The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choicexa0xa0 ?“It’s a brilliant and complicated portrait of a brilliant and complicated president.” —Salon “Readers will recognize Dyson's practiced flair for language and metaphor as he makes an important and layered argument about American political culture and the narrowness of presidential speech...[T]he book ably maintains a sharp critical edge...[ The Black Presidency ] might well be considered an interpretive miracle.” —New York Times Book Review “An enlightening work...incisive criticisms....Dysonxa0 reinterprets some soaring moments in the Obama race canon...Dyson reconsiders [the post racial debate] in memorable terms and points to the pitfalls inherent in the concept. [Dyson offers] as sharp a distillation of white privilege as you'll ever read.” —Washington Post “For a fuller explanation of the relationship between Obama and black America, Michael Eric Dyson’s The Black Presidency is indispensable.” —The New Statesman “Driven by the hopes Obama raised with his historical rise to power, Dyson delivers a provocative scrutiny of a presidency as complex as the ongoing issues of race, and he does so with grace and wary empathy.” —BookPage “Michael Eric Dyson once again proves his intellectual heft, critical thinking depth and finesse with words and messages. . . .[T]his is a must-read.” —Essence “Dyson offers harsh assessment of Obama presidency.” —The Boston Globe “Dyson is one of black America's most influential figures...Dyson's criticisms are accurate... The Black Presidency is far from a gloomy read...[Dyson] is always insightful, and entertaining.” —Macleans Magazine “ The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America by Michael Eric Dyson is a thorough analysis of the historical significance and legacy of Obama's presidency, as well as his often surprising approach to racial issues.” —Tampa Bay Times “ The Black Presidency is complicated. It's not that it's a dense read (quite the opposite, actually), but its thesis patently refuses to put forward a simplified narrative about Barack Obama's presidency...Dyson is critical of Obama -- specifically, he is critical of Obama's treatment of race -- but he simultaneously recognizes the ways in which the president has been successful.” —fnewsmagazine "Dyson offers high praise and admiration for Obama, but also a searing critique." —Chicago Sun-Times "[The Black Presidency is a] fine, very well-written and thought-out [book that] dissects Obama from a decidedly black perspective, analyzing his complicated relationship to his identity as a black presiden...[Dyson is] sympathetic to Obama...althought that doesn't stop him...from juming on Obama with both intellectual boots...Dyson fights to redeem his subject at his book's intellectually dramatic close." —The Root “Georgetown professor and New York Times op-ed contributor Dyson...turns his full critical (and often angry) attention to the president. It's an early take, as Obama has a little under a year left in office, but a smart one.” —Brooklyn Magazine “Dyson succeeds admirably in creating a base line for future interpretations of this historic presidency. His well-written book thoroughly illuminates the challenges facing a black man elected to govern a society that is far from post-racial. — Michael Eric Dyson, “one of our most graceful and lucid intellectuals writing on race and politics today” ( Vanity Fair ), delivers a provocative exploration of the politics of race and the Obama presidency. xa0 Barack Obama’s presidency unfolded against the national traumas of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott. The nation’s first African American president was careful to give few major race speeches, yet he faced criticism from all sides, including from African Americans. How has becoming the face of America affected Obama’s presidency and the nation’s identity? Dyson explores whether Obama’s use of his own biracialism as a radiant symbol has been driven by the president’s desire simply to avoid a painful moral reckoning on race. And he sheds light on identity issues within the black power structure, telling the fascinating story of how Obama has spurned traditional black power brokers, significantly reducing their leverage. Perhaps most movingly, Dyson illuminates the transformative moments, especially in his second term, when Obama has publicly embraced his blackness and used it as a powerful lens onto America, black and white.xa0 President Obama’s own voice—from an Oval Office interview granted to Dyson for the book—along with that of Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, and Andrew Young, among others, adds unique depth to this profound tour of the nation’s first black presidency. MICHAEL ERIC DYSON is a New York Times op-ed contributor, a Georgetown University professor, an MSNBC political analyst, and best-selling author of seventeen books, including the American Book Award-winning Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster. He lives in Washington, D.C. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 HOW TO BE A BLACK PRESIDENT 'I Can't Sound Like Martin' The Sunday morning of the March weekend of events celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the historic 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, was the time in Selma for some serious preaching. The focus, of course, was on Bloody Sunday, the fateful pilgrimage that dramatized the violent struggle for the black franchise and helped push the Voting Rights Act into law less than six months later. The radiant Sunday was made even brighter by the presence of so many stars from the black civil rights establishment who had marched fifty years before. They mingled with present-day luminaries in the Brown Chapel AME Church, the starting point for the marches and one of the architectural touchstones in the electrifying film Selma. The fact that President Barack Obama was to deliver what was expected to be a rousing speech on race had been the draw bringing thousands upon thousands of people to this sleepy southern city still mired in poverty and largely frozen in time. xa0 A few of us sat in the minister's office exulting in the camaraderie and lighthearted banter that black preachers share before the Word is delivered. xa0 'What's up, Doc," the Reverend Al Sharpton, the morning's featured preacher, greeted me. xa0 'What's up, Reverend? Looking forward to your sermon this morning." xa0 I had walked into the church office with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, whose coattails I had much earlier followed into my own ministry and, during his historic run for the presidency, into serious political engagement. I had heard Jackson preach in person for the first time in 1984 on Easter Sunday at Knoxville College in Tennessee. The tall, charismatic leader had cut a dashing figure as he delivered a thrilling sermon-as-campaign-speech in which he criticized President Reagan's military budget, with its priority on missiles and weapons, saying the document represented 'a protracted crucifixion' of the poor. xa0 'We need a real war on poverty for the hungry and the hurt and the destitute," Jackson proclaimed. 