In October of 2012, award-winning political scientist Fredrick Harris (Reference Harris2012a) wrote, “Whether it ends in 2013 or 2017, the Obama presidency has already marked the decline, rather than the pinnacle, of a political vision centered on challenging racial inequality.” Footnote 1 Harris’s book, The Price of the Ticket (Reference Harris2012b), has since become the gold standard for academic work focused on the damage inflicted by, and reflected in, President Barack Obama’s rise. Three key points made by Harris have shaped subsequent criticism of the President. First, Obama was produced by, and indebted to, a Democratic Party machine that does not respond to the demands and needs of Black Americans, especially the Black working class. Second, Black elites from the academy to the Capitol are too enthralled with Obama’s symbolic value to apply pressure and spur Obama to pursue social justice from the White House. And finally, any president who is rhetorically and ideologically invested in race-neutrality and the politics of respectability will never forcefully combat racial inequality.
While Harris was writing, many academics reserved judgment on the impact of Obama’s presidency. Michael Eric Dyson is one such colleague who had the patience to wait, despite his uncanny ability to write incisive books at a breakneck pace. The Black Presidency arrived in early 2016, and it illustrates the costs and benefits of waiting and writing in Harris’s shadow. On one hand, the book does not offer new empirical evidence about Obama’s presidency, nor does it significantly add to the core arguments made by Harris, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jelani Cobb, and Brittany Cooper, all of whom Dyson celebrates and cites. Footnote 2 These critics and others have allowed Obama’s record to speak for itself, and the evidence is damning in several respects. The president has repeatedly offered false equivalences when it comes to White and Black anger and violence, he has admonished Black men and young people in the face of unrelenting state terror and sociological evidence that disproves Black cultural pathology, and he has presided over the exacerbation of economic inequality between Blacks and Whites.
Because the arguments in The Black Presidency are not entirely new and the scope of the book is so broad, it does not have a powerful thesis that drives it forward. Those familiar with Dyson’s work will be neither surprised nor discouraged by this. Still, the book has two defining features that are distilled through careful reading and span from beginning to end. First, The Black Presidency demonstrates how Blackness—not just “race,” “race relations,” or “racism”—continues to shape American politics, even in the current post-multicultural or post-postracial era. And second, Dyson’s book stands among the most complete treatments of who Obama is and how he thinks. This is not the stated goal of the text, as Dyson sets out to write about the “psyche and racial identity of the nation,” (p. xiii) and believes “the cultural impact of Obama’s lean Black presidential frame will be far more enduring than partisan debates about his political career” (p. xii). But the book is most gripping when Dyson describes Obama’s strategy and tactics as campaigner and executive, dissects Obama’s speeches and comments, and reports on personal conversations with the President. The end result is not deification or psychoanalysis, but portraiture. In this sense, The Black Presidency pairs refreshingly with James Kloppenberg’s Reading Obama (Reference Kloppenberg2010), or David Remnick’s exhaustive biography, The Bridge (Reference Remnick2010); books of different genres that endeavor to get inside President Obama’s head and explain his origins, core beliefs, and aspirations. Dyson’s rendering of Obama is recognizable and believable because he is writing about someone we have watched in action over the past eight years, rather than Obama as a young, unique, and intoxicating political celebrity.
In the first chapter, Dyson provides context for Obama’s words and actions, noting that Obama has been mistreated and disrespected in unconscionable ways. The 44th president has received more death threats than any other, faced unprecedented obstructionism and sabotage from a hostile Republican legislature, and weathered all manner of vindictive and demeaning insults from his colleagues in Washington. No doubt, this hampers Obama’s ability to govern as he chooses, especially given his penchant for compromise. However, Dyson provides this context not to excuse the president, but to contrast it with the preferential treatment he has received from Black elites, many of whom defend Obama precisely because he has been treated unfairly. Too frequently, when claims of Black leniency on Obama are levied, they are unsupported. Dyson provides direct quotations from Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) chair Emanuel Cleaver, who says, “I’m supposed to say he doesn’t get a pass, but I’m not going to say that… The president knows we are going to act in deference to him in a way we wouldn’t to someone White” (Dyson 2016, pp. 16-17).
