The Black Presidency
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51. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Color-Blind Policy, Color-Conscious Morality,” The Atlantic, May 13, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/color-blind-policy-color-conscious-morality/393227/. Coates has also argued that Obama is hamstrung by a set of facts about race that he can’t afford to state: “What clearly cannot be said is that the events of Ferguson do not begin with Michael Brown lying dead in the street, but with policies set forth by government at every level. What clearly cannot be said is that the people of Ferguson are regularly plundered, as their grandparents were plundered, and generally regarded as a slush-fund for the government that has pledged to protect them. What clearly cannot be said is [that] the idea of superhuman black men who ‘bulk up’ to run through bullets is not an invention of Darren Wilson, but a staple of American racism. What clearly cannot be said is that American society’s affection for nonviolence is notional. What cannot be said is that American society’s admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. increases with distance, that the movement he led was bugged, smeared, harassed, and attacked by the same country that now celebrates him . . . What clearly cannot be said is that violence and nonviolence are tools, and that violence—like nonviolence—sometimes works . . . What cannot be said is that America does not really believe in nonviolence—Barack Obama has said as much—so much as it believes in order. What cannot be said is that there are very convincing reasons for black people in Ferguson to be nonviolent. But those reasons emanate from an intelligent fear of the law, not a benevolent respect for the law. The fact is that when the president came to the podium on Monday night there actually was very little he could say.” Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid,” The Atlantic, November 26, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/barack-obama-ferguson-and-the-evidence-of-things-unsaid/383212/.
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52. Coates wrote in “On the Death of Dreams,” “If we are honest with ourselves we will see a president who believes in particular black morality, but eschews particular black policy.” Ta-Nehisi Coates, “On the Death of Dreams,” The Atlantic, August 29, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/on-the-death-of-dreams/279157/.
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53. Coates, “Color-Blind Policy, Color-Conscious Morality.”
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54. Ibid.
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55. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “How the Obama Administration Talks to Black America,” The Atlantic, May 20, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/05/how-the-obama-administration-talks-to-black-america/276015/.
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56. Jelani Cobb, The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress (New York: Walker Publishing, 2010).
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57. Jelani Cobb, “Selma and Ferguson,” The New Yorker, March 8, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/selma-and-ferguson.
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58. Jelani Cobb, “A President and a King,” The New Yorker, January 26, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/president-king.
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59. Jelani Cobb, “Chronicle of a Riot Foretold,” The New Yorker, November 25, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/chronicle-ferguson-riot-michael-brown.
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60. Jelani Cobb, “Requiem for a Dream,” The New Yorker, August 28, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/requiem-for-a-dream.
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61. Mary Frances Berry makes this claim in DeWayne Wickham, Bill Clinton and Black America (New York: Ballantine Publishing Group, 2012), p. 110: “I remember the dinner we had in the White House when we were discussing the ‘mend it, don’t end it’ speech the president was planning to give on affirmative action. We were all sitting around the table talking about what he might say. Leon Higginbotham was there that night. So was Cornell [sic] West . . . [W]hen Clinton finally gave the speech at the National Archives, we were all invited there to hear him deliver it. His ‘mend it, don’t end it’ policy was absolutely wonderful, given the way the courts had been cutting back on affirmative action, especially in the contracting area and higher education. For the Clinton administration to be able to go forward—not as much as it would have wished—but for him to find a way to continue to implement affirmative action was extraordinary.” West’s deep and detailed involvement in Clinton’s policy of affirmative action, and the presidential speech to defend it, is exemplary of the very sort of principled participation that he now decries for other black figures involved with President Obama.
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62. Cornel West with David Ritz, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir (New York: Smiley Books, 2009), p. 193.
