Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (74 page)

But Joe Biden’s comments—which he later “deeply” regretted—became a sign of things to come. What was to come over the course of the campaign was a reflection of the audacity of racist minds—from President Bush to radio mega-personality Rush Limbaugh to Democratic stalwarts—all to view Obama as an extraordinary Negro. In February 2007,
Time
magazine speculated that African Americans were expressing greater support for New York senator Hillary Clinton because of questions over whether Obama was “black enough.” It couldn’t be because they saw Obama as a long shot. It had to be that they did not see Obama as ordinarily Black like them, meaning inarticulate and ugly and unclean and unintelligent.
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Pundits were dubbing Hilary Clinton the “inevitable” nominee until Barack Obama upset her on January 3, 2008, in the Iowa primary. By Super Tuesday on February 5, 2008, Americans had been swept up in the Obama “Yes We Can” crusade of hope and change, themes he embodied and spoke about so eloquently in his stump speeches that people started to hunger. In mid-February, his perceptive and brilliant wife, Michelle Obama, told a Milwaukee rally, “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.” Suddenly, racist ridicule came down on her, smearing her “unpatriotic” statements, slave ancestry, and brown skin, and tagging her the ultimate “angry Black woman.” Later in the campaign,
The New Yorker
put an image of Michelle Obama on its cover. She was depicted in military gear and combat boots with an AK-47 across her back and a large Afro topping her head—it was the iconic, stereotypical image of the strong Black woman—and she was standing next to her husband in his Islamic apparel. Racist commentators became obsessed with Michelle Obama’s body, her near-six-foot, chiseled, and curvy frame simultaneously semi-masculine and hyper-feminine. They searched for problems in her Black marriage and family, calling them extraordinary when they did not find any.
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When the dirt on the Obamas could not be found, investigative reporters started checking their associates. In early March 2008, ABC News released snippets of sermons from one of Black America’s most revered liberation theologians, the recently retired pastor of Chicago’s large Trinity United Church of Christ. Jeremiah Wright had married the Obamas and had baptized their two daughters. In an ABC News release, Wright was quoted proclaiming, in a sermon, “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no . . . God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.” Wright had discarded the very old racist lesson that had first been taught to slaves: that African Americans were supposed to love the United States and consider it the world’s greatest country no matter how they were treated. On top of his rejection of American exceptionalism,
Wright had the audacity to preach that American “terrorism” abroad had helped bring on the tragic events of 9/11. To put it lightly, Americans everywhere were livid.
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When Obama’s flippant characterizations of Wright as a fraught “old uncle” did not calm Americans down, Obama decided to address the controversy on March 18, 2008. He stepped into the spotlight and gave a “race speech,” entitled “A More Perfect Union,” from Philadelphia’s National Constitutional Center. Having taught constitutional law, worked in civil rights law, and overseen successful political campaigns (including his current campaign, which analysts were already regarding as masterful), Obama could easily be regarded as an expert on many things: constitutional law, civil rights law, Chicago politics, Illinois politics, campaigning, and race and politics. And just as racists presumed that all Black individuals represented the race, racists presumed that all articulate Black individuals were experts on Black people. They presumed, therefore, that Obama’s Blackness made him an expert on Black people. And media outlets routinely brought on eloquent Black voices to pontificate on all sorts of “Black” issues they had not been trained in, making the actual interracial cast of experts squirm as they listened.

And so, in Philadelphia, many Americans did not see Obama as merely a politician saying what he needed to say to save his campaign. They listened to him—as his campaign aides had hoped they would—as an esteemed, knowledgeable, and sincere expert lecturer on race—as someone more credible on race relations than the supposedly angry and old Jeremiah Wright. Obama skillfully took advantage of this platform given to him by racist Americans—and who knows whether he expressed his actual beliefs or calculated that his most comfortable political space was to stand with assimilationists, the group that Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki named the “ambivalent majority.” These Americans believed that Blacks had some strikes against them, but sometimes used that as a crutch. And they were totally unaware that this viewpoint was not only racist, but hardly made much sense. It was like saying that the game was rigged, but Blacks should not let that stop them from winning, and that when they lost and complained about the game being rigged, they were “using that as a crutch.”
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Obama dismissed Jeremiah Wright’s “profoundly distorted view,” but courageously refused to totally “disown” Wright. And then he opened his general lecture on race, explaining that socioeconomic racial inequities stemmed from the history of discrimination. From this firm antiracist opening, he rotated to the consensus racist theory of the “pervasive achievement gap,” to the disproven racist theory of “the erosion of black families” that “welfare policies . . . may have worsened,” and to the unproven racist theory that racial discrimination had bequeathed Blacks a “legacy of defeat.”

According to Obama, this “legacy of defeat” explained why “young men and, increasingly, young women” were “standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons.” He ignored the fact that this population was facing some of the nation’s highest unemployment and policing rates. Obama added his “legacy of defeat” theory to the many racist folk theories circulating in classrooms and around dinner tables and in barbershops about slavery and discrimination—especially its trauma—making Black people biologically, psychologically, culturally, or morally inferior. Over the years, people had been using these folk theories—giving them names such as “post-traumatic slave syndrome,” or the “slavery-hypertension thesis,” or the “Hood Disease”—to walk away from the complete truth that discrimination had resulted in inferior opportunities and bank accounts for Black people, and not an inferior racial group.
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Those antiracist Jeremiah Wrights, their “anger is not always productive,” Obama continued. “Indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity within the African-American community in our condition.” It was a classic assimilationist retort: calling antiracists “angry” for truly believing in racial equality, for not seeing anything wrong with Black people, and for seeing everything wrong with discrimination when squarely facing the African American condition. Like W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. before him, Obama lumped these “angry” antiracists with angry anti-White cynics to discredit them and distinguish himself from them. But when Du Bois and King ultimately arrived at antiracism, they had had to ward off the same “angry” and
anti-White labels they had helped to produce. And now, Obama was doing the same thing, unaware that he was reproducing a label that his opponents would stamp onto him whenever and wherever he uttered another antiracist word—after this speech.

