The Race Whisperer

Barack Obama and the Political Uses of Race

Melanye T Price, Melanye T. Price

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781479819256
• eBook ISBN: 9781479801343
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Nearly a week after George Zimmerman was found not guilty of killing Trayvon Martin, President Obama walked into the press briefing room and shocked observers by saying that "Trayvon could have been me." He talked personally and poignantly about his experiences and pointed to intra-racial violence as equally serious and precarious for black boys. He offered no sweeping policy changes or legislative agendas; he saw them as futile. Instead, he suggested that prejudice would be eliminated through collective efforts to help black males and for everyone to reflect on their own prejudices.
Obama's presidency provides a unique opportunity to engage in a discussion about race and politics. In The Race Whisperer, Melanye Price analyzes the manner in which Barack Obama uses race strategically to engage with and win the loyalty of potential supporters. This book uses examples from Obama's campaigns and presidency to demonstrate his ability to authentically tap into notions of blackness and whiteness to appeal to particular constituencies. By tailoring his unorthodox personal narrative to emphasize those parts of it that most resonate with a specific racial group, he targets his message effectively to that audience, shoring up electoral and governing support. The book also considers the impact of Obama's use of race on the ongoing quest for black political empowerment. Unfortunately, racial advocacy for African Americans has been made more difficult because of the intense scrutiny of Obama's relationship with the black community, Obama's unwillingness to be more publicly vocal in light of that scrutiny, and the black community's reluctance to use traditional protest and advocacy methods on a black president. Ultimately, though, The Race Whisperer argues for a more complex reading of race in the age of Obama, breaking new ground in the study of race and politics, public opinion, and political campaigns.

1

Barack Obama and Black Blame

Authenticity, Audience, and Audaciousness

Barack Obama’s relationship to the Black community is most often treated as fairly straightforward. There was an immeasurable amount of pride in light of his election to the presidency, and the celebration of the moment was felt even by detractors within the community. Photographs of Obama and his family are displayed in Black homes next to photos of beloved grandmothers, nieces, and other kin. His victory, without doubt, was a collective accomplishment that represented forward progress for the entire race.

In the full glow of this historic moment, there was one aspect of that relationship that for many reasons was overlooked. Barack Obama continuously engaged in public excoriations of African Americans and behaviors they engage in that he deems destructive and unsatisfactory. On many occasions and in front of audiences large and small, he mixed forthright campaigning with moral invectives about what members of his racial community should be doing to achieve equality. These were targeted comments that were reserved for Black audiences and used tropes specific to the Black community that were largely unchecked by anyone until well into his second term as president. Taken less seriously in 2008 by the media and the Obama campaign was an unplanned public admonition by Jesse Jackson, who made what he thought was an off-camera remark about Barack Obama “talking down to Black people.”1 It was discarded as a single critique by someone who felt marginalized in a campaign that owed a great debt to Jackson’s unsuccessful bids in the 1980s. Interestingly, it also proved beneficial to Obama, who was able to demonstrate another contrast between himself and the Jesse Jackson types of the Black community. Jackson had inadvertently set Obama up for his own Sista Souljah moment wherein the Democratic presidential nominee could distance himself from a person whose image continues to be a racial flashpoint in the minds of many Americans.

Obama consistently employs narratives based on the determinacy of individual choice and personal responsibility rather than on structural impediments to Black equality. I am not arguing that the message is new. It has quite a long trajectory in some schools of African American political thought and American democratic ideals. The interesting question that his engagement raises is how he is able to use fairly damning language that would be viewed as problematic coming from other national candidates with very few consequences for such an extended period. Navigating this kind of difficult territory is the purview of the race whisperer. He steps into public debates within the Black community, arguing that Blacks make poor choices that ultimately block them from the real progress they have been seeking for generations. However, because of the context in which he makes these arguments, he is rarely critiqued for it.

Just a few short years earlier, when Bill Cosby made similar kinds of arguments, there was both support for and critique of what he said. This has not been the case for Obama. He has been able to make negative claims about Black people (especially poor Blacks) while maintaining the support of the African American community and without being seen as a race candidate by whites. I argue that this was accomplished through his nuanced understanding of the role context and audience plays in shaping how messages will be received by various audiences.

