black folk who vent their anger in barbershops, kitchens, and churches are not as likely to spill their blood or the blood of others in the streets. And when Obama earlier claimed that the remarkable thing was not “how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds” to “make a way out for those like me who would come after them,” it must be remembered that some of those men and women got angry, and some even bore the cross, so Obama could cross over turbulent political waters.

  Obama argued in his speech that black anger kept black folk from wrestling with how they have contributed to their own problems. That argument reflects a healthy tradition of blacks taking other blacks to task for not stepping up to handle their own racial business and not policing their own moral boundaries. The ideological pedigree of those who have made such arguments runs from conservatives who look to Booker T. Washington, to black integrationists who admire Mary McLeod Bethune and King, and black nationalists who hold Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X in high regard, or who extol Louis Farrakhan today. Anger and action need not be opposed as black folk grapple with their plight. And neither does it mean that black people must always forge primary alliances with folk outside their race to uplift black people; the virtue of certain black self-help traditions is that black folk take the measure and pulse of their community to enable their own flourishing. It is hard to have it both ways: one cannot scold black people for failing to forge alliances with whites who have proven to be skeptical about such alliances, and then fail to applaud blacks who take their destinies into their own hands by working with one another to improve their condition and to relieve the suffering they have created at their own hands.44

  Obama bravely took on white anger, too, but in a far less forceful manner. He dodged wrestling with white backlash to perceived black progress. White anger has consistently burned in pockets of the culture; it has led to black psychic injury and to the exaggeration of the black threat to white survival as a way to rationalize the hatred of black folk. There is a feeling among many whites that black folk are getting more than they deserve and that it comes at the expense of whites who have been disadvantaged by the push for black rights. Obama made oblique reference to such a feeling when he said that “all Americans” must “realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams.” But that general prescription lacks the bite and force of a speci
fic remedy for white anger like the one he offered blacks. Obama’s treatment of white anger was far more sympathetic than his grappling with black anger. He paralleled black and white anger; Obama may have seen that as a necessary rhetorical gesture in the effort to make white Americans understand Wright’s wrath, but it was a parallel fraught with peril.

  Obama had already made brilliant use of parallel in his speech when he argued that we could “dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.” In this example Obama, with elegance and economy, drew an implicit parallel between a hated black figure, Wright, and a far less reviled white one, Ferraro. Obama suggested a racial equivalence that had the advantage of taking the conversation forward by inviting whites to see how Wright and Ferraro could be read in similar fashion. The implication was clear: if whites and other critics were going to beat up on Wright, they had to do the same to Ferraro. And by implying that such a charge was not true of Ferraro—though without explicitly stating it, leaving himself a bit of wiggle room to either embrace or deny the claim later, since his campaign had demanded that Hillary Clinton repudiate Ferraro’s remarks—Obama made it plain that the charges against Wright were not necessarily true either. It was a nifty logical and rhetorical gesture that might have served Obama well had he applied it to his views of the difference between white and black anger.

  False Equivalences

  Even this case reveals how Obama’s rhetorical tack denies to blacks the advantage of the moral equivalence he draws between white and black anger: he calls Wright’s words divisive but refuses to do the same for Ferraro, though her divisive and racially charged comments were directly related to Obama and the presidential race in a way that was not true of Wright’s sermons. It is another subtle but suggestive way in which Obama seems to feel he cannot hold white folk’s feet to the fire even as he warms up to criticizing black folk explicitly. Normal appeals to “inside group” argument, in which one may say negative things about one’s own group that outsiders cannot say, are pretty much a wash, since Obama explicitly rejected racial solidarity as the basis for his campaign, or as a means of getting blacks to vote for him. But the peril of even gently criticizing Obama among blacks proves that what works in theory may not always work out in practice—though it surely works to Obama’s advantage, since black folk have largely failed to call him on his flaws. Obama gets the best of the bargain: he does not have to appeal overtly to racial solidarity to be its beneficiary.

  Obama further empathized with white resentment when he noted that most working-class and middle-class whites “don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race,” that as immigrants they feel that “no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built from scratch” and had “worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor.” These whites are full of anxiety about the future as they witness their dreams disappear, especially in “an era of stagnant wages and global competition,” when “opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.” In Obama’s reading, black progress breeds white anger: when whites “are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.”

