Abstract
This article sets out think about some of the challenges to U.S. antiracism heralded by Barack Obama's presidency. It begins by examining the relationship Obama negotiates with notions of blackness in his autobiographical writings, and it considers how this exemplifies what has been described as a “post-black” politics. It proceeds to discuss the insufficiency of critiques of “post-black” as having sold out a black political tradition, but it notes that these critiques reveal something of the changing significance of blackness as a form of antiracist practice. Considering how Obama represents a move in black politics from the margins to the mainstream, I argue that the President's symbolic centrality undermines a conception of critical oppositionality hitherto implicit to the antiracist imaginary. Exploring how this challenges longstanding ideas about who “owns” or controls the antiracist struggle, I suggest that antiracism will need to move beyond accusations of betrayal if it is to account for and understand the profound ways in which Obama has transformed the entire field of U.S. race discourse.
To think about what Barack Obama's presidency means for U.S. racial politics invariably involves considering his relationship to a politics of blackness. For some, Obama's mixed-race transnational heritage means that he is grounded in “the multicultural and global reality of today's world.”Footnote 1 For others, Obama's claim on blackness is delimited by his not having been born to the descendents of slaves.Footnote 2 The complex and subtle criteria of identity claims made of Obama reveal something of the complexity of race in twenty-first-century America and exemplify Gary Younge's observation that however marginal race might be to Obama's message, it is nevertheless central to his meaning.Footnote 3
While of course Obama's autobiographical writings cannot exhaust or provide a definitive answer to this meaning, it is notable that they reveal a distantiated relationship to the politics of blackness. The first paragraph to the 2004 preface of Dreams from My Father describes its author's intention to communicate “the fluid state of identity”Footnote 4 that characterizes the politics of race in contemporary America. Obama's passage into a performative black male adolescence is archly self-conscious, the result of a “decision”Footnote 5 rather than a question of necessity. Though he rightly acknowledges the inescapably determining power of race, Obama retains an ironic distance that resists an understanding of this determination as absolute. Even the final section of Dreams, which stages a trip to Kenya as a key biographical moment in Obama's self-understanding, is undercut by an epilogue on cultural hybridity that refuses as a romantic illusion the search for an African authenticity.
And so although Ron Walters is right when he describes Obama's first book as “the story of his journey into functional blackness,”Footnote 6 Obama's repeated insistence on the contingency of blackness as a cultural and political identity suggests that this functionality is a rather strategic one. Since its first publication in 1995, Dreams has served as an argument for Obama's credibility as a black politician, the story standing as a substitute for the usual credentials of a career politician, an explanation for his precocity. At the same time that it makes a narrowly political case, Dreams also serves as a synecdochic narration of the U.S. black experience and mobilizes insights into the psychology of blackness to demonstrate the credentials of a mixed-race Hawaiian to speak for a more “typical” black America. Dreams is of course simultaneously a story about blackness for a broader electorate, and there is another register that Obama mobilizes that is insistent on its intelligibility for a white American readership, for whom the book was to serve as an important primer and palliative. Obama's ability to employ different registers for different audiences exemplifies a resistance to overidentification with a single definition of blackness that might limit his text's interpellative power.
Indeed, the ironic distance that gives Obama this flexibility is a characteristic that he shares with a number of his contemporaries. Manning Marable has described in some detail the rise since the 1990s of a new cadre of black politicians whose priorities, methods, and practices mark a clear divide from the civil rights generation. While self-identifying as African American, these “race-neutral, pragmatic black officials”Footnote 7 successfully broke with what Marable describes as “the one ironclad rule in American racial politics,” namely that “the majority of white voters in any legislative or Congressional district would not vote for an African-American candidate.”Footnote 8 Obama's cohort of black politicians are succeeding where previous generations had failed, but this is a success that is predicated on the forceful assertion of their difference from the political character of those antecedents. Distancing themselves from traditional U.S. “liberal” constituencies, these contemporary politicians exemplify what Marable has dubbed a “post-black politics.”Footnote 9
Like all “posts,” post-black politics maintains a complex relationship with its precursors. Post-black depends on the reproduction of an idea of racial politics, but it is one that diverges in significant ways from the model set by the black politicians of America's civil rights struggle. While U.S. race politics in the twentieth century challenged social and cultural inequalities through popular struggle and identified its leaders as representatives of that grassroots organizing, post-black politics conceives of the occupation of positions of power as the precondition, not the end result, of political change. Obama's presidency carries the logic of post-black politics to its ultimate conclusion: With the election of a black man to the most powerful office on the planet, Obama occupies a messianic position as the physical embodiment of the dream of change to come.
