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Abstract
This essay examines the language of shame and honor in the jeremiads of Barack Obama and the anti-Obama right. The jeremiad imagines America at a crossroads between the path of shame—where we become “a story and a by-word through the world”—and the path of honor. A brief history of the American jeremiad shows that the anti-slavery jeremiad transformed its dynamic of shame from an instrument of socialization into an indictment of hypocrisy against the defenders of slavery. Paradoxically, in the Age of Obama it is the anti-Obama right that has appropriated this rhetorical innovation of the anti-slavery jeremiad.
Notes
[1] Adam Nagourney, “A Defiant Rancher Savors the Audience that Rallied to His Side,” The New York Times, April 23, 2014, accessed May 22, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/us/politics/rancher-proudly-breaks-the-law-becoming-a-hero-in-the-west.html.
[2] Lynette Curtis and Adam Nagourney, “Rancher's Views on Race Send Supporters Fleeing,” The New York Times, April 24, 2014, accessed May 22, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/us/politics/rand-paul-condemns-cliven-bundys-remarks-on-blacks.html.
[3] Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 10, 95.
[4] In A Red Record, for example, Wells wrote, “it is their misfortune that the chivalrous white men of that section, in order to escape the deserved execration of the civilized world, should shield themselves by their cowardly and infamously false excuse, and call into question that very honor about which their distinguished priestly apologist [Bishop Atticus Haygood] claims they are most sensitive. To justify their own barbarism they assume a chivalry which they do not possess.” Ida B. Wells, A Red Record, in Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900, ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster (Boston, MA: Bedford Books, 1997), 80. On the emotionally charged representation of white Southern women as the custodians of racial purity and white honor, see, for example, Robyn Wiegman, American Antinomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), and Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890–1912 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
[5] Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York, NY: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1944), 612.
[6] Inasmuch as the shaming of LGBT people was and still is constitutive, for some, of heterosexual honor, we can see a similar, emotionally charged inversion underway in the stigmatization of anti-LGBT slurs. That the shaming of LGBT people is itself becoming shameful, I would suggest, is another element fueling the vehemence of right-wing rhetoric in the early twenty-first century.
[7] Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). Since Bercovitch's seminal study, scholars have asked whether it is more useful to identify multiple American jeremiadic traditions than to assume a single American jeremiad. See, for example, Andrew R. Murphy, Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). In addition, there is a rich body of scholarship examining a distinct African-American jeremiadic tradition, including David Howard-Pitney, The African-American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2005), Willie J. Harrell, Jr., “A Call to Consciousness and Action: Mapping the African-American Jeremiad,” Canadian Review of American Studies 36, no. 2 (2006): 149–80, Willie J. Harrel, Jr., Origins of the African-American Jeremiad: The Rhetorical Strategies of Social Protest and Activism, 1790–1861 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers, 2011), and Paul Minifee, “Rhetoric of Doom and Redemption: Reverend Jeremiah Loguen's Jeremiadic Speech Against the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 16, no. 1 (2013): 29–57, accessed October 25, 2013, doi: 10.1080/15362426.2012.746752. I agree with Harrell that the African-American jeremiad is structurally different from the American jeremiads that Bercovitch examines, and that “the major distinctions between the American and African-American jeremiadic rhetoric … can be seen not only in their purposes but also in their strategies.” “A Call to Consciousness,” 158.
[8] John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings, eds., Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1963), 199.
[9] In his excellent study of American political rhetoric up to the election of Barack Obama, Prodigal Nation, Andrew Murphy distinguishes the “traditionalist” jeremiads of the right from the “progressive” jeremiads of the left. The former, he argues, envision the recovery of an ideal past, while the latter envision the nation moving ever closer to the final realization of its founding principles. My reading of the anti-Obama jeremiad complicates Murphy's formula somewhat, identifying a more recent strain in right-wing rhetoric that claims “colorblindness” as a foundational principle in the pattern of the progressive jeremiads, and celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr., as a cultural hero. Andrew R. Murphy, Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009). For critiques of the right's use of “colorblindness” as such a principle, see Clarence E. Walker and Gregory D. Smithers, The Preacher and the Politician: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and Race in America (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2009) and Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, NY: The New Press, 2010).
[10] Sari Horwitz, “Holder to Gohmert: ‘Good luck with your asparagus,’” The Washington Post, April 8, 2014, accessed May 22, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/04/08/holder-to-gohmert-good-luck-with-your-asparagus/.
[11] Myrdal, American Dilemma, 607.
[12] Elias Isquith, “Tea Party Hero Louie Gohmert wants to arrest Eric Holder,” Salon.com, April 21, 2014, accessed May 22, 2014, http://www.salon.com/2014/04/21/tea_party_hero_louie_gohmert_wants_to_arrest_eric_holder/.
[13] John Fund and Hans Von Spakovsky, “For Attoney General Eric Holder, Justice is for Democrats Only,” New York Post, April 12, 2014, http://nypost.com/2014/04/12/for-attorney-general-eric-holder-justice-is-for-democrats-only/.
[14] Becket Adams, “Tense Exchange Complete With Finger-Pointing Erupts Between Eric Holder and Louie Gohmert: ‘Good Luck With Your Asparagus,’” TheBlaze, April 8, 2014, accessed May 22, 2014, http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/04/08/tense-exchange-complete-with-finger-pointing-erupts-between-eric-holder-and-louie-gohmert-good-luck-with-your-asparagus/.