  Obama fails to point out to working-class and middle-class whites who feel that they have worked hard for what they got, and that they do not benefit from their whiteness, that blacks and other minorities feel the same way but with a twist: they too worked hard, built from scratch, saw their jobs sent overseas, had their pensions cut, suffered depressed wages, and endured deferred dreams, but got denied the advantages that even white immigrants could take for granted. In short, black folk are the Ginger Rogers to white folks’ Fred Astaire: as the late Ann Richards quipped in paraphrasing a 1982 Frank and Ernest cartoon, “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in heels.”45 Black folk have endured everything that white immigrants have endured, except they worked in chains and under the fateful wings of Jim Crow. Unlike immigrants who got the benefit of their whiteness to work from scratch and earn their way into the American mainstream, black folk who were brought or born here often got the short end of the employment and educational stick in being unjustly denied the fruits of their labor.

  As Martin Luther King Jr. noted, at “the very time that America refused to give the Negro any land, through an act of Congress our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor.” King preached against those who demanded self-reliance from black people while overlooking the educational, agricultural, and other subsidies offered to white immigrants. “But not only did they give them land, they built land grant colleges with government money to teach them how to farm. Not only that, they provided county agents to further their expertise in learning. Not only that, they provided low interest rates in order that they could mechanize their farms.”46 Not only did white privilege and government assistance enhance the standing of whites, but it also sharply contrasted to, and reinforced, black suffering. That history—and the persistent gap between what even recent white immigrants can expect from our society in comparison to what blacks often receive—demonstrates that hard work does not distinguish white immigrants from blacks, and suggests that those immigrants have not been economically dislodged by the relatively limited efforts at black social compensation.

  Obama could not speak plainly for fear of alienating white voters, but the truth remains: what it means to be white in America is to take advantage of opportunities that rest on clear injustice. Unfair laws allowed whites to own property, accumulate wealth, attend schools, and find employment, all of which were systematically denied blacks. Obama had already sketched just how bad the gap between white and black was, yet he stopped short of drawing the conclusion such facts invite: that white anger at the recent benefits offered blacks for centuries of injustice is in truth crying over crumbs from the larger table of white privilege. Black advantage, such as it exists, does not come at the expense of poor and working-class whites, as many believe, or even at the expense of middle-class whites; instead it is the long-delayed gesture of opportunity that should never have been denied to begin with, and that whites were able to hog for themselves. Being told in the sandbox of life that they now have to share their toys makes many whites angry and resentful—but their rage is not necessarily righteous.

  Even poor and working-class whites were not shafted, and still are not, because of black progress or affirmative action, but because of the inequalities reinforced by the white elites that, Wright argues, control American society. That is why it was painful to observe poor and working-class white folk take to the streets in Tea Party protests to decry as socialist the relatively tame Obama administration policies that seek to restore to working-class people some measure of class and economic dignity. Conservative interests with deep pockets helped to orchestrate such protests, exploiting the class rage of poor and working-class whites. The privilege of whiteness is not simply about an economic payoff that can be documented; it shows, too, when whites are not harassed in stores by clerks who believe they do not have money to buy goods. It also registers when whites are not harassed by cops in their homes or in the streets, and when they are not murdered by police as routinely as black and brown folk. That is a form of white privilege that extends to all classes of whites; such privilege can mean the difference between living and dying. Living when you might otherwise be dead if you were black or brown is the ultimate form of white privilege.

  Obama had to walk a perilous tightrope in t
alking to whites. Trying to uphold his appeal as a biracial healer and resist being tagged as the “black candidate”—not to mention putting on the political asbestos suit to handle his flame-throwing pastor—meant that Obama would not be telling a compelling story about white anger that might edge nearer to the truth than the story he was sticking with. All that he said was true, but it was not all that is true and helpful to be said to explain the origins of contemporary white anger. Unlike what he did with black anger, Obama failed to offer a brief history of white fury and one of its central tenets dating back to slavery: the belief that blacks and other minorities are less than human and unworthy of solid social standing or equal rights. White anger helped to extend the reign of white supremacy well into the twentieth century. It is clear that Obama could barely touch on such matters at such a touchy time in the nation, when whites who did not trust him, and who were angry at Wright, might jump ship or never sign on at all. Those circumstances roped Obama into making an awkward mismatch between black anger from the sixties and white anger today.

  Black anger for Obama is counterproductive when it extends to the present; white anger, by comparison, is explained only in contemporary terms and thus severed from its racist roots. The disturbing result is that it is okay to be white and angry; it is not okay to be black and angry. Obama passes along to blacks the limitations that whites have imposed on him. When Obama quarantines black anger to the sixties, he gives the impression that black folk today are not righteously angry about police brutality, racial profiling, a subprime mortgage scandal that unjustly bled black wealth, the over-incarceration of black folk, and a host of other ills that ravage black life now. By restricting legitimate black anger to the past, Obama avoids grappling with legitimate forms of new black anger and how they might be related to society’s and government’s failure to treat black folk justly. Obama makes things worse when he dismisses black anger as a dysfunctional generational trait for black America even as he finds contemporary white anger compelling.