Katrina was a tipping point. The deep inequalities exposed by the storm and the federal response to the disaster made it all too plain: The government really didn’t seem concerned enough about black people—or poor black people, to be more precise. Given America’s traditional stated values of equal opportunity for all, yet its fraught history of race relations, was anything better even possible?
YES, IT WAS. JUST THREE YEARS AFTER HURRICANE KATRINA, THE ELECTION OF BARACK OBAMA (B. 1961) AMAZED AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE WORLD. Many older people had never imagined that they would live to see a black president in the White House. Some people wondered, for a delirious moment, whether the United States had finally moved beyond race and its codependent, racism.
Barack Obama entered the public consciousness a year before Hurricane Katrina, at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when the little-known state senator from Illinois stood up to give the keynote speech. Then running for the U.S. Senate, he described his unusual trajectory into politics as the son of a Kenyan exchange student and a white woman from Kansas: “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story,” he said, “and that in no other country on earth is my story even possible.”39
Obama had lost his first race for U.S. Congress against the former Black Panther Party member Bobby Rush (b. 1946), but he did win a seat in the U.S. Senate in fall 2004, becoming the only African American in that body and only the third popularly elected black senator in U.S. history, after Edward Brooke (b. 1919) of Massachusetts and Carol Moseley Braun (b. 1947) of Illinois. But he had greater ambitions. When he declared his intention to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, many Americans of all backgrounds were stunned by his audacity. Aside from the largely symbolic campaigns of Shirley Chisholm in 1972, Jesse Jackson, Sr., in 1984, and the Reverend Al Sharpton (b. 1954) in 2004, this was the first time that an African American had been taken seriously as a candidate for a major party. But even many within his own party said that America still was not ready.
African Americans were initially divided over whether or not to support Obama’s candidacy. Some survivors of the civil rights generation, including John Lewis, endorsed Obama’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. Some African Americans, scarred by the painful loss of Dr. King, Malcolm X, and others, feared that a too-prominent black leader would be at risk of assassination by white racists. Others, cynical after years of perceived betrayals by earlier black politicians, felt that Obama’s blackness alone was not enough to earn their support. There were others still who did not believe that enough whites would ever vote for a black man and were loath to “waste” their own votes on a candidate who couldn’t win. Despite these initial doubts, Obama’s campaign took off first with the younger generation, which responded with unprecedented fervor—and new tools and strategies. Another technological advance changed the course of African American history: Internet fund-raising and social media.
As Obama’s campaign built grassroots momentum, some black leaders began to reevaluate his candidacy. In February 2008, Congressman John Lewis announced that he was changing his endorsement from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama. “Something is happening in America,” he said, “and people are prepared and ready to make that great leap.”40
As Obama was carried on a wave of what seemed like unstoppable momentum, his candidacy suffered a sudden setback. In March 2008, ABC News drew attention to Obama’s pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright (b. 1941), a man of Emmett Till’s generation. In some of his sermons, the fiery pastor expressed anger about the nation’s long history of enslaving and mistreating people of color, from Native Americans to contemporary black communities. Soon, video clips of Wright declaiming, “God damn America, for treating our citizens as less than human!” were all over television and the Internet.41 Media outlets scrambled to learn more about Wright and told stories about radical politics and associations with alleged domestic terrorists of the ’60s. Would the specter of black rage and radicalism frighten white voters away from Obama?
Obama responded quickly and decisively with what has come to be known as his “race speech.” While acknowledging that Wright’s words could be considered offensive, he also refused to whitewash the history of racial inequality in the United States. “The anger is real; it is powerful,” he said. “And to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.” He compared the anger that Wright voiced to the white anger that flared in response to busing and affirmative action, and called on Americans to envision a country no longer “irrevocably bound to a tragic past.”42
That speech was a turning point. Obama managed to reassure many white and black Americans both that he understood their points of view, and the painful history of race relations that had left residues of hurt, anger, and bitterness. Obama went on to win the Democratic nomination, and then the general election, becoming the first black president of the United States.
African Americans and whites alike were astounded by this historic event. The international and American media began to debate whether America had finally moved beyond its difficult past and become a “postracial” nation. Despite these optimistic musings, the fact remained that Obama had been only the third popularly elected black U.S. senator in our history, and when he left for the White House, not a single African American remained in the Senate. Obama himself cautioned reporters not to see his election as proof that America’s “race problem” had been solved overnight. After all, even though 95 percent of African American voters chose Obama, he had won only 43 percent of the white vote.
The numbers were proof that at the polls, African Americans were almost unanimous in their support for Obama. During his first term, though, there were countless reminders of the obstacles still facing African Americans, as well as the real progress that had been made. For the black elite, it was the best of times. Before the 2008 economic crash, those at the top—whoever they were and whatever their skin color—got richer while the poor got poorer. This was just as true for the highest level of African American hedge-fund managers, business executives, and entrepreneurs as it was for rich and powerful whites.