Obama's symbolic position as a black man in power demonstrates the inexorable gravitational pull of the racial ordering of U.S. politics. Despite the flexibility, ambivalence, and sheer contingency of Obama's relationship to the idea of blackness, he clearly could not end up being anything other than a black politician. As soon as Obama declared he was putting himself forward for the Democratic nomination, the significance of this identity inevitably took center stage. In the arena of mainstream politics, post-black politics signifies blackness without any need for programmatic commitments or manifesto declarations. For Obama the politician, blackness was destiny from the start.
This guarantee of blackness through phenotype, and its implicit promise to black America, meant that Obama, like many of his contemporaries, was able to really distance himself from older modes of black politics that were thought to jeopardize his appeal to the broader (read: white) U.S. electorate. Forced to clarify his position in the aftermath of the Jeremiah Wright controversy, Obama's “race speech” historicizes Wright's anger as the distinct product of an earlier generation.Footnote 10 Whereas Wright's version of black politics in the civil rights mode is predicated on the notion that America “is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past,”Footnote 11 Obama speaks for a transformation of racial politics, a transformation that makes possible his own presidential bid. The transcendence of the civil rights tradition is a recurring motif in The Audacity of Hope, where Obama argues that the civil rights movement's “most important legacy” is an understanding that race should no longer be used “as a crutch” and that discrimination should not serve “as an excuse for failure.”Footnote 12 In that book, Obama positions himself as the product of mid-twentieth-century social liberalism, but as desirous of creating a new national compact beyond “all the political and cultural battles” it produced.Footnote 13 Though he is skeptical of the idea of a “postracial politics,”Footnote 14 Obama's third-way maneuvering is nevertheless designed to put clear water between himself and what Ron Walters calls the (Jesse) “Jackson model” of black politics.Footnote 15
So what does Obama's skillful negotiation of the politics of blackness mean for antiracism? Does Obama's status as “a black man who doesn't conform to the normal scripts for African-American identity”Footnote 16 jeopardize his progressive potential, or is it a precondition of his success? Does Obama's victory signal “the end of black politics,”Footnote 17 or its radical reinvention?
Beyond Betrayal
Many commentators have been decidedly uncomfortable with Obama's post-black politics. While there is an acknowledgment (albeit at times grudging) of Obama's symbolic importance, critics have been quick to point out that the simple fact of a black man in the White House does precious little in itself to transform the entrenched structural inequalities of race in America. Carlos Fierro remarks that the success of Obama can be said to dangerously consolidate notions of U.S. exceptionalism as a nation of unrivaled opportunity.Footnote 18 Glenn Ford adds that Obama is part of a “great diversion” in U.S. racial politics from which African Americans will get “less than nothing,”Footnote 19 while Ricky L. Jones charges Obama with a vulgar careerism and describes him as “not a black leader but an American leader who happens to be black.”Footnote 20
There are of course elements of truth to such criticisms. It is particularly important to challenge the idea that Obama's victory somehow heralds the arrival of a “postracial” society and to heed warnings that white people's acceptance of Obama is more likely based on the notion that he has “transcended his own blackness”Footnote 21 than on a more deeply held conviction about racial equality. And yet there is at the same time something rather limited and insufficient to critiques that understand post-black politics as simply the betrayal of a black political tradition. There is, for one thing, an incredible naïveté to this charge, as if it is made in expectation that Obama could or should have reverted to the Jackson model. The blindingly obvious point, which Manning Marable has got a handle on with his definition of post-black politics, is that the Obama phenomenon marks an inevitable departure from the Jackson model. Obama's divergence from that type of grassroots organizing is a definition of his success (for after all it delivered only Jackson's principled failures to gain the Democratic nomination in 1984 and 1988). Sure, we can deploy the language of betrayal; we can regret the sense in which the election of a black president does not automatically bring with it a thorough and meaningful challenge to all forms of structural, cultural, and institutional racism in the United States in just the same way that we might regret that the election of a Democratic president does not necessarily usher in a radically redistributive democratizing challenge to American capitalism. But while one would be hard pressed to find anyone who believes the latter is a real possibility, there appear to be a surprising number of commentators on U.S. racial politics who sincerely believe that Obama has “sold out” black America.