This chapter is divided into three parts that explore the process by which Obama uses racial rhetoric. First, I discuss an important paradox that emerged during Obama’s initial presidential candidacy. He ran as a deracialized candidate and intentionally avoided racial questions except in two cases: when he was directly questioned and when he was engaging in Black blame. In this chapter, I take up the latter situation. Second, I use his own words to demonstrate the ways he relies on Black blame to undergird his explanations of and remedies for Black problems. Last, I make claims about the importance of context in explaining how these messages were received. These messages were delivered in ostensibly homogenous spaces where members of the same racial group were having an internal conversation about the state of their group. However, the homogeneity of the space was undermined by the presence of cameras that broadcasted these conversations across the globe. Dual audiences, then, reshaped the potential interpretation of the entire event.

Barack Obama as a Deracialized Candidate

Almost immediately after the 2008 election, the media began to discuss whether or not the country had entered a postracial period, the suggestion being that the election of a Black president demonstrated the ability of whites to see beyond race and simply vote for their candidate of choice (Remnick 2008; Steele 2008; Schorr 2008). Others argued that the new Black president was able to get elected without making race the major focus of his campaign (Bai 2008; Smith and Martin 2008; Serwer 2008). Obama’s victory signaled a transitional moment in American history in which its history of African enslavement and racial prejudice was replaced by a period of racial openness and true adherence to the American ideals of freedoms and equality (Steele 2008). While his Blackness portended much for racial tolerance, Obama’s mixed-race heritage was also seen as symbolically important (Harwood 2008; Carroll 2008). Watching footage of Obama’s family and seeing his extended family on the campaign trail presented a portrait of a multiracial family that represented the American racial mosaic (Terry 2008). He was the son of white mother and Kenyan father, the husband of a Black wife, the father of Black daughters, and the brother of an Asian sister (Niesse 2008). The visual told a story of American racial progress that was powerful for many Americans and resonated with a cross-section of voters.

Obama’s campaign style was a new-millennium take on an older style among Black candidates. Black candidates understood that if they were to be elected to higher office, they had to figure out a way to diminish the negative impact of their race on their electoral ambitions. In their examination of the 1989 election that ushered in the first Black governor of Virginia, Democrat Doug Wilder, and Black mayors in New York City, Cleveland, Seattle, and several other majority-white municipalities, Joseph P. McCormick and Charles E. Jones (1993) highlight two important anomalies in this election cycle. First, these officials were elected in non-Black districts that bucked previous trends, even though many believed that whites would not vote cross-racially and particularly not for Black candidates (Reeves 1997). More important, McCormick and Jones highlighted another anomaly in these election outcomes that is particularly relevant here. They argued that these candidates engaged in a campaign strategy called deracialization, which they defined as,

conducting a campaign in a stylistic fashion that defuses the polarizing effects of race by avoiding explicit references to race-specific issues, while at the same time emphasizing those issues that are perceived as racially transcendent, thus mobilizing a broad segment of the electorate for purposes of capturing or maintaining public office. (McCormick and Jones 1993, 76; italics added)

Simply put, these candidates avoided direct engagement with race or any racialized topic or image beyond things that were out of their control, such as phenotype. According to these scholars, deracialization impacted three areas of campaign strategy: “political style, mobilization tactics, and issues.” These new deracialized candidates worked to dispel white voters’ perceptions of Black candidates as angry insurgent candidates. They had to exhibit a nonthreatening demeanor while refraining from making explicit racial appeals to the Black community and avoiding issues that are or could potentially be viewed as being race-specific. These tactics provided enough distance from the Black community to make the Black candidate more palatable to white voters. Since the 1989 election, the number of Black candidates who have taken on variations of this deracialized strategy and successfully been elected to office has increased significantly.2 Barack Obama’s ascendency to the White House is the most important endorsement of this electoral strategy.