Dyson notes that Cleaver, Marcia Fudge, and Maxine Waters have actually been quite vocal in their criticism of Obama relative to their peers. But such criticism is scarcely heard because Black elected officials do not want to alienate their constituencies, who overwhelmingly support the president. And so, Obama has governed with the benefit of the doubt from fellow Black representatives, despite the fact that he exacerbated what was already a significant generational divide among Black politicians by “stealing scenes from his elders’ dramatic history” (p. 20), and keeping the CBC at arm’s length.
After setting the scene and establishing that on content, Obama is mostly wrong about racism and his approach to Black uplift, Dyson turns to questions of Black identity in America. Obama’s navigation of biracial/Black and African immigrant/African American divides has been addressed elsewhere, Footnote 3 but towards the end of the chapter, Dyson makes a point that many often miss: Perhaps the most important reason we must attend to the politics and fissures of Black identity is that anti-Blackness lies at the core of institutional racism and postracialism in America. The argument is not that Black oppression is the only racial bigotry worthy of moral outrage. The question is: Given the ascendance of multiculturalism and the fact that White supremacy is cancerous to all people of color, what is it about Obama that produced the public obsession with postracialism in early twenty-first century America? Dyson answers, “The fantasy that Blackness can somehow be done with, overcome, gotten rid of, quenched, quarantined, cordoned off, or finally resolved is what really lies behind the post-racial ideal” (p. 67). Obama’s biography and complex Black identity gives those who deny racism all the avenues and tools they need to reduce, mitigate, and escape the fact of Blackness.
The Black Presidency picks up steam in Chapter 3, as Dyson turns his attention to rhetoric and religion. This is Dyson’s home turf, and he moves with comfort and elegance as he makes the case for the inescapabilty of Black speech, which invades and shapes White politics. The seminal work on this topic within Obama Studies is H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman’s Articulate While Black (Reference Alim and Smitherman2012), and Dyson does not approach their breadth and depth. But this is the place where Obama starts to come to life, as we hear more of Obama’s words and voice, and Dyson tells us where they come from and what they mean. He locates Obama within Black intellectual and rhetorical history, noting that Obama draws from many Black speech traditions, but is rooted in the Black pulpit (p. 80). The president dramatizes the question of “how much Black sacred rhetoric can survive the flight from prophecy to political power” (p. 86), and when Dyson inevitably turns to the Jeremiah Wright controversy and Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech, he highlights a fundamental paradox in Black American politics: “the prophetic was widely seen as an obstacle to the political power it has always argued should exist” (p. 96).
Dyson flatly condemns the president for the false equivalence of Black and White anger in “A More Perfect Union.” But this section is also an area where critics of Obama will be unsatisfied with the tone of Dyson’s analysis, as the author repeatedly points to White media and White audiences as constraints on how much truth Obama could tell. Dyson even suggests that Obama and Wright are not so far apart in their “estimation of the structural forces that sweep over Black America” (p. 102), which is certainly contestable. But rather than dwell on whether Dyson heaps the right amount of blame on Obama for the way things unfolded, readers would be wise to focus on the end of the chapter, where Dyson actually brings Wright to the foreground, and explains the choices that the pastor made in the aftermath of Obama’s rebuke.
Dyson emphasizes that both Obama and Wright had clear roles to play, and they stuck to them as the controversy unfolded. This not only tells us something about the structure of America’s ritual political drama, but about who Obama is as a person. Rather than thinking of Obama as someone who is “really” an activist, or a preacher, or a president, or a professor, Dyson’s emphasis on the mutual responsibilities of role play reframes Obama as someone who is not really any of those things, but is supremely adaptable and confident when he knows the expectations of his role. This insight is certainly connected to a less refined criticism of Obama as a “chameleon” who has no core beliefs and simply parrots back to his audience whatever they want to hear. At its most toxic, this sort of criticism is a thinly disguised attack on Obama’s credentials, character, and claim to “authenticity”: American, Black, Christian, or otherwise. But that is not my argument, nor is it the one that emerges from The Black Presidency. Dyson illustrates that Obama has strong beliefs about his roles and responsibilities, and at this point in his tenure, Obama has certainly disappointed several audiences, though the moderate White base of the Democratic Party may not be among them.