One of the key challenges to thinking about contemporary black politics in the United States accordingly circulates around the recognition that there is actually no inevitability or unshakeable weight of obligation here. black politicians are not somehow committed to maintaining a fidelity to any particular model of practice; they are not inexorably beholden to some kind of teleological geist of radical struggle. Indeed, it is an idealistic fantasy to imagine they might be. Those who charge Obama's post-black politics with selling out can legitimately suggest that the President's position differs from their own, but they cannot claim that this means that Obama no longer represents or exemplifies a form of black politics: after all, the simple fact of his status as America's first black president alone guarantees that he represents a pivotal moment in its history. To confine one's understanding of this to a discourse of betrayal is to fail to recognize how the fact of Obama's presidency has changed in fundamental ways the entire field of U.S. race discourse. Like the ossified ideologues of revolutions that are never to come, such critiques signal their own redundancy by failing to acknowledge this important conjunctural shift, and the fact Obama's presidency changes the nature—and indeed the very possibility—of contemporary black politics.
To begin thinking about these changes and how to respond to them, we need only consider how the U.S. presidency has featured in the struggle for racial equality. The idea of a black president has historically operated as a symbolic marker in the U.S. antiracist imaginary as the (utopian) moment of racism's overcoming.Footnote 22 Because it holds together in such dramatic fashion notions of racial difference and absolute power, the idea of a black president has historically served as the limit point of antiracism, the signifier of its future redundancy. While it can of course be argued that the fact of a black president does not bring into existence the ends that it symbolizes (in that we can point to any number of areas of U.S. life where a black president brings about no discernible difference to conditions of discrimination or exclusion), this would be to ignore its importance in shaping the antiracist imaginary, and the sense in which Obama's presidency implicitly undermines those arguments that insist on how little has changed in American racial politics.
For one thing, the immediate symbolic potency of the black president simply invalidates claims predicated on the explicit and straightforward marginalization of black people in America. Obama stands for the move of blackness from the margins to the mainstream. Obama was by no means the first black person to obtain access to a position of power, but his presidency represents a qualitatively new dimension; most important, it records a moment in U.S. racial politics when a critical mass of whites were prepared to cast their vote for a black person. In the figure of Obama, blackness is now decidedly center stage: there is no location more central in the U.S. political economy of race.Footnote 23 The significance of this shift from the periphery to the core of U.S. political life has been registered in an interesting way by the politically mobile race commentator Glenn Loury. Unusually for someone pushing the “betrayal” thesis, Loury recognizes the implications of Obama's racial politics for what he calls the “black narrative” of American history. According to Loury, Obama places under threat “the prophetic African-American voice—which is occasionally strident and necessarily a dissident, outsider's voice.”Footnote 24 Though for reasons I have already suggested I think Loury misses the point when he tries to make a case that Obama is not sufficiently representative of black Americans, he is absolutely right to recognize that Obama's presidency restructures the valences of a black (and particularly African-American) voice as the expression of an antiracist politics. While, as Gary Younge has argued, blackness once described an alternative or oppositional America, it now describes America's mainstream.Footnote 25 Whereas “outsider” figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X occupied positions of critical distance to dominant cultural norms, that distance has been closed up by the figure of Obama. To be black in America was once to be necessarily critical of the status quo, to embody a dissatisfaction with the present and the demand for a future beyond racism. With Obama's election, America's racial future is now.
Antiracism in the Post-black Conjuncture
And so while of course Obama has not brought about an end to racism, he has nonetheless transformed the way that blackness works in contemporary U.S. race politics. Though Obama's critics are in certain respects right to suggest that the changes he brings are more symbolic than “real,” this symbolism is nevertheless of immense importance to the antiracist struggle. A black politics can no longer be predicated on the idea that black people are excluded per se from positions of power and privilege. The claim to authority in race discourse cannot any longer be based on this assumption. Notions of critical oppositionality that had so much purchase in twentieth-century antiracist struggle have decreasing significance in the twenty-first century. While it is legitimate to mourn the loss of the marginal, oppositional “black narrative” of American history, it is not sufficient simply to attempt to reconstruct it anew. Although post-black racial politics sometimes appears, in David Theo Goldberg's terms, to be characterized by “antiracialism,” that is, an injunction on racial reference and an orientation “to wipe away the very vocabulary necessary to recall and recollect, to make a case, to make a claim,”Footnote 26 new antiracist claims cannot afford to be too nostalgic for such losses. They must be made out of the conditions of the present, utilizing the resources and opportunities that it offers. A discourse of selling out may seem like a principled response to Obama's post-black politics, but it fails to register a fundamental change in the objective conditions of antiracist practice.
