"To Have Your Experience Denied . . . it Hurts": Barack Obama, James Baldwin, and the Politics of Black Anger

ABSTRACT

This article argues that Barack Obama's rhetorical example—captured in 4 addresses in response to acts of violence—suggests habits of mind to help us begin to navigate perhaps the most vexing democratic conundrum of our age: Can we find words to realize reconciliation and trust across lines of racial difference, given the violence that infects our efforts to talk to each other? The tensions occasioned by the intersection of race and violence comprised the defining conditions of Obama's presidency. The underpinnings of those conditions and the ways Obama rhetorically worked within them invite us to profoundly rethink how we might articulate a nuanced civic honesty, an honesty inflected by the rhetorical-politics of Black anger modeled by James Baldwin. Together, this honesty, that anger, illuminate understandings of the ways Obama marshaled rhetorical resources to combat the political lynchings ravaging our contemporary civic polity.

KEYTERMS:

• anger
• race
• violence
• Barack Obama
• James Baldwin

Notes

1. See Obama (2016).

2. Greenfield (2016) did not use the term political lynchings, yet his article, with its emphases upon understanding better the ways one political party virulently delegitimizes another party's very capacity to govern embodies what I have in mind in using the metaphor as it concerns our civic polity.