Obama uttered quite a few antiracist words in the speech—most profoundly, his analysis of how for “at least a generation” politicians had used “resentments,” fears, and anger over welfare, affirmative action, and crime to distract White voters “from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze,” the nation’s “economic policies that favor the few over the many.” But then, ever the politician, he refused to classify White “resentments” as “misguided or even racist”; amazingly, he “grounded” them “in legitimate concerns.” Obama ended up following in the racist footsteps of every president since Richard Nixon: legitimizing racist resentments, saying those resentments were not racist, and redirecting those resentments toward political opponents.

The doubly conscious Obama encouraged African Americans to fight discrimination, take personal responsibility, be better parents, and end the “legacy of defeat.” Obama did not offer any childrearing or psychological lessons for the presumably parentally and psychologically superior White Americans. He merely asked them to join him on the “long march” against racial discrimination—“not just with words but with deeds”—in a chillingly antiracist conclusion. He left the Philadelphia platform on March 18, 2008, as he began, expressing the half-truthful analogy of continuous racial progression. “This union may never be perfect,” he said, “but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.”
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Segregationist and antiracist critiques were drowned out by the fawning eruption across the ideological isle. MSNBC political analyst Michelle Bernard framed it as “the best speech and most important speech on race that we have heard as a nation since Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.” And it was not just Democrats who were fawning. Prominent Republicans—everyone from presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and John McCain to the Bush administration’s Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell and to the Clintons’ old foe, Newt Gingrich—were also praising the speech.
The Bell Curve
’s author,
Charles Murray, called it “flat out brilliant—rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America.”
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If Barack Obama hoped to transform
ABC News
’s roadblock into a springboard, then he succeeded, soaring into April and May away from Jeremiah Wright and Hillary Clinton and on to the Democratic nomination in early June. Meanwhile, Republican producers of racist ideas had gotten down to business, demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate, questioning whether Barack
Hussein
Obama was really an American, and suggesting that only real Americans, who were White like McCain, could live in the White House of the United States. No other major-party candidate for the US presidency had ever been put under such a searing nativity microscope. Then again, no other major-party candidate for US president had ever been anyone other than a White male. The Obama campaign released a scanned copy of his US birth certificate, but the rumors of Obama being born in Kenya or some Islamic anti-American nation did not suddenly go away. They were not started out of ignorance, so why would they go away out of knowledge?

But the son of a single mother turned to other matters, like a Father’s Day address on June 15, 2008. “If we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that too many fathers are missing—missing from too many lives and too many homes,” Obama said to a thunderous applause from Black hands at a Southside Chicago church. “They’re acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.” The next day in
Time
, sociologist Michael Eric Dyson should have buried once and for all the racist exaggeration that Obama—and many other Americans—kept repeating on this issue of missing
Black
fathers. Dyson cited a study by Boston College’s Rebekah Levine Coley finding that Black fathers not living in the home were more likely than fathers of every other racial group to keep in contact with their children. “Obama’s words may have been spoken to black folk, but they were aimed at those whites still on the fence about whom to send to the White House,” Dyson criticized.
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The legend of the “missing Black father” had become as popular as the legend that there are “no good Black men.” Back in May 2008,
Tyra Banks had devoted an episode of her popular television talk show to the topic, calling it “Where Have All the Good Black Men Gone?” The nearly 1 million Black men in prison and the life expectancy of Black men being six years below White men did not make the discussion. Tyra Banks speculated, sounding the tune of racist Black women, that Black women were having trouble finding
good
Black men because so many were dogs or dating non-Black women or men. In no time, racist Black men were saying the same thing about Black women. The longest-running No. 1 R&B single of 2010, Alicia Keys’s “I’m Ready,” featured Hip Hop sensation Drake, who rapped: “Good women are rare too, none of them have come close.” Few good Black men plus few good Black women equals few good Black people, equals racist ideas.
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ON NOVEMBER
4, 2008, a sixty-four-year-old recently retired professor cast a vote for a major political party for the first time in her voting life. She had retired from academia, but not from her very public activism of four decades. She was still traveling the country trying to rouse an abolitionist movement against prisons. In casting her vote for Democrat Barack Obama, Angela Davis joined roughly 69.5 million Americans. But more than voting for the man, Davis voted for the grassroots efforts of the campaign organizers, those millions of people demanding change. When the networks started announcing that Obama had been elected the forty-fourth president of the United States, happiness exploded from coast to coast, and from the United States around the antiracist world. Davis was in the delirium of Oakland. People whom she did not know came up and hugged her as she walked the streets. She saw people singing to the heavens, and she saw people dancing in the streets. People, in fact, were dancing on streets around the world. And the people Angela Davis saw and all the others around the world who were celebrating were not enraptured from the election of an individual; they were enraptured by the pride of the victory for Black people, by the success of millions of grassroots organizers, and because they had shown all those disbelievers, who
had said that electing a Black president was impossible, to be wrong. Most of all, they were enraptured by the antiracist potential of a Black president.
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