Reclaiming the Black Past

The Use and Misuse of African American History in the 21st Century

Pero Dagbovie

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781786632036
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786632012
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

In this information overloaded twenty-first century, it seems impossible to fully discern or explain how we know about the past. But two things are certain. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we all think historically on a routine basis. And our perceptions of history, including African American history, have not necessarily been shaped by professional historians. In this wide-reaching and timely book, Pero Gaglo Dagbovie argues that public knowledge and understanding of black history, including its historical icons, has been shaped by institutions and individuals outside academic ivory towers. Drawing on a range of compelling examples, Dagbovie explores how, in the twenty-first century, African American history is regarded, depicted, and juggled by diverse and contesting interpreters-from museum curators to film-makers, entertainers, politicians, journalists, and bloggers. Underscoring the ubiquitous nature of African American history in contemporary American thought and culture, each chapter unpacks how black history has been represented and remembered primarily during the "Age of Obama," the so-called era of "post-racial" American society. Reclaiming the Black Past: The Use and Misuse of African American History in the 21st Century is Dagbovie's contribution to expanding how we understand African American history during the new millennium.

1

“None of Our Hands Are Entirely Clean”

Obama and the Challenge of African American History

In what ways did Barack Obama conceptualize African American history during his presidential terms? How did he mull over black history in front of his different audiences and represent specific episodes in black history at key moments and in major speeches, such as his “A More Perfect Union” oration in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008? What types of code-switching did Obama engage in when discussing black history or policies, such as affirmative action, that have concrete historical antecedents? In what particular manners does his standing and approach as a black trailblazer / black “first” and leader compare with similar black luminaries from the past? How did Obama portray and make sense of hip-hop within the context of African American history and culture?

Such inquiries guide what I consider in this chapter. As a historian of black intellectual thought, I prioritize analyzing Obama as an intellectual and strive to unpack his carefully calculated thoughts about and characterizations of black history.

A HISTORIC OCCASION RECONSIDERED

Though it is not usually included in political commentators’ lists of the most memorable US presidential elections, the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States on November 4, 2008 was a historic event. In varying degrees, of course, all US presidents have shaped the course of US political history. Accordingly, historians often use presidential administrations as opportune points of departure for broadly surveying and identifying particular eras in the American past. Presidents do indeed make history.

Obama, however, is a history-maker and catalyst of a peculiar type. He joined the pantheon of black firsts and arguably became a black first that eclipsed all others. He will forever be known and remembered as being the first black president, even though comedian Chris Rock and novelist Toni Morrison bestowed that title upon former President Bill Clinton nearly two decades ago.¹ Though the notion of Clinton’s honorary commander-in-chief blackness continues to receive some attention (as late as 2015, for instance, journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates sought to untangle and translate Morrison’s thoughts for The Atlantic readers), Obama now holds the undisputed title.

The American mainstream media was obsessed with Obama’s remarkable triumph and justifiably so. Until now, however, a great deal of print and online journalism as well as some trigger-happy scholars have haphazardly helped jettison Obama into the genealogy of black leadership and African American history and lore by portraying his presidency as an unprecedented milestone in the black freedom struggle, as evidence of America’s monumental progress in race relations since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Immediately following the 2008 election, droves of columnists, political pundits, and “everyday Americans” interpreted and presented Obama’s presidency as a landmark event that somehow atoned for and even expunged several centuries of overt racial oppression.

The New York Times headline “Obama: Racial Barrier Falls in Decisive Victory” was followed by an article written by then chief political correspondent Adam Nagourney, who dramatically declared: “Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United Sates on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.” Nagourney added that the election of 2008—“a striking symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history”—also “ended what by any definition was one of the most remarkable contests in American political history.” Even McCain in his concession speech could not ignore the historical significance of Obama’s election. “This is a historic election, and I recognize the significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight.” He continued, “We both realize that we have come a long way from the injustices that once stained our nation’s reputation.”²

The day after the election, renowned public intellectual Henry Louis Gates Jr. reiterated McCain’s and others’ prevailing sentiments with greater specificity but equal astonishment. For Gates, Obama’s accomplishment was “the symbolic culmination of the black freedom struggle, the grand achievement of a great, collective dream,” a sensational occasion that was only comparable to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Joe Louis’ June 22, 1938 revenge defeat of Max Schmeling, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s legendary 1963 “I Have a Dream” oration.³

For the vast majority of black America, Obama’s groundbreaking victory was their triumph as well. They took to heart his victory declaration—“I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to. It belongs to you. It belongs to you.” They personalized and derived collective pride from his becoming a black first in a similar manner to how, one hundred years earlier, African Americans across the nation celebrated Jack Johnson when he became the first black heavyweight champion of the world by trouncing Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia, and two years later when the brazen pugilist humiliated “The Great White Hope” James J. Jeffries in the “Fight of the Century.”

