Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
322 pp. Pantheon Books. $26.95.
By BRENT STAPLES
Published: September 2, 2011
The next time you see Barack Obama gliding into a White House press
conference, take note of that jazzy walk. It is a dead ringer for the
strut that was the bearing of choice among inner-city cool guys in
the 1960s, when Barry Obama was still a tyke growing up in the exotic
precincts of Hawaii and Indonesia. The Obama glide represents his
embrace of a black aesthetic that was not his by circumstance of
birth. It speaks on an intimate frequency to African-American men,
who have been smiling in recognition and rating it for style ever
since he stepped into the national spotlight. President Obama is
acutely aware of how to deploy the physical self to excellent effect.
If we looked back closely at 2008, we would no doubt notice him amping
up the glide for black audiences and dialing it back elsewhere.
Every campaign enlists its own meta-language. As Randall Kennedy
reminds us in his provocative and richly insightful new book, "The
Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama
Presidency," the Obama forces disseminated several messages intended
to soothe the racially freighted fears of the white electorate. On one
channel, they reassured voters that he was not an alien, but a normal
American patriot. They also made clear that he was a "safe,"
conciliatory black man who would never raise his voice in anger or
make common cause with people, living or dead, who used race as a
platform for grievance. On yet another wavelength, the candidate
proffered his bona fides as a black man to African-Americans who were
initially wary of his unusual upbringing, his white family ties and
his predominantly white political support.
The press viewed this courtship of black voters as largely beside the
point for a "post-racial" campaign that had bigger fish to fry on the
white side of the street. Kennedy, who teaches law at Harvard, is
having none of that. He argues with considerable force that the
candidate deliberately set out to blacken himself in the public mind —
while taking care not to go too far — and would have lost the election
had he not done so. He sees Obama's courtship of black voters not as
tertiary, but as the main event and as the perfect vantage from which
to view the campaign and the presidency.
"The Persistence of the Color Line" consists of an introduction and
eight interrelated essays that offer a fresh view of events that had
prematurely taken on the cast of settled history. One essay, "The Race
Card in the Campaign of 2008," lays out an exacting standard for
determining when the charge of race baiting is appropriate and applies
it to several statements that were labeled as racist, or at least
nearly so, during the last presidential campaign. Kennedy praises the
Republican nominee, John McCain (he "imposed upon himself a code of
conduct that precluded taking full advantage of his opponent's racial
vulnerability"), and redeems the former Democratic vice-presidential
candidate Geraldine Ferraro, who was run out of the Clinton campaign
essentially for saying what was indisputably true: Obama's blackness
mattered to his stature as a candidate. Without it, he would never
have appealed so strongly "to the emotions of millions of white
Americans who yearned for a moment of racial redemption."
Another essay is likely to be misunderstood. In it, Kennedy makes
something close to common cause with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the
bombastic pastor who upended his famous parishioner's candidacy with
fiery sermons ("God damn America!") that castigated the United States
for historical crimes and hubris. Kennedy parallels Wright's life and
rhetoric with that of his own father, a hard-working man who came of
age during the era of American apartheid and who was humiliated by
racist police officers in front of his family. Deeply (and
justifiably) embittered, the elder Kennedy renounced "any sentimental
bond with the American government or the American nation" and went so
far as to root against the United States in war. Kennedy locates his
father and Wright in that venerable vein of black political thought
(it includes Malcolm X and W. E. B. Du Bois) whose adherents flatly
rejected the "secular scripture" of fundamental American goodness. He
sees Wright's critique of America as excessive, but notes that it is,
at bottom, more integral to the African-American worldview than was
generally acknowledged during the episode.
The messianic glow that surrounded Obama's candidacy — Kennedy and
others call it "Obamamania" — precluded closer scrutiny of his
pronouncements, especially those having to do with race. The widely
held notion that the now-famous race speech, "A More Perfect Union,"
ranked with the Gettysburg Address or "I Have a Dream" strikes Kennedy
as delusional. The speech, he writes, was little more than a carefully
calibrated attempt to defuse the public relations crisis precipitated
by the Wright affair. Far from frank, it understated the extent of the
country's racial divisions and sought to blame blacks and whites
equally for them, when in fact, Kennedy writes, "black America and
white America are not equally culpable. White America enslaved and Jim
Crowed black America (not the other way around)." The speech was in
keeping with the candidate's wildly successful race strategy, which
involved making white voters feel better about themselves whenever
possible.
The cornerstone essay, "Obama Courts Black America," is a breath of
fresh air on many counts, not least of all because it offers a fully
realized portrait of the black political opinion — left, right,
center, high and low — that was brought to bear during the campaign.
This is the most comprehensive document I've yet read on the near
street fight that erupted over the question of how Obama should
identify himself racially. There were those who viewed him as "too
white" to be legitimately seen as black; those who had no problem with
his origins; those who viewed the attempt to portray him as "mixed
race" as a way of trying to "whiten" him for popular consumption; and
those who accused Obama of throwing his white mother under the bus
when it became clear that he regarded himself as African-American.
Tallying votes, Kennedy reckons that it would have been political
suicide for Obama to identify himself as anything other than black.
This would have undermined his standing among African-Americans, whose
overwhelming support he needed to win, and gained him nothing among
those whites who were determined to punish him for his skin color, no
matter how he described himself.
Like many others, Kennedy is disappointed in Obama's failure to fight
harder for progressive causes and his habit of unilaterally ceding
ground to the right during negotiations like those that played out
recently over the debt ceiling. But two things should be clear by now.
The president is by no means as liberal as the Eastern elites seemed
to think he was in 2008. And two-fistedness is not his nature. He
would never have been elected had he run as, say, a brown-skinned
version of the leg breaker Lyndon Johnson. The white electorate might
one day be ready for a black president like that, but not yet.
Brent Staples writes editorials on politics and culture for The Times
and is the author of "Parallel Time," a memoir.
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