The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Such clashing perceptions make it difficult to generate the broad consensus against police brutality in the Age of Obama that came to define the civil rights struggle against racial oppression in the sixties. The failure to find wide agreement has hampered racial progress in our criminal justice system, lowering the standards of racial justice, especially in contrast to the past. This has become brutally clear in the jarring juxtaposition of past and present. We have since 2013 experienced national celebrations of the triumphs of the civil rights movement—the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and, in March 2015, the commemoration of Bloody Sunday in Selma. The crowning achievement of a black president in office as so many of these occasions are marked heightens the national appreciation of these jubilee celebrations. But the glory of the past runs up against the gory details of the present: an epidemic of black death at the hands of white police, flaws in a prosecutorial system that misrepresents the interests of black citizens, the failure of grand juries to indict cops in most police-involved shootings, and the vast overreach of a penal system in punishing people of color. Thus, when a white police officer is finally charged with murder, what should be seen as a minimal gesture is celebrated as a big victory because it took maximum effort to achieve. The floor of racial justice has been snatched from beneath the feet of black communities and turned precipitously into a ceiling—a harsh irony in Obama’s America.

  Our reverence for saints from the sixties underscores how we are addicted to the easy past rather than the hard present, though only a willful suppression of bitter facts can make us believe that anything about the racial past was easy—a narrative that President Obama has underscored. Its achievements were sealed in blood and cost the lives of some of the greatest witnesses for political transformation the nation has ever had. But Americans are bad at taking in race in real time; we prefer rose-tinted lenses for watching slow-motion replays in which we control the narrative and downplay our complicity in the horrors of our history. Unfortunately, President Obama’s racial procrastination has only exacerbated this tendency.

  The racial present is messy, unresolved; it thumbs its nose at stories that promote bland racial optimism about how far we have come. Every black body that suffers unjustly at the hands of a cop chips away at racial triumphalism. Racial optimism and racial triumphalism make it more difficult to organize resistance and gain white allies. There have been many white participants in the series of protests across the nation against police brutality who remind anyone within earshot, in their familiar chant, that “Black Lives Matter.” These actions echo a past when blacks and their allies forced the nation to grapple with its racist legacy through acts of civil disobedience that were harshly criticized and resisted.

  Many Americans in the past finally conceded the legitimacy of black struggle because its leaders brilliantly staged their protests for the world to see. White citizens struggled to digest their meals in peace as scenes from Selma’s bloodbath flashed on their television screens. It was more difficult to write off Negro complaints as gestures of self-pity when the fangs of police dogs tore at the flesh of women and children on the evening news. But that, and Americans, and their media, have all changed. Massive black marches have diminished, American guilt and compassion have severely flagged, and American television has been radically transformed: a thousand or more stations compete for our attention, and the rise of the Internet and social media has challenged television in supplying the unifying fiction of American identity and citizenship.

  The fractured media landscape has led to the proliferation of images, perception overload, and a vying for digital attention. The demand for spectacle merges with the desire to capture more eyeballs on television, computer, and smartphone screens. This visual barrage and optic glut make it difficult to command the unified national consciousness in the same way as when there were only three networks in play. We are reduced to forging workable rather than wide consensus, more modest goals for justice, and shorter-term alliances with potentially increased numbers of allies, for digital ties are not necessarily those that bind, even if they point to larger landscapes, longer timelines, and deeper truths. The digital can in fact be the handmaiden of the historical when rightly used. President Obama brilliantly proved it when he transformed the American political campaign with his unprecedented success in fund-raising and message-sharing on the Internet.

  But all of this seeing and overseeing in contemporary visual culture does not solve the problem of how black folk have been historically viewed in a negative cultural light. Even the sight of a black president whose image is posted daily in cyberspace, plastered on print newspapers across the nation, and televised around the world cannot dislodge the set of images that fix black life in the national and global glare. Tragically, the negative thinking about black life has survived media transformations and Obama’s rise to power. Another way of saying this is that the content of black identity has survived a change in format and presentation. New media, besides breaking barriers so people of color can speak up, has also provided the culture with more ways to stereotype, more ways to be suspicious and hateful.

  The optics of race are tricky: while contemporary media and devices allow us to see more—including images of brilliant and beautiful black people occupying the White House and representing the nation’s family values—they do not necessarily allow us to see more deeply. That millennials see race the same way Generation Xers and baby boomers do testifies to a troubling racial continuity. Moreover, stereotypical representations of blackness—some authored by black hands and disseminated as reality TV—are accepted as normative. Yet problems arise when images of blackness contradict a received racial script. That is why it was easier to believe that the video footage of Michael Brown in Ferguson stealing cigarillos more accurately communicated his character as a “thug” than to believe that the last gasps of Eric Garner were the pleas of an unjustly assaulted man. The Michael Brown video reinforced the belief that black males are inherently criminal; the Garner video, despite what we saw, contradicted the script that says even an unarmed black man begging to breathe cannot be believed—that says he is literally lying as he lies on the ground dying. We cannot believe what we see because it contradicts what we have seen and been led to believe. What we see is not simply determined by what we perceive with our eyes; instead, sight registers the cumulative impact of what we learn and what we think we know.