Through Obama, black Americans from all walks of life enjoyed the vicarious thrill of feeling affirmed. Obama’s coup unquestionably belonged to them and their forebears. The millions of African Americans who voted for him—especially between the ages of eighteen to forty-four years—recognized that they were shaping the trajectory of American political culture and making history; in other words, doing something consequential that had never been done before.

The symbolic importance of Obama’s victory and presidency to generations of African Americans cannot be overstated. Yet along with the triumph came a declaration that the era of Obama’s presidency represents a “post-racial” phase of American history. To those who scrutinize the contemporary realities of black life, this label is fallacious.

During Obama’s presidency, there was a resurgence in anti-black thought and behavior in American culture. On one level, this is nothing new. Dating back to the Civil War and the short-lived era of Reconstruction, whenever African Americans have made major headway, groups of white Americans have pushed back, often violently. Riots ensued after Johnson beat Jeffries and after James Meredith began his quest to be the first African American to graduate from the University of Mississippi. Similarly, violent anti-black rhetoric shadowed Obama’s victory, and violence against African Americans has mushroomed at the hands of police and domestic terrorists during and since his presidency. Just as it would have been optimistic to have thought that the Thirteenth Amendment would eradicate the exploitation of black labor or that Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) would swiftly put an end to Jim Crow segregation, it is naïve to assume that the status of African Americans would suddenly and magically improve under the administration of a black president.

Several years into Obama’s presidency, historian Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua tendentiously dubbed the period from 1979 until 2010 the “New Nadir,” contending that African Americans were living in “a state akin to the situation more than a century ago.” Despite a black president and a noticeable increase in the “black petty bourgeois and bourgeois classes,” Cha-Jua underscored that there had also been a rise in black incarceration, “spikes in racial violence,” the “marginalization of black workers,” and flagrant black disenfranchisement. “On most social indicators, since the decline of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements,” he continued, “African American progress has stagnated and in significant areas, regressed.”⁴

Looking back on Obama’s two presidential terms, public intellectual Michael Eric Dyson echoed Cha-Jua, unfavorably comparing him to presidents who are not considered progressive toward black people by any stretch of the imagination. Dyson, who provided a pensive and evenhanded assessment of the deeper meanings of “the black presidency,” wrote:

Under Obama, blacks have experienced their highest unemployment rates since Bill Clinton was in office. Obama doesn’t even compare favorably to his immediate predecessor … The ranks of the black poor have also swollen under Obama … In Obama’s administration, the disparity in wealth between blacks and whites nearly doubled … Obama’s failure to grapple forthrightly with race underscores a historical irony: while the first black president has sought to avoid the subject, nearly all of his predecessors have had to deal with “the Negro question” … It is unfortunate that our nation’s first black president has been for the most of his two terms uncomfortable with dealing with race; it is even more unfortunate that he could not, for the most part, openly embrace, in the course of his duties, the vital issues of the group whose struggle blazed his path to the White House.⁵

HISTORIANS AND THE “OBAMA PHENOMENON”

What journalist and op-ed columnist Bob Herbert dubbed the “Obama phenomenon” in early 2008 has spawned an earthquake of scholarship. “The historians can put aside their reference material,” Herbert declared, “This is new. America has never seen anything like the Barack Obama phenomenon.”⁶ Since he won the presidency, countless journalists, biographers, scholars, social commentators, and polemicists have published books on various dimensions of Barack Obama’s life, thought, and presidency. This steady flow of published writings has been inextricably bound to Obama’s evolving leadership strategies and events and controversies that have characterized and shaped his governance. It seems that no stone has been left unturned; all perspectives have been publicized in some venue or another. It is not an overstatement to conjecture that Obama’s presidency has been a lifeline for scores of academic careers.

More than any other single topic, the subject of Obama and race has been in vogue—and is still all the rage—among scholars and political pundits alike. After all, as Dyson has observed, “Race is the defining feature of our forty-fourth president’s two terms in office.”⁷ Simply put, the “Obama phenomenon” cannot be adequately deciphered without understanding, if not centering, the meaning and history of race and the African American struggle in the United States. For the last eight years, many African American intellectuals, in particular, have understood this and some have produced excellent essays and books. Moreover, leading African American Studies journals, such as The Black Scholar and The Journal of Black Studies, have published “special issues” on the meaning of Obama’s presidency and race.

In 2016 alone, the last year of Obama’s second term in office, books on Obama and race continued to multiply. Such books include Dyson’s wide-reaching and penetrating The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race, political scientist and Africana Studies scholar Melanye T. Price’s The Race Whisperer: Barack Obama and the Political Uses of Race, and Afrocentric pioneer Molefi Kete Asante’s provocatively entitled Lynching Barack Obama: How Whites Tried to String Up the President. Even comedian D. L. Hughley has joined the fray by writing Black Man, White House: An Oral History of the Obama Years. The January/February 2017 issue of The Atlantic features Ta-Nehisi Coates’s lengthy and somber appraisal of Obama’s years in office, “My President Was Black: A History of the First African American in the White House—And What Comes Next” and in October 2017, Coates’ contemplative We Were Eight Yearts in Power: An American Tragedy was released.