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2. “Invisible Man Got the Whole World Watching”:
Race, Bi-Race, Post-Race in the Obama Presidency
1. I would also endorse Obama in an article a few months later when The Nation magazine asked eight figures to support their chosen Democratic candidate among the eight politicians then running for president in a November 2007 issue nearly a year before the 2008 election. (Ellen Chesler, for instance, endorsed Hillary Clinton; Katherine S. Newman supported John Edwards; and Gore Vidal endorsed Dennis Kucinich.) See Michael Eric Dyson, “Barack Obama: A Visionary Candidate for a New America,” The Nation, November 26, 2007.
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2. Larry Blumenfeld, “Barack Obama in New Orleans,” Salon, July 6, 2007, http://www.salon.com/2007/07/06/obama_172/.
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3. Ibid.
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4. Barack Obama’s Democratic National Convention Keynote Address, Boston, July 27, 2004, Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19751-2004Jul27.html.
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5. Rachel L. Swarns, “So Far, Obama Can’t Take Black Vote for Granted,” New York Times, February 2, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/opinion/11sun3.html?_r=0. Also see Brent Staples, “Decoding the Debate over the Blackness of Barack Obama,” February 11, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/opinion/11sun3.html?_r=0; “The Obama Card: The Discussion of Race and the Senator’s Candidacy Is Really About Whose Side He’s On,” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2007, http://articles.latimes.com/2007/feb/13/opinion/ed-obama13; and Gary Younge, “Is Obama Black Enough?,” The Guardian, March 1, 2007, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/mar/01/usa.uselections2008.
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6. Stanley Crouch, “What Obama Isn’t: Black Like Me,” New York Daily News, November 2, 2006, http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/opinions/obama-isn-black-race-article-1.585922.
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7. Debra J. Dickerson, “Colorblind: Barack Obama Would Be the Great Black Hope in the New Presidential Race—If He Were Actually Black,” Salon, January 22, 2007, http://www.salon.com/2007/01/22/obama_161/.
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8. For a brilliant rebuttal of Dickerson’s (and, by extension, Crouch’s) position, and one that takes into account a global conception of blackness that accentuates the complicated convergence of multiple ethnicities within black identity, see Joan Morgan, “Black Like Barack,” in Sharpley-Whiting, The Speech, pp. 55–68. Morgan makes the point that Obama’s “presidential run forced all Americans to grapple with the fact that ‘black’ in America is a diverse, multiethnic, sometimes biracial, and often bicultural experience that can no longer be confined to the rich but limited prism of U.S. slavery and its historical aftermath. As a first-generation black immigrant, I also know that Obama’s precarious footing was caused . . . by the confusion and distrust this identity tends to provoke among whites and African Americans alike—precisely because it complicates, quite beautifully, not only existing constructs of race but all the traditional expectations, stereotypes, and explanations we have come to expect from discussions around what it means to be black in America” (pp. 59–60).
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9. Victoria Brown, “In Solidarity: When Caribbean Immigrants Become Black,” NBC News, March 2, 2015, http://www.nbcnews.c
om/news/nbcblk/solidarity-when-caribbean-immigrants-become-black-n308686; Jonathan Kaufman, “Help Wanted No Blacks Need Apply,” The Social Contract 5, no. 4 (Summer 1995), http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc0504/article_465_printer.shtml; Stephen Steinberg, “Immigration, African Americans, and Race Discourse,” New Politics X-3 (Summer 2005), http://newpol.org/content/immigration-african-americans-and-race-discourse. Also see Joleen Kirschenman and Kathryn Neckerman, “‘We’d Love to Hire Them but . . .’: The Meaning of Race for Employers,” in The Urban Underclass, ed. Christopher Jencks and Paul E. Peterson (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1991); and Marcy C. Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Dreams and American Realities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
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10. Morgan, “Black Like Barack.” Even as she argues for broadening the palette of identities from which we paint black identity, Morgan acknowledges the thorny intraracial differences and political disputes between native-born blacks and immigrant blacks. “As first- and second-generation immigrants, we are often more conservative in our political ideology, are less likely to publicly embrace social programs like welfare, and tend to be very stalwart in our opinions about black complicity in our own conditions. Racism for us is an undeniable reality, but it is also not the ultimate determinant. At our very core, we view America as a land of infinite possibilities because we know firsthand that it is possible to arrive in this country with nothing and build a life infinitely richer than the ones we left behind. We are, in short, a very up-from-the-bootstraps kind of people, a bit more Republican (although we tend not to vote that way), if not moderately Democratic, in nature than black political leaders care to recognize” (p. 64).
