Fear of a Black President by Varun Kataria
By the time the last election rolled around, that of the 44th president of the United States, I had all but abandoned the notion that any single person elected to that office could in even the slightest way rework the machinery of power in this country. As far as I knew, presidents can’t and don’t really do anything different, nothing serious, at least, nothing for the good of people in general. Power doesn’t work that way.
My expectations of Barack Obama were therefore no different. To me he was just another American president. There was really nothing about Obama, not his heady rhetoric nor his Whole Foods fussiness, that stirred the settled dust of political indifference in me, except for the apparently crucial and much exalted fact of his blackness. I wanted not to care, but blackness in the Whitehouse was too much of an anomaly, a sparse line of poetry in the otherwise tawdry novel of America’s official history; Blackness was enough to conjure in me a modest interest, and within the nation, a storm of race-related infatuation either celebratory or contentious.
All the dancing in the streets, CNN specials and right-wing doomsday blathering that followed Obama’s inauguration have to have been about something: So what, after all, is the significance of a black man in the Whitehouse? I would like to think that there is more to the matter than that the commander in chief has a persistent skin-tan. So Barack Obama penetrated the highest echelon of the American government, assuming a mantle that was previously thought to be prohibited to those not among the most privileged and well-positioned white men of this society. Well done, sincere congratulations to him on becoming the first non-white president, but with all due respect, blackness is more than skin deep, and we have not yet had a black president. It takes more than being the first dark-skinned president to be the first black president.
I don’t aim to make the tired and incendiary claims that Barack is not really black or not black enough, that he ought to speak in ebonics and wear a dashiki or that he should have “thug life” tattooed on his torso. It isn’t my place to arbitrate on what makes an individual sufficiently black, nor is it my point. My point is that there are particular aspects of the black experience (which actually transcend race itself) that constitute the real promise of a black presidency, and they have not manifested from the Obama administration thus far.
There is something common to all instances of blackness in American culture, from Muhammed Ali to Aunt Jemima. Regardless of whether a particular instance advances the cause of mutual respect or sets it back, the black perspective is one of otherness, of coming in from the outside. Whereas official American history is a tale of triumph over savagery (nature, natives, commies, etc.), black history has always been about survival under duress. Triumph is a rarer occurrence in Black America, and when it happens, its significance is always tempered by what was overcome, a tale of an outsider busting his way in.
Obama’s presidency is one such triumph. It is a classic “come up,” not just for him, jumping with relative quickness from being a humble state senator to holding the highest post in the land, but for every marginalized person in the country, who now as never before had a president who himself rose from the margins to speak for them, the voiceless. Except that it hasn’t really played out that way.
The Obama that ran for president was the Tiger Woods of presidential campaigning, breaking fundraising records and challenging basic assumptions about the game. Obama took the temperature of America’s voting public and wrote a new prescription. He had a mandate to enforce the hope and change that he ran upon with a vigorous enthusiasm: he was going to put that pimp hand down on Guantanamo Bay so that justice would be done for the sad sacks getting tortured out in Cuba; he was going to take his righteous fist to the American health care system and make it rain quality and affordable medical care on the entire country, he was going to restore America’s swagger so everyone on the planet would recognize that America is the dopest MC in the world. This was the president that America voted in, a black president.
However, it’s gone down differently than expected since that fateful day in January of ‘09 in that it is more or less exactly the same as what came before, or even a little worse. Obama’s presidency has been silent, anemic and slow. When British Petroleum spilled their oil into the gulf of Mexico, delivering an insult even worse than Hurricane Katrina in that it was caused by the hands of man, it was a clear cut case for Obama to show his color. The powerful and rich, monolithic BRITISH petroleum company in a fit of greedy negligence irreparably pollutes the lives and livelihoods of the diverse and numerous AMERICANS that live and prosper off the gulf’s briny waters, a national heritage site, and with the entire nation calling for BP’s head on a platter, the federal government’s response was to establish bureaucracies and issue “stern warnings” that BP rectify the situation. Fast forward one year and you will find annual earning in the hundreds of billions of dollars for BP while tens of thousands of claims filed by Gulf Coast residents remain unpaid and the federal government remains silent. The legacy of Obama in the Gulf will be that he was no different than Bush in failing the beleaguered people affected first by the hurricane, second by the spill, and always by negligence. This is not how a black president would have responded.