One way of thinking about this change is to suggest that a black politics no longer “belongs” to those who charge Obama with betrayal. The whole idea of ownership may seem a rather odd one, but it is actually implicit to the organizing principles of antiracism, as well as the other forms of political movement that developed out of the civil rights struggle.Footnote 27 It was indeed once the case that antiracism could reasonably be said to “belong” to a finite group of black activists, who beyond tactical differences represented and guaranteed a reasonably coherent antiracist program. black politics was indeed an oppositional politics, an outsider politics. Yet the very success of this concerted, radical struggle has necessarily undermined the terms of “ownership.” The mainstreaming of antiracism has meant that the antiracist struggle is no longer underwritten by that earlier model of practice. Antiracism's success means it now “belongs” to a far wider constituency, whether institutionalized in America's schools and colleges or shaping the moral architecture of its contemporary media texts. Antiracism is a valuable property in twenty-first-century America, and in casting a vote across the racial divide, white people have signaled that they want a part of it too. It is part of a common cultural lexicon upon which all can now lay claim.
Another way of expressing antiracism's concerted move from the margins to the mainstream is to suggest that it has become hegemonic: Antiracism has an immense normative power that is no longer conditional on the approval of the activist constituency that brought it into being. It is therefore not surprising that contemporary forms of antiracism are experienced as betrayal by that activist constituency. Antiracism's current hegemony exemplifies its success, but this success is at the same time a kind of defeat, in the sense that it jeopardizes those older, marginal, oppositional forms of antiracist practice; it potentially makes redundant the resonances of an old language of antiracism built to deal with forms of overt prejudice and racial exclusion. Though we should indeed be distinctly uneasy about antiracism's hegemony, it is therefore simultaneously important to recognize that it is not going to be possible to “return” to the principled certainties of an “older” form of antiracism. Indeed, nostalgia for a simpler time when antiracism unequivocally “belonged” to its radical activists is nothing less than a desire to undo its hegemony, to return antiracism to the ghetto.
This recognition demands that we develop a new understanding of what hegemony means in the politics of antiracism. It does not, as perhaps those who long struggled for it assumed, signal the ultimate victory of antiracism, but rather a shift in the terms of ongoing antiracist struggle. What the mainstreaming of antiracism means is that antiracist activists do not any longer get a casting vote in determining its meaning.
Antiracism in the “post-black” conjuncture is an uncharted territory, and one that provides us with new opportunities as well as challenges to old certainties. One definitive shift in U.S. racial politics that Obama represents, perhaps above all else, is the maturing and consolidation of America's black middle class. While this change in social status is limited in important respects and might indeed be said to facilitate the reproduction of various forms of racial distinction (not least in appearing to mitigate the charge of discrimination by parading exceptions to the rule), it is important that antiracists do not fall into the trap of dismissing this as insignificant, or of relying solely on older forms of antiracist practice to mount a challenge to ongoing acts of discrimination. Indeed, an effective antiracism must surely recognize and build upon its own acceptance into the mainstream. A meaningful antiracist politics would not therefore repudiate the gains of a black middle class, but would find ways of articulating its successes to the plight of poor black America. Political realists will argue that Obama will not do much here under his own volition, and they would be right. However, it is essential that in efforts to push contemporary America in a more progressive direction, antiracists will need to recognize and make use of recent developments in U.S. race politics.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that the struggle for antiracism has not unfolded along the lines imagined by its mid-twentieth-century pioneers, but this does not render its transformations insignificant or without meaning.Footnote 28 It would be immensely counterproductive, for example, to reject the successes of black professionals in order to insist on some “authentic” (ideal) program for the emancipation of all. Obama's figuration of racial transcendence in his promotion of a new aspirational blackness is clearly not going to be to everyone's taste, and the refrain of “no excuses” in his presidential address to the NAACPFootnote 29 may indeed feel like an insult to many antiracist activists. Yet his recognition that the conditions of contemporary black America represent “a radical break from the past”Footnote 30 is irrefutable. Obama has proven that the betrayal or selling out of an older model of political blackness has been an inevitable event in the development of U.S. race politics. Rather than remain trapped in a politics of ressentiment that opposes what is to an ideal that might have been, the challenge is surely to recognize the changed circumstances of which Obama is both the product and symbol. The old certainties are no longer with us, and the terrain of antiracist struggle is now a conflicted and ambiguous one. But to develop an understanding of this territory where racism continues to exist despite a black president, despite the hegemony of antiracism, despite the fact that racism is now far more equivocal and differential, surely leaves us better equipped at challenging that racism than a reckoning that denies that very much has changed in U.S. racial politics. After Obama antiracism's heroic mode is perhaps over, but the end of antiracism's attachment to the trope of brave oppositionality should herald a new maturity that means it is more capable of dealing with the complexities of race and racism in the new century.