Nowhere is Obama’s commitment to role play more clear than in Dyson’s rehashing of his personal conversation with Obama at the beginning of Chapter 5. Obama contends that he is not the change to the racial status quo that we all hope for, but he may reflect a change already underway among the voting public. He believes his role as president is to provide common ground for productive dialog, picking and choosing his opportunities to intervene such that listeners, including the media, are forced to look at contentious issues in new ways. He tells Dyson, “I don’t always have the luxury of speaking prophetically” (p. 162), and he does not believe in racially targeted strategies for reducing racial inequality because he has to answer to diverse constituencies and build coalitions.
Dyson responsibly points out that Obama’s belief in universalism is misplaced, citing William Julius Wilson as an example of someone who used to champion universalist and class-based policies at every turn, but recently changed his mind and argued for both class and race-specific policies as means to reduce racial inequality. If universalism and race neutrality actually included Black interests and civil rights, Dyson contends, the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights would be all we need. The pain of this truth grows more intense when Dyson turns to yet another role Obama has repeatedly played during his time on the political stage; that of the tough-love father to Black people. Obama has deployed his no excuses/personal accountability rhetoric in church and at Morehouse College, and Dyson points out that Obama would never speak in such a way to graduates of the Naval Academy or Barnard College. The problem with this is not simply the admonishment, but that as “racial arbitrageur,” Obama has the responsibility to speak for the group as no one else can, just as he criticizes the group as no one else can (p. 180). Obama has failed in this regard.
Toward the end of the book, Dyson broaches topics few Obama books have covered, as recent attention to police violence and the corresponding surge of Black protest have reshaped American politics. Dyson explains how racial scripts contradict the videos of Black people being senselessly killed. Many Americans cannot believe what we have all seen. “The script says that even an unarmed Black man begging to breathe cannot be believed—[it] says he is literally lying as he lies on the ground dying” (p. 206). The public, gruesome destruction of Black bodies and the persistence of the Black Lives Matter movement have forced Obama into a new role, and, Dyson argues, brought out the best in the president. The Black Presidency ends with Dyson breaking down Dylan Roof’s terrorist attack in Charleston, South Carolina, and Obama’s emotional eulogy in the church where the murders took place. Dyson loves the speech, including Obama’s choice to sing “Amazing Grace,” during the remembrance. He writes that Obama had “broken free of constraints and given voice to Blackness… become a preacher leading the nation to spiritual healing… [and] was fully and proudly African American” (p. 269). Such effusive language is sure to rub skeptics and non-believers (in Obama and/or the Black church) the wrong way. But Dyson’s parting words exemplify the themes that make The Black Presidency unique: Obama’s dedication to the roles he is called to play, and ineluctable Blackness as condition and voice.
After eight years of Obama-mania, Obama fatigue is all too real for those of us who teach and write about the president. But something was missing from our conversations without Dyson’s contribution, and ultimately The Black Presidency lands on a reinvigorating note. Engaging the spiritual and emotional dimensions of the Obama presidency in the current epoch of Black death and survival is necessary work, especially when we consider Dyson’s standing and his readership. As a public intellectual with a capital “P,” Dyson has a broader audience than Harris, Alim and Smitherman, and others who have published notable Obama books on academic presses. The attention Dyson commands and receives has also made him a target. His relationship with, and willingness to criticize, Obama has been repeatedly questioned, most famously by Cornel West. The Black Presidency refocuses onlookers’ attention on more pressing issues, and contains a critique of Obama quite different from West’s, which is heavy with ad hominem attacks. This is a timely, readable, teachable book that helps us think about the beginning of the end of the Obama era.