So, while money afforded African Americans at the top some measure of color blindness from whites, there was no “trickle down” for blacks at the bottom of the economic ladder. A look inside urban city schools across the country might make it impossible to believe that almost six decades have gone by since the Supreme Court passed Brown v. Board of Education. The residents of poor, predominantly black neighborhoods like Roxbury in Boston, one of the communities where the “Battle of Boston” raged in 1974, have few options but the city’s worst schools. What remains of affirmative action continues to draw critics and court cases, and recent victories for affirmative action, such as in Michigan, no longer have the same equalizing effect they once had, when affirmative action initially functioned as a class elevator. Today, it often tends to perpetuate the class status of middle-class African Americans through their children.
The specter of racial profiling, which Harvard Law professor and legal theorist Charles Ogletree called “the presumption of guilt” based on skin color, continued to haunt America. On February 26, 2012, an unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin, was shot dead by a vigilante neighbor in Florida. Was the fear of black men still as deep-rooted as it had been in the days of Jim Crow?
Inauguration of President Barack Obama, with Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, by Carol M. Highsmith, January 24, 2009. Photograph. Library of Congress.
Dishearteningly, the racial caste system developed in the 1980s and ’90s still obtains throughout our society, perhaps most obviously in the nation’s prisons. Civil rights advocate and scholar Michelle Alexander questioned how far America has come in more than a century. “Today,” she said, “a criminal freed from prison has scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a freed slave or a black person living ‘free’ in Mississippi during th
e height of Jim Crow.”43 And indeed, reminders of Jim Crow are everywhere. The Jim Crow Museum in Michigan is full of shockingly racist Obama paraphernalia, all created and distributed since 2008.
Many African Americans continued to question how this could go on with a black man occupying the Oval Office. Scholars such as Cornel West and journalists and activists such as Tavis Smiley pointedly questioned whether the president was doing enough to solve the structural problems afflicting poor black people. Was he taking their loyalty for granted? Others asked whether the election of this mixed-race son of an African exchange student was just another example of how black immigrants were leaving native-born African Americans behind.
There was no question that Obama saw himself as black: He identified himself as such in the 2010 census, even though he could have checked off multiple races. But with his international background, could he truly understand what it meant to be African American? And Obama’s efforts to work with his intractable opponents in Congress revealed that a significant slice of white America—colored deep red down the wide center of the country on the electoral map—feared black people and resented their success just as much as ever.
Obama’s reelection in 2012 offered a new perspective on these questions: A significant majority of Americans still saw their black president as the best person to lead the nation, even in the midst of an economic crisis. Although racism and racial disparities in incarceration rates and poverty remain pressing issues, the face America shows the world—and itself—has changed forever with the election, and reelection, of the nation’s first black president.
THE QUESTIONS RAISED ABOUT BARACK OBAMA’S “BLACKNESS” QUOTIENT REMINDED THE NATION HOW MUCH MORE DIVERSE black America had become since the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. That law had marked a radical break from past policies, opening the United States to immigration from Africa and Asia, which had previously been excluded. It also removed the national-origins quota system that had been in place since the 1920s. As a result, African Americans are no longer the nation’s largest minority group, with blacks accounting for only 13.1 percent of the population, compared to the 16.7 percent who identify as Hispanic or Latino.44 The 1965 law also changed the demographics of the African American population, as 3.4 million new black immigrants arrived from Africa and the Caribbean, about eight times as many people of African descent as came here during the entire transatlantic slave trade.
Newly arrived black immigrants have often succeeded here in ways that have eluded African Americans for generations. Nigerian Americans, for example, enjoy an average educational level that exceeds any other minority ethnic group, including Asian Americans. At Harvard and other Ivy League schools, the children of recent black immigrants outnumber African Americans in the undergraduate student body. Some native-born black African Americans flat-out resent it when African and Caribbean immigrants move up the ladder to economic success more rapidly than they do. Is it easier for black immigrants to succeed here because they arrive on these shores free of the legacy of America’s painful racial history? And how long does that so-called immigrant mentality persist? At what point do immigrants or their descendants become simply black Americans?
A major motivation drawing immigrants here is the promise of better economic opportunity and political and religious freedom. And even though black people around the world are well aware of our history of slavery and Jim Crow, it is a fact of history to them and not of personal heritage, and nothing symbolizes America’s promise better than the world-famous African American icons of politics, music, sports, and the arts. Murals of Tupac Shakur (1971–1996), Muhammad Ali (b. 1942), and Malcolm X and posters of African leaders posed next to Barack Obama cover the walls of the public spaces of Dakar, Senegal; Accra, Ghana; Luanda, Angola; Johannesburg, South Africa; Freetown, Sierra Leone; and Lagos, Nigeria. West African rappers echo and re-interpret American culture in their own music and performances. African American culture and the long struggle for freedom and civil rights have come to represent a global ideal; and hip-hop, a cultural form forged by dis-enfranchised African Americans of the most entrenched underclass in uniquely American cities, has become an indisputable global force.