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11. Obama, “Selma Voting Rights March Commemoration Speech.”
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12. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995; repr., New York: Crown, 2004).
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13. Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (1974; repr., New York: Basic Books, 1983).
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14. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963; repr., New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 4. Writing to his nephew about the youth’s grandfather—Baldwin’s father—Baldwin states: “Well, he is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him . . . You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.”
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15. Obama, Dreams, p. 99.
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16. Ibid., p. 87.
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17. David Remnick, “The Joshua Generation: Race and the Campaign of Barack Obama,” The New Yorker, November 17, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/11/17/the-joshua-generation. Also see David Remnick, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), p. 4.
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18. Frank Newport, “Obama Retains Strength Among Highly Educated,” Gallup Poll, July 30, 2008, http://www.gallup.com/poll/109156/obama-retains-strength-among-highly-educated.aspx. Also see Janel Davis, “Is Education Level Tied to Voting Tendencies?,” PolitiFact, November 5, 2012, http://www.politifact.com/georgia/statements/2012/nov/05/larry-sabato/education-level-tied-voting-tendencies/. (“Based on the 2008 exit polls of Georgia, Virginia . . . and nationally, whites with a college degree supported Barack Obama at a higher rate than whites without a college degree.”)
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19. The most persuasive, and sophisticated, argument for Obama’s being “America’s most progressive president since FDR,” and that “electing a more compelling human being to the White House is probably impossible” in this nation, is made by Gary Dorrien in The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), p. 12.
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20. Cited in Tim Wise, Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2009), p. 26.
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21. “CNN’s Candy Crowley Interviews President Barack Obama,” CNN, December 21, 2014, http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2014/12/21/cnns-candy-crowley-interviews-president-barack-obama/.
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22. Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
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23. Frank Rich, “In Conversation: Chris Rock,” New York, November 30, 2014, http://www.vulture.com/2014/11/chris-rock-frank-rich-in-conversation.html.
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24. For a powerful, empirically grounded argument about the effects of contemporary racial inequality—in an era when many racist barriers have fallen but racial inequality persists, not primarily because of the harmful things whites do to blacks, and other minorities, but because of the helpful things whites do for one another—see Nancy DiTomaso, The American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013).
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25. Helene Cooper, “Attorney General Chided for Language on Race,” New York Times, March 7, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/us/politics/08race.html?_r=0.
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26. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Random House, 2006), pp. 363–364.
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27. “Andrew Young Says Obama Lacks Experience to Be President, Bill Clinton ‘As Black as Barack,’” Fox News, December 10, 2007, http://www.foxnews.com/story/2007/12/10/andrew-young-says-obama-lacks-experience-to-be-president-bill-clinton-as-black.html.
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28. See Yolanda Putman, “Video: Chattanooga Pastor Challenges City to Deal with Violence at Martin Luther King Jr. Day March,” Chattanooga Times Free Press, January 17, 2012, http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/news/story/2012/jan/17/martin-luther-king-day-challenge-chattanooga/68411/. In a sidebar timeline of King’s life, there is this item: “1953: Interviews to become minister at First Baptist Church on East Eighth Street in Chattanooga. Church overseers were concerned that, at age 24, he didn’t have enough experience.” Also see Lynda Edwards, “Chattanooga’s Black History Sites Are Slowly Disappearing or Forgotten,” Chattanooga Times Free Press, February 9, 2015, which states: “First Baptist Church: Martin Luther King Jr. interviewed for a job as minister of this church at 506 E. Eighth St., but the church thought he was too young at age 24.” http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/life/entertainment/story/2015/feb/09/vanishing-history/287003/.