'the poor must have a way out. We must end extended crucifixion, allow the poor to realize a resurrection as well." xa0 Jackson argued that President Reagan had to 'bear a heavy share of the responsibility for the worsening' plight of the poor. "It's time to stop weeping and go to the polls and roll the stone away.' Jackson also blasted cuts in food stamps, school lunches, and other social programs. xa0 'People want honest and fair leadership," he said. 'the poor don't mind suffering," but, the presidential candidate declared, 'there must be a sharing of the pain.' Jackson clinched the powerful parallel between Christ's crucifixion and the predicament of the poor, especially the twelve thousand folk who had been cut off from assistance, when he cried out that the 'nails never stop coming, the hammers never stop beating." xa0 It is easy to forget, in the Age of Obama, just how dominant Jackson had been after Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, how central he had been to black freedom struggles and the amplifying of the voices of the poor. It was in Selma, during the marches in 1965, that a young Jackson was introduced to King by Ralph Abernathy and began to work for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He had only later been shoved to the political periphery by the rush of time and the force of events, and viewed as a relic'or worse, as a caustic old man'after he was caught on tape wishing to do away with Obama's private parts. Jackson's weeping visage later flashed on-screen at the celebration in Chicago's Grant Park of Obama's first presidential election. Some viewed Jackson's sobbing as the crocodile tears of an envious forebear. In truth, Jackson was overcome with emotion at a triumph for which he had paved the way. Sharpton was now the nation's most prominent civil rights leader; relations between him and Jackson alternated between frosty and friendly. xa0 Jackson had been Sharpton's mentor as well as mine, and the two embraced in a genial half hug before Sharpton squeezed onto the couch between Jackson and Andrew Young, the former UN ambassador, Atlanta mayor, trusted lieutenant to King'and a father figure of sorts to Jackson. The reunion of Jackson and Young, with Sharpton at the center, was a bit of movement theater. The occasion in Selma had brought together three generations of the bruising patriarchy that black leadership had so often been, with its homegrown authority and blurred lines of succession. I could not let the opportunity pass to quiz Young about his thoughts on Obama and race in the company of his younger compatriots. The elder statesman pitched his views about the president to the home base he knew best: Dr. King and the arm of the movement he had helmed. xa0 'Well, you know, Martin always depended on me to be the conservative voice on our team," Young said, smiling and with a twinkle in his eyes less than a week before his eighty-third birthday. I knew this story, but it was delightful to hear Young regale us with his witty retelling. xa0 'I remember one day Hosea Williams [an aide whom King dubbed his 'Castro'] and James Bevel [an aide and radical visionary] were off on their left-wing thing," Young recalled, glancing across at their sometime collaborator Jesse Jackson, 'who, despite his seventy-three years, had a boyishly mischievous grin etched on his face. "And I was tired of fighting them, so I agreed with what they were proposing.' Young gathered himself on the couch, lurched forward slightly, and delivered the punch line with the confidence of a man who had told this story a few thousand times before. xa0 'martin got really mad at me. He pulled me aside and said, 'Andy, I don't need you agreeing with them. What I need you to do is stake out the conservative position so I can come right down the middle.'' King found it useful to be more moderate than his wild-eyed staff, yet more radical than Young, the designated 'tom' of the group. It might be plausibly argued that Obama's own hunt for a middle ground between Democrats and Republicans was a later echo of some of King's ideological inclinations, a balancing tendency that led historian August Meier to dub the civil rights leader 'the Conservative Militant." xa0 I did not quite know what to expect from Young on the topic of Obama; in 2007, when he was a supporter of Hillary Clinton's in the 2008 election, he had pointed to Obama's inexperience and poked fun at his racial authenticity, which he said lagged behind Bill Clinton's blackness. But I suspected the ambassador had come around. It seemed that Young, taking a page from King's book, might travel between Jackson, whose criticism of Obama had been largely subterranean, given his chastened status, and Sharpton, who made a decision never to publicly criticize Obama about a black agenda as a matter of strategy. But Young's brief answer still surprised me for its empathy toward Obama. xa0 'Look, there's a lot on his plate. And he's got to deal with these crazy forces against him from the right. I think that Obama has done the best he could under the circumstances." xa0 Young's answer contained a good deal of wisdom: Obama has faced levels of resistance that no president before him has confronted. No president has had his faith and education questioned like Obama. No other president has had his life threatened as much.5 No other president has dealt with racial politics in Congress to the extent of being denied an automatic raise in the debt ceiling, causing the nation's credit rating to drop. No other president has had a representative shout 'You lie!' during a speech to Congress. No other president has been so persistently challenged that he had to produce a birth certificate to settle the question of his citizenship. University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone has argued that 'no president in our nation's history has ever been castigated, condemned, mocked, insulted, derided and degraded on a scale even close to the constantly ugly attacks on Obama.' Read more