Over its three-decade history, hip-hop has evolved through various phases, at times stressing the entertainment element far more than its political thrust. At its most effective and most strident, hip-hop music continued the tradition of political protest that characterized the younger generation of black radicals in the ’60s, to some extent. And in some ways, early rap lyrics seemed to be an extension of the form of literary naturalism practiced by the great writer Richard Wright.
SO AT THE DAWNING OF THE 21ST CENTURY, WHAT OF THE BATTLE BETWEEN THE BLACK CULTURAL NATIONALISTS of the US organization and the latter phase of SNCC, among other organizations, as opposed to the Marxist-Leninist platform of the Black Panther Party, which led to the deadly shootout on the campus of UCLA in January 1969, the sad episode in the history of African Americans we encountered at the beginning of this chapter? Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, if not well before, there has not been a serious mass political movement advocating either the violent overthrow of the capitalist system or a socialist revolution within the African American community. While that may change if the conditions haunting the chronically poor are not addressed, this does not appear likely.
At the same time, no major black cultural nationalist political movements are vying for the attention and support of the African American people, either. The “Back to Africa” movements that have been such a colorful part of the story of the African American people for 200 years, starting with Paul Cuffee’s successful attempt to transport a handful of former slaves to the British colony of Sierra Leone in 1815 and ranging through Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association of the early 20th century to the strident nationalism of Malcolm X during the Nation of Islam phase of his political evolution in the ’50s and early ’60s, have largely grown silent over the past two decades. Why? The answer to that question is quite complex, but one reason, we think, certainly stems from the fact that Africans themselves are “voting with their feet,” as it were, and migrating willingly to the United States in the largest numbers this country has seen since the forced migration of their own ancestors and ours during the long and dreadful history of slavery.
But the other reason for this is even more fascinating: It is fair to say that black cultural nationalism has “gone mainstream.” There was the creation of African American studies departments, which at several colleges and universities have become top-ranked research programs and even Ph.D.-granting programs that attract a wide cross section of the student bodies at historically white institutions of higher learning. Long gone is the violence that characterized the birth of black studies on the campus of UCLA, replaced today by the sort of healthy debates over the interpretation of historical events that represent the best of academic inquiry. Each January we have the annual national observance of the King national holiday, which serves as the entrée to Black History Month, which virtually every elementary, middle, and high school, and college and university observe in their own meaningful ways, and which the United States Postal Service celebrates as well, with its Black Heritage series of stamps, usually issued in February. Kwanzaa stands alongside Christmas and Hanukkah as a staple of the American December holiday season, and of many public school curricula.
Black musical culture (jazz, the blues, rhythm and blues, soul music, and most certainly hip-hop) has without a doubt become the lingua franca of American popular culture, along with speech patterns and phrases and “black” dance forms (a process set in motion and effected by Don Cornelius’s syndicated television program, Soul Train). There is a long roster of print, radio, and broadcast journalists who have distinguished themselves in every form of media. There has been thorough integration of the most popular American team sports—even country-club sports like golf (with Tiger Woods [b. 1975]). And of cou
rse the canon of American literature and history (along with other disciplines such as sociology and even the curriculum of law schools) has been thoroughly integrated as a result of both the black studies movement and the so-called canon wars of the multicultural movement of the ’80s and ’90s. All these things, and many more, attest to the mainstreaming of African American history and culture, and their embrace not just by African Americans, but by Americans.
IN THE AFOREMENTIONED FIELDS THERE HAS BEEN TREMENDOUS PROGRESS, but in surveying the landscape of recent African American history, it must be noted that this most recent period can be—perhaps should be—characterized as the era of great achievement for African American women. In virtually every field of endeavor, women have risen, starting appropriately enough with the election of Shirley Chisholm in November 1968 as the first black woman ever to serve in the House of Representatives. Four years later, Chisholm, as we have described, would also mount the very first campaign for the presidency, in the same year that Barbara Jordan would become the first black woman from the South to win election to Congress. In 1977, Patricia Harris (1924–1985) was confirmed as President Jimmy Carter’s secretary of housing and urban development, the first African American woman appointed to a Cabinet post. Two years later, Hazel Johnson (1927–2011) became the first African American woman promoted to the rank of general in the United States Army, while in 1998 Lillian E. Fishburne (b. 1949) would become the first African American woman promoted to the rank of rear admiral in the U.S. Navy. While she wasn’t breaking any barriers for women, as Chisholm, Jordan, Harris, Johnson, and Fishburne did, Vanessa Williams (b. 1963) achieved another sort of first in 1984: She was crowned Miss America, the first African American to win this title.
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