Lynching the Narrative: Barack Obama, Selma, and the Myth of American Exceptionalism

Abstract

This analysis of Barack Obama’s “Address on the 50^th Anniversary of the Selma, Alabama March” argues that the president used the African oral element of nommo to locate the civil rights protest within a broader narrative of American exceptionalism. In two stages, Obama first appealed to American exceptionalism to reconceptualize the impediments to Black citizenship at the time of the protest and then utilized counterargument to manage the tension between inclusion and exclusion underscoring the contemporary struggle for African Americans. While Obama’s deployment of American exceptionalism functioned as an attempt to create a transformative perspective for the nation’s pursuit of equality, the myth’s colonialist foundation created space to decenter the Black cultural perspective from the debate over structural racism.

Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10646175.2021.1929580 .

Keywords:

• American exceptionalism
• Barack Obama
• colonialism
• nommo
• public memory

Notes

1 According to Asante, although “the stated theme … may be White racism, Black pride, freedom, crime, poverty, desegregation, poor housing conditions and voting rights, the underlying issue is always the slavery experience” (Smith, 1970, p. 266).

2 Asante (1998) has noted that the literature of America’s origin is “rich in the language of liberty and freedom” but prioritizes an understanding of freedom exclusively from the Eurocentric perspective (p. 70).

3 Beasley (2014) argued that President Clinton, at the thirty-fifth anniversary, eschewed remembering the nation’s failure at Selma by positioning his presidency around key principles that informed the civil rights movement including nonviolence and forgiveness. She maintained that the speech functioned as one of Clinton’s final efforts to “secure his legacy” (p. 287).

4 On March 15, 1965, just eight days after Bloody Sunday, Johnson opened his speech with the following remarks: “At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”

5 Less than a month prior to Obama’s speech in Selma, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani spoke at fundraising event for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, telling the audience, “I do not believe that the president loves America” (as quoted in Samuelsohn, 2015). Earlier the same year, former Vice President Dick Cheney stated, “Barack Obama doesn’t believe in an exceptional America…. [T]he U.S. did have a role to play in the world as an exceptional nation [but] Obama clearly doesn’t believe that” (as quoted in Hensch, 2015). The Giuliani and Cheney statements reflected the sentiment of other Republicans who questioned Obama’s national allegiance since his election in 2008. For an extended discussion, see Jones (2010) and Edwards-Levy (2015).

6 Future references to Obama’s speech will be made parenthetically by paragraph number as they appear on AmericanRhetoric.com.

7 It is important to note that Obama’s reference to the “nation’s destiny” might also be read as an implicit appeal to the Doctrine of Manifest Destiny, an ideological construct that provided justification for westward expansion of U.S. sovereignty (Edwards & Weiss, 2011).

8 Obama’s retelling is remarkably resonant with challenges he faced on the campaign trail that continued follow him into the executive office. In 2008, the “birther movement” emerged to cast doubt on Obama’s citizenship and also his Christianity; a media fiasco surrounding Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s religious adviser, raised questions about Obama’s faith and functioned to undermine the legitimacy of his candidacy; after taking office, Obama sustained verbal assaults from conservative lawmakers, including in a joint session of Congress when Rep. Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” during the president’s proposal for health care reform, as well as repeated attacks on his allegiance from the GOP.

9 Obama delivered his speech in Selma less than two years after the landmark Supreme Court case, Shelby County v. Holder. The plaintiff, Shelby County, Alabama, sought a permanent injunction of two provisions in the Voting Rights Act of 1965: section 4(b), which contained a coverage formula to determine which jurisdictions must achieve preclearance based on their histories with regard to discriminatory voting practices, and section 5, which required certain local and state governments to obtain preclearance from the federal government before making changes to their voting laws. On June 25, 2013, in a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled section 4 unconstitutional, which essentially invalidated section 5, thereby allowing the states and local governments to implement changes to voting laws at will. Following the ruling, voter suppression continued in a variety of manifestations. In 2014, for example, a federal district court overturned a voter identification law in Texas that accepted concealed weapons permits but rejected student ID cards as a valid form of identification. While opponents of the law, which included the U.S. Department of Justice, claimed it violated the federal Voting Rights Act and sought to diminish the strength of the state’s growing population of minority voters (Ramsey, 2014), proponents argued that Texas was well within its authority and that the law was motivated across partisan rather than racial lines (Hasen, 2015). Other states such as Ohio and Georgia enacted “use it or lose it” laws, which eliminate voters from registration rolls if they do not maintain voter participation within a prescribed time frame. These voting restriction laws in key swing states are often perceived as efforts to silence minority voters (Gross, 2018).

10 In an analysis of George W. Bush’s speech following the 9/11 attacks, Milford (2016) argued that Bush appealed to the “resolve” of American exceptionalism to restore a sense of national confidence and simultaneously prepare the audience to endure the crisis at hand (p. 22).