[15] The tendency to direct shame outward toward others rather than inward toward the group is also characteristic of jeremiads of the current political right, as I will argue, and as Mark Jendrysik notes in “The Modern Jeremiad: Bloom, Bennett, and Bork on American Decline,” Journal of Popular Culture 36, no. 2 (2002): 361–83. He writes, “While preachers such as Jonathan Edwards declared their congregations guilty and pointed out the hard road to absolution, [Allan] Bloom, [Robert] Bork, and [William] Bennett declare others guilty and then demand their followers to act. The disconnection in style and reaction is clear. Since she is not personally accused, the reader cannot easily see a connection between her own actions and the salvation of America. After all, if I am not responsible for national decline, how can I prevent it? Shouldn't the ones who are responsible be forced to change their ways?” (378). Jendrysik does not, however, trace the pattern to the anti-slavery jeremiad.
[16] See, for example, Harper's 1893 novel Iola Leroy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987), 256.
[17] Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, 46.
[18] Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, 75n.
[19] Quoted in Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, 55, emphasis in original.
[20] Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, 155.
[21] Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, 153–54, emphasis in original.
[22] Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 297.
[23] Quoted in David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 313.
[24] Waldstreicher, Perpetual Fetes, 346.
[25] Waldstreicher, Perpetual Fetes, 347.
[26] Frederick Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner, abridged and adapted by Yuval Taylor (Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 195, 203.
[27] Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1989). Gates writes, “Douglass's major contribution to the slave narrative was to make chiasmus the central trope of slave narration, in which a slave-object writes himself or herself into a human-subject through the act of writing” (172).
[28] Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth,” 196–97.
[29] Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2010), 187.
[30] Appiah, The Honor Code, xvii.
[31] Appiah, The Honor Code, 20, 118, 176.
[32] Ariela J. Gross, Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 50.
[33] Appiah, The Honor Code, 118.
[34] Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Nell Irvin Painter (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2000), 8.
[35] Jacobs, Incidents, 9, emphasis in original.
[36] Jacobs, Incidents, 9.
[37] Gross, Double Character, 51.
[38] Jacobs, Incidents, 8.
[39] Quoted in Howard-Pitney, The African-American Jeremiad, 102.
[40] Quoted in Howard-Pitney, The African-American Jeremiad, 107–8.
[41] Quoted in Howard-Pitney, The African-American Jeremiad, 144.
[42] Quoted in Howard-Pitney, The African-American Jeremiad, 146.
[43] Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 98.
[44] Walker and Smithers, The Preacher and the Politician, 8.
[45] Quoted in Walker and Smithers, The Preacher and the Politician, 13.
[46] “Transcript: Barack Obama's Speech on Race,” The New York Times, March 19, 2008, accessed April 12, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/us/politics/18text-obama.html.
[47] “Transcript: Barack Obama's Speech on Race,” The New York Times, March 19, 2008.
[48] Other readings of Barack Obama's use of the jeremiad include Willie J. Harrell, Jr., “‘The Reality of American Life Has Strayed from its Myths’: Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope and the Discourse of the American Reclamation Jeremiad,” Journal of Black Studies 41, no. 1 (2010): 164–83, and John M. Murphy, “Barack Obama, the Exodus Tradition, and the Joshua Generation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 4 (2011): 387–410, accessed October 25, 2013, doi: 10.1080/00335630.2011.608706.
[49] Ben Shapiro, “Barack Obama Throws Grandma Under the Bus,” Townhall.com, March 26, 2008, accessed April 12, 2011, http://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2008/03/26/barack_obama_throws_grandma_under_the_bus/page/full.
[50] Mitt Romney's campaign autobiography was entitled No Apology: Believe in America (New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 2010). See also newspaper accounts of the September 22, 2011 Presidential primary debate in Orlando, Florida, in which Romney claimed that Obama “went around the world and apologized for America.” “Republican Primary Debate: Issues and Transcript,” Washington Post Online, September 22, 2011, accessed October 15, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/2012-presidential-debates/republican-primary-debate-september-22–2011/.
[51] Shushannah Walshe, “Rick Santorum Goes After Obama, Romney, at First New Hampshire Event Since Iowa,” January 5, 2012, ABC News Online, accessed January 9, 2012, http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/01/rick-santorum-goes-after-obama-romney-at-first-new-hampshire-event/.
[52] Similar racial stereotypes were invoked by others in the Republican primary campaign. Newt Gingrich, for example, said, “Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday. … They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of I do this and you give me cash unless it is illegal.” Reported by Jonathan Capehart, “Newt Gingrich's disgusting remarks about ‘really poor children,’” “PostPartisan,” Washington Post Online, December 1, 2011, accessed January 9, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/newt-gingrichs-disgusting-remarks-about-really-poor-children/2011/03/04/gIQASoLpHO_blog.html.
[53] “Restoring Honor Rally, August 28, 2010,” C-SPAN Video Library, accessed April 12, 2011, http://www.c-span.org/video/?295231–1/restoring-honor-rally. Full text/transcript is now available at, Glenn Beck, “Keynote Address at the Restoring Honor to America Rally,” August 28, 2010, American Rhetoric, accessed October 1, 2014, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/glennbeckrestoringhonorkeynote.htm.
[54] Glenn Beck, Glenn Beck's Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 79.
[55] Glenn Beck's Common Sense, 19.
[56] Glenn Beck's Common Sense, 26.
[57] Glenn Beck's Common Sense, 103.
[58] “Restoring Honor Rally.”
[59] Glenn Beck's Common Sense, 5.
[60] Transcript in “Obama Commemorates King's ‘Dream’ Speech,” The New York Times, August 28, 2013, accessed August 30, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/29/us/obama-commemorates-kings-dream-speech.html.
[61] Hans von Spakovsky, “President Obama's (Un)Memorial Speech,” “The Corner,” National Review Online, August 29, 2013, accessed August 30, 2013, http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/357193/president-obamas-unmemorial-speech-hans-von-spakovsky.
[62] Judith Rodin and Stephen P. Steinberg, eds., Public Discourse in America: Conversation and Community in the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 85.