The key to the effectiveness of more recent deracialized candidates is their “story.” Former White House senior political advisor David Axelrod, who specialized in consulting for Black mayoral candidates before working for the Obama campaign and administration, highlighted the importance of candidates’ personal stories in an article in The Nation in 2007, where he suggested that the best asset of Black candidates with whom he worked was “the direct, lived experience of the effects of injustice with a simultaneous faith that the injustice wasn’t permanent, that it could be overcome” (quoted in Hayes 2007).3 Although Black candidates by virtue of phenotype offer a constant reminder of America’s history of racial injustice, deracialized candidates—through the symbolism of their story and the style of their campaign—render that history part of the past and offer a hopeful view of the present.

Deracialized candidates avoid talking about race because they believe their raced bodies silently cue white voters to think about race. Adding words to that cue seems to emphasize racial differences instead of making voters more comfortable with voting for Blacks. For the most part, as a candidate, Obama focused on his story and the ways that story demonstrated racial unity rather than division. In his skillful management of race, he successfully downplayed the importance of his race in the campaign and avoided most discussions about it. However, he was able to talk about race in one particular way: he could talk about Black pathology as frequently as he wanted without much opposition.

Defining Black Blame

Citizens want to understand and explain persistent racial inequality. As Blacks and other Americans attempt to reconcile core American values with persistent unequal outcomes, it is expected that they also look to assign blame. Who is responsible? Evidence from my previous works suggests that there were two general targets for blame, either structural forces (system blame) or Blacks themselves (Black blame) (Price 2009). Blacks who see the American political system as inherently hostile to Black interests, either intentionally or through more benign forms of racial privilege, are more likely to see the American government and its agents as responsible for racial inequality—in other words to engage in system blame. Alternatively, some believe that contemporary inequalities can be explained by poor choices that Blacks make. In an era where Blacks have more access to the centers of power and opportunities to succeed than at any other time in American history, they see hard-earned political capital being squandered by the consistently misplaced priorities of the youth who are making poor choices. As a result, they engage in a process of Black blame.

The focus here is on how President Obama uses rhetoric that blames Blacks. However, neither the conceptual framework of blaming Blacks nor the strategic uses of rhetoric to do so are new developments. Inherent in most pursuits of racial uplift has been the judgment (most often on the part of middle-class Blacks) that poorer Blacks are not living up to high moral or social standards (Gaines 1996). Even Black nationalists who prioritize racial pride believe that most Blacks need to experience some kind of cognitive liberation process in which they purge themselves of internalized standards of Black inferiority (Harris-Lacewell 2006; Dawson 2001). Nationalists argue that this false consciousness drives the destructive behavior of Blacks. Black blame and system blame are not mutually exclusive processes; presumably one can believe that the government enacts policies that are hostile to Black progress and that Blacks make choices that hinder progress. In my research, however, most often people emphasize one or the other and the direction of emphasis has an impact on which policy preferences and prescriptions they support (Price 2009). Shortly before Obama began his campaign, a high-profile debate about this topic emerged, initiated by statements made by Bill Cosby.

“Come on, people,” was both the pleading refrain Bill Cosby offered during his national Call Out tour. It is also the title of his book with Harvard physician Alvin F. Poussaint. In the tour (of mostly Black churches) and in the book, Cosby extended the narrative he initiated in 2004 at an NAACP gala to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, in which he called on particular segments of the Black community (e.g., the poor, single mothers, and youth) to take responsibility for their destructive life choices and the negative outcomes that resulted (Cosby and Poussaint 2007). According to Cosby (2004), “the lower economic and lower middle economic people are not holding their end in this deal.” They were letting down the civil rights generation by engaging in a long list of dysfunctional behaviors such as poor parenting, making unwise financial choices, engaging in criminal acts, giving their children ethnic names, and making problematic fashion choices. For instance, at the NAACP dinner, Cosby said,

In our cities and public schools we have 50% dropout. In our own neighborhood, we have men in prison. No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband. No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child. (Cosby 2004)

Although Cosby was not the first African American to use tropes of personal responsibility to explain persistent community problems, his initial outburst and subsequent reaffirmation reignited this debate among African Americans.4 Many questioned the truth of Cosby’s statements, whether he had enough moral authority to be the one making them, and whether or not these things needed to be said at all. Ted Shaw, then director of the NAACP Legal and Education Defense Fund, which sponsored the event, rose immediately after Cosby spoke to offer a counterpoint to Cosby’s assertions. He noted that many of the problems the Black community faced were not of its own making and were the result of discriminatory policies beyond their control (Meyer 2004). However, Kweisi Mfume, a former congressman and the former head of the NAACP, agreed with Cosby and gave him credit for saying what needed to be said, as did many Black other commentators (Tucker 2004). According to them, Cosby had engaged in a “tough love” conversation with Black people, especially certain community members, that was long overdue.

