The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Obama underscored the literally unbelievable humanity of black people who could, without the killer ever asking, forgive the man who murdered their kin in cold blood. Theirs was no offer of “cheap grace,” as the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer phrased it, “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance.” Bonhoeffer counseled instead the embrace of costly grace, in which “the gospel . . . must be sought again and again.”9 The forgiveness of the folk in Charleston was more than a singular moral act; it was, too, a gesture of theological preemption and political strategy—a refusal to define their lives by hate and a refusal to offer the killer the pleasure of the race war he desperately hoped to provoke. Obama wasn’t simply an observer of the black theology at work in forgiveness; he was a participant as well when he argued that Roof didn’t know that God was using him. That doesn’t mean that God intended for Roof to do wrong; it means that God uses even Roof’s bad actions for good purposes, purposes that were lost to Roof behind his veil of evil. Black believers never tire of quoting the scripture in Genesis 50:20 about the good outcome of Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers, only to become minister of agriculture to save them and a nation from famine: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” The death of nine valiant souls brought down a symbol of hate that has menaced millions of blacks for decades—and may open the way to a more vigorous challenge to the white supremacy for which that flag stands. If black Christians didn’t believe this, they would lose their minds and their faith in the God who guided them to triumph over suffering.

  Perhaps it was spontaneous reflection on the grace of God, and the grace of black folk to bring the Word to life in their willingness to forgive—and the grace of black worship, with its mighty songs and its eloquent words—that caused a hush in the president, a silence, a pause, twice, as he repeated near the end of his eulogy the words “Amazing grace.” “If we can find that grace, anything is possible. If we can tap that grace, everything can change.” And then several seconds of silence. “Amazing grace,” the president said, and then again, shortly afterward, “Amazing grace.” That was followed by a longer silence, thirteen seconds of it—the silence necessary for speech to sink in, for speech to rise in the first place, for speech to make meaning and make an impact, for words to reach their biggest targets, the hearts and minds and souls of those listening. Obama played the pauses as brilliantly as he had commanded the speech; his rhetoric had soared to heights, and now it sank to silence, but a pregnant, creative silence, a cessation of talking that focused the energy of the moment on what was not being said, on what was being thought silently in the minds of those listening, and, finally, what was being felt by those who savored the ecstasies of Obama’s eulogy.

  There was much to contemplate in the silence. How Obama had broken free of constraints and given voice to a blackness that now percolated through his rhetoric. How the president had become a preacher leading the nation to spiritual healing. How the words of a black man were being heard around the world because a white man had desperately wished to unleash tides of hate that would forever mute the black voice. How a black presidency had looked as if it were on its last legs when suddenly, fresh momentum turned the president from lame duck to rising phoenix. How all the promise of hope and change that his presidency had pointed to, but continually frustrated, now seemed possible again because he gained the courage to be at his blackest when he was at his best. How he was fully and proudly African American.

  At that moment, in those pauses, speech seemed hardly enough. Isn’t that why we have always relied on our greatest artists to search our truths and sing our lives in their words? Why we have embraced words that are sung so that we might draw nearer to a vision or feeling or wish or hope that could never be captured in prose? The rhythm of our creation is mirrored in the rhythms of the songs we create to praise our inspirations and, for many of us, the God who made us with nobody else in mind. Obama paused to drink in all of this; he paused the first time for focus, the second time for courage. He knew that as powerful and as eloquent as his words had been—preachers, even temporary ones, know when they strike rhetorical fire—a more lasting impression could be made if he gave of himself even more. If he slipped out from beneath his security blanket and wrapped his vulnerability around the church—and as president, he leads a congregation that spans the nation—then his parishioners, his constituents, his countrymen and women, might be reminded of the need to risk their identities, comforts, securities, and pride, and go out on a limb for somebody too.

  One could glimpse his struggle to find the right key in those pauses, as he glanced down, seeming to ask himself if he dared follow where the Spirit led him.10 He repeated the phrase “Amazing grace” twice, between pauses, to remind himself that it was God’s grace that would help him enchant the nation. And then, without warning, without a musical safety net, on the high wire of live television, before an audience of millions around the world, he stepped out on the faith he had encouraged others to follow. The president crooned a post-linguistic celebration of the truths he had evoked in such a masterly way. He memorably condensed into song what he had said over the last forty minutes. Singing, after all, is never just about singing; it is also about melodies breaking forth on one’s lips which rise from one’s heart and soul. Singing in church ratifies with the gut what the head has decided is true.

  A singing preacher is a reminder that the message of God is both said and sung. A singing president is even more profound: a man becoming spiritually transparent for the world to see and hear; a figure going where no executive order can rescue notes ill flung, where no pen can veto the legislation of verbal dissent. When Obama, after electrifying, productive silence, launched into the first words of “Amazing Grace,” the bishops and ministers behind him leaped to their feet. He turned his head, slightly, to acknowledge their approval as they chimed in to help him finish the verse.