  Thus a history of how blacks have been seen is recapitulated each time a new video surfaces of black people being poorly treated by the police—from Rodney King to Walter Scott to Dajerria Becton in McKinney, Texas. But what we see with our eyes is often contradicted by what we see with our collective sight in a culture that has taught us to understand blackness in an especially malevolent fashion. Thus, before the video of his encounter with Scott emerged, Slager relied on a script that many white cops have used, including Darren Wilson in Ferguson: I was afraid for my life; the black man reached for my weapon to harm me; I had to defend myself with lethal force. Those police scripts derive from a larger pool of stories about black people as dangers and threats, and thus these cops’ stories make sense to the majority of white Americans because they have fed on a common diet of black perception. Police reports sync up with images derived from our culture.

  Also, what looks obvious to black folk—that they are under siege—seems to shift when white eyes land on black subjects, as people and as issues. Whites and blacks see from two different perspectives shaped by history. For instance, black and white Americans view the presidency of our first black commander in chief in widely varying terms. What blacks see is sometimes not viewed as rational or real, or worthy of respect; it does not count as sufficient evidence to prove a case of abuse or injustice. This is why President Obama repeats, in the wake of police shootings of unarmed victims, that black people are not making up their perceptions of injustice. The demand for proof of what they believe is not foolproof: even when video eviden
ce emerges, it is not seen by many whites as incontrovertible or even persuasive of the case made by blacks that mistreatment abounds. There is a racial Rorschach test going on: we see the same image, but we sometimes do not see the same reality, or the same truth it reveals. This proves that seeing involves more than sight; it involves “sites,” too, of past realities packaged in ready-made images of, for example, black pathology, or deserved poverty.

  Rodney King was brutally beaten by police, but a jury acquitted his abusers; Eric Garner pleaded for his life, but a grand jury failed to indict. It is not just what is seen; it is what scenes of race replay in our heads. Black frustration mounts when blacks have what they think is clear evidence of police misconduct, and the failure to appreciate black life is reinforced when there is a rejection of what stands as proof that their lives do not matter the same way as white lives. They cannot matter the same way because they cannot be seen the same way. To make matters worse, the fictional images of blacks held in many minds are taken as literal, while the images from real-life cameras fail to convince whites of what blacks see: that black lives do not matter as much. The smartphone has turned the spectator into a participant, permitting her to record and change history. Given black people’s ready experimentation on the cutting edge of beepers, pagers, and cell phones, that shift seems to favor them. In the case of Walter Scott, a police shooting caught by cell phone, his police assailant was charged with murder by a grand jury. But often the electronic evidence will not relay truth back, because the broader context can never be underestimated or dismissed or ignored. This is why Obama’s importance as a public historian and interpreter of racial experience can hardly be disputed.

  This failure to be taken seriously, or to be seen in the right contexts, and to be seen as human, is part of the trauma of black existence, one that reinforces an often submerged truth: the lived experience of race often feels like terror for black folk, whether fast or slow. Few metaphors and tropes more adequately capture what it means to be black and afraid of random and arbitrary forms of violence than the single word “terror.” If the American people now believe they are subject to assault from forces in the Middle East for no other reason than that they are American, that comes close to what it means to be black: for no other reason than their identities, blacks are profiled, abused, dismissed, disbelieved, set aside—literally killed and un-mattered. Black people know what it means to feel insecure in one’s home, unprotected by one’s government; no space is safe or adequate to prevent the plague of assault just because one is black.

  The recording of Walter Scott’s death is so terrifying because it could be any black—the real fear that terror seeks to impart. In most cases in the past, and likely in the future, there were, and will be, no cameras to vouch for blacks, no incontrovertible evidence that blacks were assailed; no matter how much education blacks possess, how much money they have in the bank, how many late-model cars they drive, how well behaved they are, how articulate they become, they may, at any moment, be gunned down or feel a baton beating them, a Taser electrifying them, a bullet penetrating their flesh—all because they are black, and therefore seem likely to commit, or to have committed, a crime. Ironically, blacks are seen as necessary sacrifices for the safety of white society; they are viewed as scapegoats, or perhaps collateral damage, in the white war against the terror of black criminality.

  The terror that black people experience is of two varieties. Slow terror is masked but malignant; it stalks black people in denied opportunities that others take for granted. Slow terror seeps into every nook and cranny of black existence: black boys and girls being expelled from school at higher rates than their white peers; black men and women being harassed by unjust fines from local municipalities; having billions of dollars of their wealth drained off by shady financial instruments sold to blacks during the mortgage crisis; and being imprisoned out of proportion to their percentage of the population. President Obama has referred to this kind of terror as a “slow rolling crisis.” Fast terror is more dynamic, more explicitly lethal, more grossly evident. It is the spectacle of black death in public displays of vengeance and violence directed against defenseless black bodies. Shootings like that of Scott traumatize blacks, too, because they conjure the historic legacy of racial terror: lynching, castration, and drowning. The black body was not safe then, and blacks today do not feel safe, or accepted, or wanted, or desired.