A black president would stand in solidarity with his people, knowing that the system itself is stacked against him, he would seek support from and lend his support to those who “have his back.” He would not agree to an extension of tax-cuts for the richest 1% of Americans and bailouts for gigantic corporations while at the same time acceding to a congressional budget proposal that would cut crucial funds to the programs both public and private that serve the neediest among us. A black president would not diminish those programs because a black president would understand that it is precisely their existence that helped to reduce the odds against his success.
A black president would be resourceful, because to be black in America means that you have often been denied access to the people, places and things needed to realize your goals. To be black means that you have to use creativity and cunning to get the most out of whatever you have, systematically removing obstacles that have been set before you since before you were even born. Barack Obama began his presidency with a political mandate to swing a hammer and has at his disposal the vast resources of the federal government, not to mention the cult of personality that surrounds him, giving him a bully pulpit capable of major damage. Instead of utilizing those resources creatively to bully his agenda through, whether it be for healthcare reform or saving the jobs of his fellow democratic office-holders during the mid-term elections, a quick survey of this administration’s stats is a litany of misused talent and wasted opportunity.
When considering Obama’s blackness, it would perhaps be incomplete not to consider one persistent stereotype of the black American male, that of the aggressive and angry phallic symbol. Throughout the campaign and into his presidency the fear (or hope) that Barack Obama represented ‘the angry black man with a chip on his shoulder’ dogged him from every corner of the media. Whether it was the controversy of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s statement that the attacks of 9/11 proved that, “America's chickens are coming home to roost" and that this was somehow a reflection of Obama’s personal beliefs or the pejorative label of “Socialist” that were hurled his way by the ranting Doomsdayers of Fox News and the Tea Party, it is clear that there has been an assumption of guilt by association. Leaving aside the disappointingly racist aspects of that assumption, consider it for a moment: has Obama been the militant activist, the gangster or the pimp? Not by my estimation. I would not characterize Obama’s domestic or foreign policy as aggressive; he doesn’t take what he wants. He wanted a comprehensive reform of health care with a public option, what he got was legislation that will leave 23 million US residents without health insurance even after all provisions of his bill have taken effect and no public option. Internationally the US has no decisive direction in Afghanistan, no goals and no purpose, all the while the so-called “Arab Spring” erupts in the Middle-east, in the name of freedom, and Obama hasn’t the will nor political capital to intervene in one of the rare instances that American intervention would be justified and welcome (not to mention compatible with our national interests). From that standpoint, George W Bush was way more the thug than Obama has been. Bush was the ‘Decider;’ and when the Decider decided, you knew some shit was gonna go down.
I was probably being naïve when I imagined that an Obama presidency would play out something like that scene from Silver Streak where Richard Pryor teaches Gene Wilder how to “act black,” smoothing out Wilders clunky and uptight gait with the smooth swagger of a real soul-brother, opening Wilder’s mind to the possibilities that exist for him beyond all that he had ever known up to that point. It was a romantic vision of an America that gets a revised sense of priority, a moral compass dictated by the experiences of those traditionally in the margins, as a refreshing departure from the 400 years of business as usual. Instead the Obama presidency’s relationship to the general American public has turned out to reflect the plot of Trading Places. A poor street hustler, trades places with a well-to-do yuppie on the whims of two old white power-brokers. The hustler quickly sheds the trappings of his previous life as he gets acquainted with his new and powerful station, while the yuppie, in shock by the loss of his previous privilege, has no choice but to wise up to the ways of the world for those on the bottom. The movie ended well, with the yuppie and the hustler joining forces, seizing control of their own destiny and deposing the two old farts who for too long dictated the terms for all involved. I’m not sure how this movie ends, but I’m still waiting for the plot twist… Call Obama what you will, mark the historical moment for what it’s worth. As for me, I’ll be looking forward to voting for the first black president when Jay-z runs in 2012.