  Obama stayed mostly on tune, though he fell flat, a flatness that was both the object and vehicle of the blues that black folk embraced.11 As Obama finished the verse, he spoke again, for speaking after singing—especially if that singing already followed speech—has to be engaging, and the president didn’t disappoint. He called out the names of those who died with Pinckney that fateful night. Obama ushered his song into speech, his words now humming with the slight tune and gentle vibrato of black sacred rhetoric—rhetoric that could at any moment erupt into music within the spoken words, an art that in the black church is called the chanted sermon, or, more colloquially, “the whoop.”12 As he called each name, the president reminded us that they all “found that grace,” dramatizing how much more amazing grace was for having been found in the midst of terror and grief and heartbreak and death.

  Obama ended his eulogy and reveled in the warm elation of the bishops, and in that moment, and in all that had preceded it for the last forty minutes, the promise of his black presidency beamed as brightly as it ever had.

  ★ | ★

  Afterword

  Beyond the Haters and Hagiographers

  Obama’s Legacy on Race

  The eulogy at Charleston gave Barack Obama an opportunity to praise the transcendent moral appeal of black humanity. This was a sharp contrast to the previous six years of presidential reprimands. The shift might be explained this way: If black lives truly matter, they had to matter to the black man under whose presidency a daring new social movement was born. Now that the Obama era has ended, Obama will be remembered as a great, but flawed, president, and many of those flaws have to do with how he addressed race—or avoided doing so.

  In his first two years in office, Obama performed Herculean deeds in rescuing the banks, restoring the economy, bailing out the automobile industry, and getting his signature health care legislation passed. It was an astonishing record of success, despite bitter right-wing resistance to his presidency and the alarming racist reaction to a black man being in charge. I
twice worked hard to get this president elected. I have known Barack Obama since the early 1990s, and for a time we belonged to the same church in Chicago. Watching him as president, I greatly admired how this highly intelligent and supremely confident figure managed the affairs of state with verve and swagger. No matter how much I disagreed with him about policy or politics, I was deeply moved by his historic achievement. Still, I was frustrated, because the president hit some targets in the path to racial progress but missed a great many as well. And that is not a sentiment I or other fellow black scholars, preachers, and activists are supposed to express.

  That’s because black America has carried on an unrepentant love affair with Obama. Everywhere we turn on social media, the love for the Obamas flourishes: a 106-year-old black woman dancing with the first couple during a Black History Month celebration in the White House; a little black girl crying when she realizes Obama will soon no longer be president; and memes and lists cataloguing why Obama and his remarkable wife and daughters are the greatest black family ever.

  There is good reason to celebrate Obama’s importance to black America. It is hard to overstate the symbolic significance and positive effects of a black man commanding the most celebrated seat of power. His black brain and tongue have changed America forever. But gales of black pride have swept aside awareness of his flaws, and when those flaws are conceded, gusts of black defiance play down their meaning and significance. Obama’s most ardent black fans ignore how he often failed to ascend the bully pulpit to address race or use his powers to convene commissions or issue executive orders to lessen black suffering; his nastiest black critics lambast him as an ineffectual leader who has done little to protect blacks from racial assault or lift them from economic misery. Neither the haters nor hagiographers do the Obama legacy justice.

  Obama’s failure to take to the bully pulpit on race unhappily coincided with the rise of racial demagoguery. Part of the racist reaction to Obama’s presidency has found its troubling apotheosis in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Trump’s surprising run for the White House amplified our country’s worst racial instincts in a generation. Trump gained political notoriety a few years ago by joining the “birthers” who challenged Obama’s American citizenship. The “birthers” formalized racist attacks into a movement by claiming that Obama, despite his Hawaiian birth certificate, was born in Kenya—or that he was really a citizen of Indonesia, or that he had dual British and American citizenship at birth. The sick attempt to paint Obama as un-American—a closet socialist, a secret Muslim, and a hater of democracy, no less—didn’t stop there, echoing over the years in the feverish rantings of figures like Dinesh D’Souza, who claimed Obama was motivated by “an inherited rage” against American wealth and power from his anticolonialist African father. On television, Glenn Beck asserted that Obama had “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” while Rush Limbaugh spewed a steady stream of invective on his radio show, from playing a song dubbed “Barack the Magic Negro” to claiming that Obama wanted Americans to get Ebola as payback for slavery. The most infamous “birther,” Donald Trump, questioned, without basis, not just Obama’s birth certificate, but his college transcripts and whether he had truly deserved a spot at Harvard Law School.