  The last moments of Scott’s life, caught on video and widely watched, are classic fast terror. The video is sickening because it captures the breathtaking indifference to moral consequence that seems to grip Slager as he fires at an unarmed black man in broad daylight. A frozen frame from the video shows a police officer, gun drawn, in pursuit. Fifty years earlier, a lawman in pursuit pulled his gun and shot dead the Selma protester Jimmie Lee Jackson, whom Martin Luther King called a “martyred hero of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity.”16 The failure to be seen as human unites black people across time in a fellowship of fear as black people share black terror, at both speeds, in common. The way we see race plays a role in these terrors: fast terror is often seen and serves as a warning; slow terror is often not seen and reinforces the invisibility of black suffering. Fast terror scares black people; slow terror scars them.

  Black, White, Blue, and Gray

  The way fast and slow terror occasionally entangle in menacing indivisibility played out in Baltimore in the aftermath of the funeral for Freddie Gray, the young black man who died from a spinal cord injury in April 2015 while in police custody. Gray’s arrest, like Scott’s murder, was captured on cell phone camera video as he was dragged into a police wagon by several officers. The six police officers involved in arresting and transporting Gray were quickly charged with crimes ranging from manslaughter and illegal arrest to second-degree depraved heart murder. It was a rare display of prosecutorial vigilance on behalf of black victims of alleged police misconduct. A grand jury largely agreed with Baltimore City state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby when it later indicted the officers on most of the charges Mosby brought; though it dropped charges of illegal imprisonment and false arrest, the grand jury added a charge of reckless endangerment against all the officers involved.17

  Before any of the charges were filed, the beleaguered community gathered, metaphorically, in the spacious sanctuary of Baltimore’s New Shiloh Baptist Church, at the funeral of Freddie Gray, as the familiar weight of grief descended over participants, not just for Gray but for the countless Freddie Grays across black America who die, unarmed, at the hands of the police. A few hours after the Gray family laid their son to rest, the city’s black anguish burst into flame as cars were burned and young people hurled rocks at cops.

  A predictable question trailed closely behind their actions, a question that always reappears like the ghost of riots past: Why are they destroying their own neighborhoods and setting their futures on fire? The question feels helpless, sometimes cynical, but it is exactly the right question. It should be asked, however, not in anger but with compassionate curiosity. Because the truth is as ugly as the facts that fuel riots: without a brick tossed or a building burned—the dramatic response to the fast terror of Gray’s death—the nation hardly confronts the hopelessness, the slow terror, of the future for these young people, a point that President Obama underscored in the smoldering aftermath of Baltimore’s enflamed grief.

  Sadder still is that the social neglect that sparked the carnage had been largely overlooked by the powers that be. The unemployment rate in the community where Gray lived is over 50 percent; the high school student absence rate hovers around 49.3 percent; and life expectancy tops out at 68.8 years, according to analyses by prison reform nonprofits.18 These statistics are a small part of the portrait of radical inequality and slow terror that blanket poor black Baltimore. It is no wonder that black Baltimore erupted in social fury. As Martin Luther King Jr. announced in the wake of the Watts riots fifty years ago, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”19 Judging by
the actions in Baltimore, thousands were not being heard. The stale repetition of black death at the hands of the police led to burning rage, a rage that would, sadly, lead elected officials, including President Obama, to label participants in the mayhem “thugs”—while no such label, nor the word “riot,” left their mouths to describe the 9 deaths, 170 arrests, and destruction in the wake of a melee between dueling biker gangs in Waco, Texas, a month after the Baltimore uprising.20

  Perhaps a basketball analogy can explain the urban rebellion. Often on the court, a player commits an offense—say, hitting an opposing player in the ribs—without being spotted by the referee. Then, when the offended player strikes back, he is the one hit with a foul. The black youth who took to the streets have been hit with the slow terror of so many unacknowledged assaults—from racial profiling to poor schooling—that their violent responses are frequently viewed through a haze of social stigma that penalizes them without regard for context.

  Jesse Jackson—who helped to eulogize Gray, arguing at his funeral service that the young man was now “more than a citizen” and had become “a martyr”—spoke of that context, and reflected on the conditions of slow terror that plague black communities and leave black youth destitute. “Our boys are the least educated, the most profiled, and the most jailed, do the most prison labor, [are] the most unemployed and have the shortest life expectancy,” Jackson lamented. He acknowledged the chaotic consequences of social injustice in black communities. “When there is darkness there will be crime and behavioral issues,” the seasoned minister observed. “It is easier to fight the victim rather than the source of the darkness.” Jackson also admitted that the presence of new technology advanced the quest for justice. “In some sense what makes the difference today is his innocence, and the presence of a camera,” he said of Gray. “If he had been in a gun shootout with the police, or if he had been killed in a drug bust, or caught in some compromising position hurting someone[,] it would have been easier to dismiss his killing.” Jackson touched on the furious tensions between the police and black communities that make a mockery of any sense of security and justice. “The Baltimore police became the pallbearers of an alive man and turned the paddy wagon into a tombstone,” Jackson charged. “We are here because we all feel threatened. All of our sons are at risk. Their number has just not popped up yet. There is too much killing, too much hatred, and too much fear.”21