Did Obama Fail Black America?
By RANDALL KENNEDY
July/August 2014
On January 20, 2009, when Barack Obama assumed the presidency, the overwhelming majority of African-Americans cheered and prayed for him. His inauguration was a signal moment in black history, reminiscent of the celebrations that accompanied the Emancipation Proclamation, Joe Louis’ victory over Max Schmeling and the March on Washington. Irma Brown-Williams traveled to the inauguration from Tuskegee, Alabama, wearing a coat on which she had pinned photos of her mother, father and siblings, all of whom were deceased. Asked to explain, she said, “I’m here for them. … They could not be here, so I brought them with me.” Against the backdrop of such exhilaration and triumphalism, an emotional downturn was inescapable. It has come to pass. For many, the passion has cooled. For some, the thrill is gone.
Obama swept into office with a reputation as an intellectual politician with vision. Part of the reason had to do with his memoir, Dreams from My Father, his campaign book, The Audacity of Hope, and a March 18, 2008, address, “A More Perfect Union,” in which he explained his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago preacher who had denounced the status quo in memorably inflammatory fashion: “God Damn America!”
The speech was immediately celebrated, with some likening it to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address or Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. These gushings were a vivid symptom of Obamamania. For in fact “A More Perfect Union” is not a speech for the ages; it was simply a tactical intervention aimed at quelling whites’ discomfort about Obama’s long association with a radical, left-wing minister. In neither its rhetoric nor its analysis nor its prescriptions did the speech offer anything beyond a carefully calibrated effort to defuse a public relations crisis. “In the end,” Obama declared, “what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less than … that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper. … Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.” Fine banalities that could have been voiced just as easily by Mitch McConnell.
Still, many listeners discerned in the speech a desire and ability to grapple in an innovative fashion with the unfinished business of racial justice. Obama said, after all, that the subject of race was too important to ignore and implicitly promised to confront it if he won the presidency.
He has not. He has avoided the subject assiduously. And when he has addressed it, he has typically done so only obliquely. “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago” and similar signature musings over the Obama years do not explain much, do not promise much and do not tell us where we should go from here. For many African-Americans, he has been a hero—but also a disappointment. On critical matters of racial justice, he has posited no agenda, unveiled no vision, set forth no overarching mission to be accomplished.
Take criminal justice. Nothing in the day-to-day lives of black Americans is more menacing than their vulnerability to criminality on the one hand and mistreatment by police on the other. Yet on neither front has Obama focused the attention of the nation. Oh, yes—there was the “beer summit.” In his first term, the president suggested that a police officer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had acted “stupidly” when, after investigating a report of a possible burglary, he arrested a black man, Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor who owned the house to which the officer had been dispatched. Obama expressly refrained from attributing a racial motive to the officer’s action. But many commentators nonetheless saw it that way, which fueled a fierce reaction against Obama. He backpedaled quickly, invited the officer (and Gates) to the White House for a beer and abandoned any further discussion about the matter of black Americans’ interactions with police in particular and the criminal justice system more generally. This was painful to witness. In the words of Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown University who wrote a 2008 book on the racial politics of incarceration, the president’s performance was “depressing in the extreme.”
For many African-Americans, Obama has been a hero— but also a let-down. He has set forth no overarching mission to be accomplished.
The conspicuous disproportionality of blacks in handcuffs, jails and prisons is an urgent matter. In 2010, the imprisonment rate for blacks was 4.6 times that of whites—a greater magnitude of racial disparity than in almost any another arena.
This is not to say the president has done nothing. The Obama administration played a key role in persuading Congress to pass the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced somewhat the penalties associated with possessing or distributing crack cocaine, drug crimes that were punished with peculiar harshness and that ensnare blacks disproportionately. (In 2006, 82 percent of offenders under federal anti-crack cocaine laws were black, while only 8.8 percent were white.) But the president virtually hid himself away when he signed the legislation on Aug. 3, 2010, and he has said little to educate the public regarding the larger question: Are racial disparities in stops, arrests, prosecutions and imprisonment more a function of racial discrimination by the authorities, or are African-Americans simply more engaged than others in criminal misconduct?