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29. For an appreciation of how Jackson’s progressive, big-tent, multiracial vision of the Democratic Party has prevailed, despite being for a time displaced by the neoliberalism of centrist Democrats like Bill Clinton, see Sam Tanenhaus, “Jesse Jackson Created the Modern Democratic Party,” Bloomberg View, August 27, 2015, http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-08-26/jesse-jackson-created-the-modern-democratic-party.
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30. Jesse Jackson Jr., “Jesse Jr. to Jesse Sr.: You’re Wrong on Obama, Dad,” Chicago Sun Times, December 3, 2007, http://www.suntimes.com/news/commentary/.
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31. Roddie A. Burris, “Jackson Slams Obama for ‘Acting White,’” The State, September 19, 2007, shared on Politico, http://www.politico.com/story/2007/09/jackson-slams-obama-for-acting-white-005902.
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32. “Jesse Jackson Disparages Barack Obama: Caught on Tape,” Huffington Post, July 24, 2008, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/16/jesse-jackson-caught-on-m_n_111732.html.
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33. Ashley Southall, “Jesse Jackson Jr. Gets 30 Months, and His Wife 12, to Be Served at Separate Times,” New York Times, August 14, 2013.
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34. “Quotes in Reaction to Sean Bell Trial Verdict,” abclocal.com, http://abclocal.go.com/story?section=news/local&id=6103450; “Obama Takes Questions on Sean Bell, Clyburn and Wright,” Washington Post, April
25, 2008, http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2008/04/obama-takes-questions-on-sean.html.
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35. James Baldwin made the claim, in conversation with psychologist Kenneth Clark, that “most cities are engaged in . . . something called urban renewal, which means moving Negroes out: it means Negro removal.” See Kenneth B. Clark, “A Conversation with James Baldwin,” in Conversations with James Baldwin, ed. Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), p. 42. Also see a video clip of Baldwin’s interview with Clark in which Baldwin makes the statement about urban renewal as Negro removal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8Abhj17kYU.
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36. Not all critics who argued that Obama wasn’t black, but was instead biracial, were victims of such desires. Some maintained that the very categories of race that trapped us in the past continue to hold us captive, and that the refusal to see Obama as our first biracial president is the surest sign of our failure: “We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black,” wrote the brilliant cultural critic Marie Arana in a thoughtful essay, “He’s Not Black,” in the Washington Post. “Progress has outpaced vocabulary.” Arana pointed to her experience as a mixed-race Hispanic—white American and Peruvian—to argue for a more cosmopolitan view of race as glimpsed in the experience of Hispanic Americans. “Perhaps because we’ve been in this hemisphere two centuries longer than our northern brethren, we’ve had more time to mix it up. We are the product of el gran mestizaje, a wholesale cross-pollination that has been blending brown, white, black and yellow for 500 years—since Columbus set foot in the new world.” One might conclude that Arana is right to criticize the refusal to embrace Obama’s biracial heritage, and instead, lazily and retrogressively, call him black—a term, by the way, which Arana acknowledges that Obama embraces. What Arana may be overlooking in her critique is the politics of race that offers heightened esteem and greater privilege to the whiteness that is contained in such racial mixtures; biracialism becomes an appealing trait because it lessens blackness, generating an eagerness to embrace that whiteness, and therefore garnering greater acceptance in our culture while spurning the virtue of blackness and other nonwhite categories. Arana’s Hispanic point of reference comes with built-in advantages in the dominant culture in regard to whiteness: there is in our culture’s racial vocabulary the category of non-Hispanic white and, though far less frequently, non-Hispanic black, but none for non–African American white, or non-black white. See Marie Arana, “He’s Not Black,” Washington Post, November 30, 2008.