Thanks to numerous wordsmiths and scholars, we’ve learned a great deal about the ways in which race profoundly shaped Obama’s presidency and influenced his calculated stance toward African Americans. Much can also be learned, I argue, by looking at how Obama has interpreted, portrayed, sampled from, and even manipulated African American history. Obama’s relationship to African American history is kaleidoscopic. Yet Obama scholars have virtually ignored this subject, showing very little interest in his interpretation and approach to black history.

This may have something to do with the fact that professional historians, as a whole, have remained relatively quiet about the “Obama phenomenon.” While recent editions of popular African American history textbooks like The African-American Odyssey and From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans discuss Obama’s presidency within the general context of black life during the twenty-first century (both books also unsurprisingly feature emblematic images of Obama on covers of recent editions), only a few professional historians—Thomas J. Sugrue, William Jelani Cobb, and Peniel E. Joseph—published book-length studies focusing on Obama while he was still in office. Ever so hip to the historical moment that they were witnessing, these historians, whose books were all published in 2010, partook in the public intellectual enterprise and the much-needed writing of contemporary history.

In his controversial 2017 Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, historian David J. Garrow approaches Obama in a much different manner than Sugrue, Cobb, or Joseph. Garrow’s study is an exhaustive biography that drags on for close to 1,500 pages and details Obama’s political and personal life, putting a spotlight on his sex life and relationship with one former love interest in particular. Unlike Sugrue, Cobb, and Joseph who wrote about Obama in the moment, Garrow worked on his biography for close to a decade and even shared drafts of it with Obama.

Sugrue dubbed Obama “the nation’s most influential historian of race and civil rights.” Wearing the hat of biographer, Sugrue charts how Obama’s keen appreciation and interpretation of race, African American history, and the black freedom struggle transformed from his childhood through the beginning of his first term as president. He ultimately argues that Obama, the politician, had to adjust his treatment of black history by the time that he announced his candidacy for the US Senate. “Obama read widely in civil rights history; he taught antidiscrimination law; and he steeped himself in the historical and scholarly literature on race, poverty, and inequality,” Sugrue observed. “This was a history he knew better than all but a handful of Americans. But none of that history was particularly useful for an ambitious politician. Situating himself in a current of civil rights history that emphasized its radical currents would be political suicide.”⁸ Instead, Sugrue suggests, Obama memorialized benign versions of the black past in order to endear himself to white voters.

A passionate Black Power era aficionado, Joseph examines the election of Obama as the byproduct of decades of vigorous black political mobilization and activism. Ergo, “Obama’s climb to the top of American politics does not so much illustrate the end but rather the evolution” of a black politics that underwent significant transformations during the post–World War II era, especially during the highly contested and pigeonholed Black Power era. In Joseph’s estimation, the “Obama phenomenon” would not have existed without the Black Power era. Simply put, “Barack Obama is a direct beneficiary of this rich legacy,” a legacy that he perhaps consciously samples from but never really fully welcomed with open arms. Often drawing comparisons between Obama’s nuanced approach to dealing with America’s shameful racial history and democratic ideals and the strategies of civil rights activists as well as grassroots, militant champions of Black Power, Joseph repeatedly emphasizes that Obama “enjoyed the benefits of both the civil rights and Black Power movements while maintaining a safe distance from both.”⁹

Sugrue maintains that Obama was intimately informed by the black freedom struggle of the 1960s and 1970s and possessed an informed conceptualization of Black Power and black history more generally at least a decade prior to announcing his decision to run for president. By contrast, Joseph deduces that for Obama, the Black Power crusade “represents a kind of racial anachronism” and that Obama, like the general American (white) public, possessed a flawed understanding of this pivotal movement. This is especially intriguing because the discussions of race in American society that emerged during what has come to be known as “The Age of Obama” were reminiscent of those sparked during the Black Power era. Obama often, Joseph argues, avoided calling for “race-based solutions to historical discrimination” and “displays a lack of awareness of history that is at times stunning.”¹⁰ Joseph plays up the differences between Obama and Black Power era activists by taking notice of how many of these former militants were skeptical of and even opposed to Obama during his first presidential campaign. Still and all, Joseph does concede that Obama did in certain instances attempt to come face to face with the painful history of the oppression of African Americans during slavery a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: The Enduring Mystique of Black History
• 1. “None of Our Hands Are Entirely Clean”: Obama and the Challenge of African American History
• 2. Honoring “The Gift of Black Folk”: The Contested Meaning of Black History Month
• 3. Dramatizing the Black Past: Twenty-first Century Hollywood Portrayals of Black History
• 4. “Everything Is Funny?”: Humor, Black History, and African American Comedians
• 5. “So Long in Coming”: Political and Legal Attempts to Right Past Wrongs
• Afterword: Displaying the Black Past
• Notes
• Index