Or take affirmative action. For middle-class blacks, policies that favor racial minorities in competition for scarce opportunities in employment and higher education are of critical importance. At the most elite law schools, for example, withdrawing racial affirmative action would decimate the number of black students present; their number would fall from 8 or 9 percent to as low as 1 percent. But affirmative action is under increasing pressure from commentators, voter initiatives and court rulings (in April, the Supreme Court affirmed the power of state electorates to rescind affirmative action through referenda). Obama’s Justice Department supports affirmative action in little-publicized briefs and in the arguments of the solicitor general. But the president has declined to offer his own view of the controversy, in his own voice. George W. Bush set forth a definite position—against affirmative action in the form of quotas. So did Bill Clinton—in favor. Yet Obama is virtually mute.
Or take unemployment. Early in his administration, the president strongly rejected demands by black lawmakers that he specifically target black joblessness, given its peculiarly pronounced and stubborn presence. “I can’t pass laws that say I’m just helping black folks,” Obama replied. The president “tries to describe our challenges in ways that are inclusive,” his senior adviser Valerie Jarrett later explained.
On that, Obama seems to have changed his mind in recent months. “We need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys,” he said last July. In February, he returned to this theme, announcing My Brother’s Keeper, an interagency task force aimed at “creating and expanding ladders of opportunity for boys and young men of color.” The president was moved to do this, he said, because of the “persistent gaps in employment, educational outcomes and career skills” that so strikingly and destructively set young men of color apart from their white peers. The president’s apparent reversal raised the question: If race-targeted policy is appropriate for the My Brother’s Keeper initiative, why is it not appropriate more generally? He has offered no explanation.
Disappointing, too, is the president’s limp pushback against the Republican Party’s campaign to restrict voting. Thirty-four state legislatures have succeeded in requiring, or are attempting to require, prospective voters to show documents that authenticate their identity. Passed ostensibly for the purpose of combating voter fraud, the real purpose behind these laws is to suppress voting among certain sectors of the electorate, including, rather obviously, racial minorities, a key Democratic voting bloc. Yes, the Obama Justice Department is resisting this malevolent campaign of disenfranchisement, challenging these new restrictions with what is left of the Voting Rights Act after its maiming by the Supreme Court last June.
But absent here too, is much of the president’s own upraised voice. Lyndon B. Johnson rallied public opinion against disenfranchisement a half-century ago. When he announced the proposal that became the Voting Rights Act, he invoked the anthem of the civil rights movement: “We Shall Overcome.” Why can’t Obama muster some passion of his own? He has repeatedly lauded the heroics of Rep. John Lewis and the other activists who dramatized the need for legislation in the 1960s. Yet today, with that same legislation confronting new perils, the president remains largely quiet.
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The president remains quiet. That has been a recurring pattern when it comes to African-American concerns. He might work on black issues behind the scenes. But he won’t be caught promoting them out front, not even now, when he is free of the burden of seeking reelection.
Yet blacks remain the solid core, the indispensable anchor, of the Obama coalition. According to Gallup polling, Obama’s job approval as of June 9 has dipped nationally to 44 percent, and to only 35 percent among whites. By contrast, among African-Americans his job approval is 87 percent. Black America still loves Obama, and, absent some absolutely egregious development, will continue to do so. (In November, Saturday Night Live even spoofed this phenomenon in a sketch about a fake pro-Obama talk show called “How’s He Doing?”)
Some critics disapprove of what they see as blacks’ naive sentimentality, excessive patience and willingness to be placated too easily. They note that according to key indicators of material well-being—employment, income, incarceration rates, educational outcomes and homeownership rates—blacks as a whole have fared badly during Obama’s tenure. His black critics on the left urge the African-American rank and file to push the president to advance policies that are more directly and openly beneficial to blacks. They contend that Obama has interests of his own that may conflict with those of his black base; that he is, after all, a politician and therefore should not be given a virtually unconditional free pass. They maintain that it is folly to accept Obama’s implicit plea to blacks just to trust him to do the right thing.
For the most part, however, African-Americans have declined publicly to pressure Obama. No major African-American organization has sought to make him pay a political price for his failings. The Congressional Black Caucus has periodically made threats but then has backed down. When individual blacks have publicly criticized Obama with bite, they have often either been ignored or rebuked by their peers. Cornel West, the professor, and Tavis Smiley, the talk show host, enjoyed high standing among politically active black folk prior to their concerted excoriation of Obama for failing to do enough for black America. Subsequently, however, they have been disinvited from podiums and even lost their co-produced radio show. They learned that for many African-Americans, loyalty to Obama is a litmus test: If you are against him, they are against you.
What explains this seemingly unshakeable attachment? Two things, primarily.