Less than four years later, Barack Obama announced his intention to run for president and began campaigning across the country. While doing so, he made statements that can be read as Cosby-esque. However, instead of reigniting the heated debate over both the message and the appropriateness of the speaker, Obama’s comments were largely unknown or unacknowledged. To some extent, Obama and Cosby occupied similar social spaces where both the strength of connection to the targets of their critique and their authority to speak to these particular community issues was fragile at best. Cosby’s status as a crossover comic with a mostly white audience and Obama’s status as a relative newcomer to the national Black political scene created some social distance between them and most Black people. The difference, however, was that at least with Cosby there was a debate. When the political stake of the presidency came into play, debate was largely silenced and unwelcomed.

There is no question that Barack Obama used personal responsibility tropes and characterizations of Black behavior that qualify as Black blame. Whether chiding Blacks for poor parenting, for dysfunctional priorities, or for being too apathetic, Obama made clear throughout the campaign and his presidency that there was much work to be done by Blacks themselves if community outcomes were to improve. The work that he prescribed was not only necessary but a unique set of objectives for African Americans that he did not offer to other racial groups. Instead, he made pointed statements to Blacks about the need, to quote Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet (2008), “to shape up.” Obama’s use of Black blame achieved two goals: he demonstrated to ordinary Black people that he was connected to them and understood their challenges, and he signaled to whites his ability to serve as an objective critic of Black behavior. He was able to do these two things simultaneously by invoking Black blame as an racial insider at predominantly Black events that before the 2008 election were essentially safe spaces for Blacks (or the producers of what Michael Dawson [2001] calls the Black counterpublic). In Black churches and at majority-Black events, he dispensed blame as if he was engaged in a conversation with a bunch of old friends who needed and didn’t mind a good talking to. His rhetorical style and mannerisms took on the tone of a southern Baptist minister rather than that of a Harvard-educated law professor. He engaged the audience with call and response and other racialized cues. Simultaneously, he was speaking as a racial interlocutor who, like members of other racial groups, questioned the values and priorities of certain segments of the Black community. This “talking to” was done within earshot of non-Blacks. When they saw him telling Blacks to take responsibility for themselves, they believed that Obama understood the problems they saw as endemic and widespread among Blacks. In short, he tapped into beliefs that are the foundation of modern racial resentment (Kinder and Sanders 1996).

Obama’s deployment of Black blame coupled with his deracialized campaign style and his characterization of the role of race in contemporary America presents real difficulties for Black politics. During the campaign, he asserted that racism was largely in the past and invoked Black blame to indict Blacks who pointed to continuing racism as a reason for failure within the community. When Black blame is coupled with this view of American race relations, Blacks and their advocates are placed in the impossible position of being marginalized either as disgruntled holdovers who cannot release the past or as people who are so myopic they cannot see beyond their own narrow struggles to coalesce with like-minded people of other races. Either way, the combination creates a hostile environment for making race-specific claims related to problems that continue to plague the African American community.

Obama: In His Own Words

The speeches examined in this chapter were delivered in front of majority-Black audiences to rousing success and raucous applause. While Obama uses Black blame frequently, he never does so before non-Black audiences. I begin with Obama’s Selma speech because it represents one of his earliest invocations of Black blame on the campaign trail. However, I provide examples that continue well into his second term. These examples are taken from transcripts of formal and informal speeches that were covered by the national press and broadcast to national audiences.

Selma

On March 4, 2007, veteran activists and ministers from the civil rights movement came together to commemorate the Selma marches for voting rights, a series of three marches from Mon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Barack Obama and Black Blame: Authenticity, Audience and Audaciousness
• 2. Barack Obama, Patton’s Army, and Patriotic Whiteness
• 3. Barack Obama’s More Perfect Union
• 4. An Officer and Two Gentlemen: The Great Beer Summit of 2009
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author