  Through it all, Obama played it cool. He brushed aside these comments as unenlightened prattle, having just as much to do with ideological differences as racial animus. To the extent that these insults were racialized—and there’s no doubt they were—Obama deflected them through humor. During a 2012 appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Obama got off a droll one-liner when asked about the clash with Trump. “This all dates back to when we were growing up together in Kenya,” the president deadpanned. “When we finally moved to America, I thought it’d be over.” It wasn’t over. But Obama, while acknowledging that racism is deeply rooted in our culture, for most of his presidency had avoided addressing the plague of race and instead highlighted the progress the country has made. For black Americans especially, that message was encouraging—but it also turned out to be devastatingly shortsighted. Obama is not responsible for the rise of Trump, though the same can’t be said for staunch conservatives who relentlessly hammer supposed black moral irresponsibility and blast alleged black cultural pathology.

  It is unsurprising that the man who led the “birther” movement built a campaign that reflected elements of the “birther” bigotry: anti-Muslim talk, xenophobia toward Mexicans, and hostility toward blacks at his rallies. It’s possible that if the president had spoken more forcefully on race, it might have blunted some of the bigotry that fueled Trump’s rise, or at least provided a compelling alternative to his vision. And in addition to working to get Hillary Clinton elected, Obama has had to more aggressively address the racism that he was never eager to acknowledge or confront and that thrives in deep pockets of support for Trump.

  Late in the second term of his presidency, Obama used executive power to fight segregation in housing and discriminatory policing. He also challenged hate more directly. He heaped great contempt on Trump for renewing his call to bar Muslim immigrants after the historically gruesome massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016—even though the gunman was born in the United States. Without uttering Trump’s name, Obama seethed, in a rare show of public anger, about Trump’s disruptive bigotry. “Are we going to start treating all Muslim Americans differently? Are we going to start subjecting them to special surveillance?” As his voice rose in frustration at such a prospect, one occasioned by desperate hatred of the religious or ethnic other that has blighted the country’s claim of democracy, Obama demanded to know if Trump’s positions reflect the Republican Party’s views, declaring “that’s not the America we want—it doesn’t reflect our democratic ideals. It won’t make us more safe. It will make us less safe.” It makes sense to ask where that anger had been. For the most part, Obama sought to contain his rage against the right-wing hate machine.

  It is now clear that his response to these racist haters was both admirable and flawed. He refused to pity himself—but failed, as did so many others of us, to read the anti-Obama signs and songs and social media outbursts as symptoms of the persistence of swirling racist currents in American society. He insisted on celebrating advancements for African Americans like him, but in so doing delayed the acknowledgment of what was festering: a revived siege of race hate that would sweep the country. Obama’s racial optimism—some might say delusion, enhanced by musings in the mainstream that America had entered a post-racial era after his election—denied the president the motivation, the will, even the occasion, to address enduring racism, racism that erupted violently in the killings of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and the Emanuel Nine in Charleston and, more ominously, in the flurry of deaths of unarmed black citizens at the hands of mostly white police.

  And it was curious, and hurtful, that Obama responded at times to the criticism by scolding black folk in public for making excuses he said were holding them back. During his last appearance before the annual Congressional Black Caucus gala in September 2016, Obama was electrifying, mostly because it found him reprimanding black folk for the belief that it didn’t matter if they voted, or who the country elected to be president in 2016. “It matters,” Obama shot back. “We’ve got to get people to vote. I will consider it a personal insult—an insult to my legacy—if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election. You want to give me a good sendoff? Go vote.” But in his speech a week later on the national mall to dedicate the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Obama was muted, nearly somber, offering a joyless homily that said many of the right words but lacked enthusiasm, energy, and conviction. It was if he were speaking about a reality, a history, that was foreign, distant—something he didn’t feel in his gut or believe in his heart of hearts. It reinforced the perception that Obama just hasn’t shared the black experience in a way that would make him elated to salute the greatest monument to black
memory ever erected on the most holy civic landscape in the nation. I heard both speeches live and couldn’t help but conclude that Obama is consistently more engaged when he is chiding rather than championing black folk. Perhaps these were acts of self-defense by the president, perhaps not. Whatever the reasons, the president’s racial reticence highlighted a submerged civil war in black America about how blackness is best engaged in public. Obama opted to signify blackness—he was and is our first black president, and wears that title proudly. But he did not tangle meaningfully with the political responses to the explicit expression of that backlash: his racist haters and the dark cultural current they occupied. Maybe Obama really was personally unaffected by their insults. But the bottom line is that vulnerable blacks ended up dead as victims of the same kind of racist hatred. How did Obama and the rest of us miss—or ignore—all the signs that this might happen?

  Obama’s election came with unique historic and symbolic importance, bestowing on him both the honor and burden of choosing how to wear his race. Harkening back to the incident in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, where he describes having to “disguise my feverish mood [of race],” Obama, at various points ever since, seems to have been forced—or chose—to disguise expressions of his race, even though there are many more moods to blackness than the feverish one from which he shrank.