First, Obama has delivered on what most blacks most craved: a serious, competent, dignified male politician who identifies as black, is married to a black woman, is free of any associations understood as anti-black and is simultaneously attractive to enough whites and others to prevail electorally. It is difficult to exaggerate African-Americans’ frustration with the stereotype of black male irresponsibility or their yearning for a dramatic counter-image. Obama is the antithesis of The Black Man as Failure. That alone buys him a lot of gratitude.
Obama loyalists insist, moreover, that he has delivered much more than psychic rewards. They point to the benefits black poor and working-class people have reaped disproportionately from the rescue of the automobile industry, the jobs generated by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “stimulus”), the boosts to Pell Grant funding, the expansion of Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act enabling millions of blacks to receive health insurance. They say that in his own bumbling way, Mitt Romney was correct when, after his defeat in the 2012 presidential election, he groused that Obama had garnered support from blacks and other parts of his coalition by showering them with “gifts.” They point to observations like that of the eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson, who declared in 2013, “Obama has done more for lower-income Americans than any president since Lyndon Baines Johnson.” They note, with lowered voices, that Obama has already accomplished much of what his critics request but without fanfare, avoiding putting a racial bull’s-eye on programs that are already vulnerable to Republican vengeance.
This last point leads to the second reason why, despite their ongoing socioeconomic pains, blacks remain so attached to Obama: They do not blame him for their various predicaments and the deadlock that makes the prospect of further assistance remote. They blame his Republican adversaries. They suspect, moreover, and with good reason, that racism has a lot to do with Republican obstructionism. This suspicion makes them even more protective of “their” president.
True, some African-Americans were overtaken by imaginings that Obama’s election would usher in a new order. Mesmerized by the mirage of a post-racial society, they told fellow blacks that the days of protest and excuses were over. Most African-Americans, however, retained a deeply embedded skepticism. They have, and for good reason, low expectations of their government and fellow citizens in general. Often, when they said that they never thought they’d live to see a black president, the remark contained an overlooked stinger: They were saying that, given the racism that still pervades American life, it was a miracle that any black man in any circumstance could win the presidency. That is why millions of African-Americans were anxiously holding their breath even after the 2008 election; they feared that substantial numbers of whites would do anything to prevent a black man from occupying the White House. That is also why many blacks, though angered by the born-in-Kenya slander, the ape cartoons and the constant invocation of racial epithets, are not really surprised by these and countless other affronts. We are used to it.
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A decade before Barack Obama burst onto the scene, the novelist Toni Morrison mischievously dubbed Bill Clinton the first black president. How does Obama compare with his Democratic predecessor? Like Clinton, Obama takes pains to appoint people of color to high office, including posts that have not traditionally been held by racial minorities. One thinks here of Obama’s appointment of Eric Holder as attorney general, Lisa Jackson as head of the Environmental Protection Agency and Charles Bolden as chief of NASA—all three of whom were the first African-Americans in those positions. Like Clinton, Obama is adept at paying homage to African-American icons and remedying oversights of blacks in public memory. Remember, for example, Obama using Martin Luther King Jr.’s Bible to take the oath of office and his designation of Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, to offer the invocation at his second Inauguration.
But also like Clinton, with his Sister Souljah moment, Obama periodically has tried to inoculate himself against charges of excessive negrophilia by castigating blacks for illegitimacy, criminality, complacency and other moral failings—sermons that the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates dismisses as “convenient race talk.” Clinton promulgated a national “conversation on race.” It was a dud, even if it did show a president who was willing to risk some prestige and invest some energy in attempting to educate the public about the American race question. My Brother’s Keeper is very much like Clinton’s unproductive race conversation, including that, unfortunately, it too is likely to be a dud.
But Obama’s place in the hearts and minds of blacks does not rest on the success of that or any other initiative. Tragically, the expectations of many blacks have been diminished so severely that they do not require much from Obama. This is an observation, not a critique. Perhaps the black conventional wisdom is right, reflecting a resigned but accurate assessment of the very narrow limits within which Obama can maneuver.
Perhaps the blacks who champion Obama are right to intuit that in becoming president at all, he has already done the most that could reasonably have been expected at this juncture in American history. After all, by doing so, he has irrevocably changed the nation’s imagination. He has shown that a black man can lead the country and indeed the “free” world. In many ways, African-Americans see Obama as the Jackie Robinson of politics. He was the first man through the color wall at the White House and was for that reason understandably inhibited. Given what he has contributed, is it wrong to want more?
Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein professor of law at Harvard Law School, is author of Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency.
you think that bill would have helped the black community? 