Notes
J. Harris and C. Davidson, “Obama: The New Contours of Power,” Race & Class 50, no. 4 (2009): 2.
M. S. Alam, “Obama and the Politics of Race and Religion in America,” Counterpunch, http://www.counterpunch.org/shahid11192008.html (November 19, 2008).
G. Younge, “An Obama Victory Would Symbolise a Great Deal and Change Very Little,” Guardian, January 7, 2009.
B. Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007), vii.
Ibid., 78.
R. Walters, “Barack Obama and the Politics of Blackness,” Journal of Black Studies 38, no. 1 (2007): 8.
M. Marable, “Racializing Obama: The Enigma of Post-Black Politics and Leadership,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 11, no. 1 (2009): 5.
Ibid., 4.
See also C. Fraser “‘Race, Post-Black Politics, and the Democratic Presidential Candidacy of Barack Obama,” ibid., 19.
B. Obama, “Obama Race Speech,” Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/18/obama-race-speech-read-th_n_92077.html (March 18, 2008).
Ibid.
B. Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006), 241.
Ibid., 41.
Ibid., 232.
Walters, “Barack Obama and the Politics of Blackness,” 16.
Kwame Anthony Appiah in J. Derbyshire, “Performing Blackness,” Prospect, http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10510 (2008).
M. Bai, “Is Obama the End of Black Politics?” New York Times Magazine, August 6, 2008.
C. Fierro, “Obama and the End of Racism,” Counterpunch, http://www.counterpunch.org/fierro11282008.html (November 28–30, 2008).
G. Ford, “Barack Obama: The Mania and the Mirage,” Counterpunch, http://www.counterpunch.org/ford01192007.html (January 19, 2007).
R. L. Jones, What's Wrong with Obamamania? Black America, Black Leadership and the Death of Political Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 123.
T. Wise, Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009), 86.
See, for example, J. Javits, “Integration From the Top,” Esquire, http://www.esquire.com/features/predicting-the-first-black-president-1258 (1958).
While a case could be made that the significance of the likes of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell as Black politicians was mitigated by their unelected status, this is an argument that simply cannot be made of Obama.
G. Loury, “Losing the Narrative,” Talking Points Café, http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/03/31/losing_the_narrative (March 31, 2008).
G. Younge, “The Best of Times and the Worst of Times: Barack Obama and the Crisis in American Politics,” lecture at London South Bank University, January 12, 2009.
D. T. Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), 21.
B. Pitcher, “Radical Subjects after Hegemony,” Subjectivity, 4, no. 1 (2011).
Comparison can be made here to assessments of Thatcher's legacy as Britain's first woman prime minister. Because Thatcher represented such a radical divergence from standard feminist narratives, it has taken a long while for feminist scholars to move beyond the initial knee-jerk response that she did nothing for or stood as an obstacle to a “genuine” feminist struggle. Whether we like it or not, we need to come to terms with the palpable existence of politically centrist and indeed conservative and right-wing forms of antiracism. For more on this, see B. Pitcher, The Politics of Multiculturalism: Race and Racism in Contemporary Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
B. Obama, “Remarks by the President to the NAACP Centennial Convention,” http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-to-the-NAACP-Centennial-Convention-07/16/2009 (July 17, 2009).
Obama, The Audacity of Hope, 241.