the Little Rock Nine, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, “all the civil rights giants,” and even Emmett Till’s uncle, Mose Wright, for making history and paving the way for his presidency. He also affirmed personal links between himself and black America’s past.
Obama unpacked how historical discrimination impacts the present by highlighting the major historically rooted problems that disproportionally affect black America and offered rudimentary remedies. Invoking the long tradition of black self-help and seemingly sampling from Malcolm X, Obama posited that African Americans have internalized oppression. “We need a new mindset, a new set of attitudes—because one of the most durable and destructive legacies of discrimination is the way that we have internalized a sense of limitation; how so many in our community have come to expect so little of ourselves.” He also pointed to himself as being a role model for the hip-hop generation. He declared that “our kids” need to
set their sights higher. They might think they’ve got a pretty good jump shot or a pretty good flow, but our kids can’t all aspire to be the next LeBron or Lil Wayne. I want them aspiring to be scientists and engineers, doctors and teachers, not just ballers and rappers. I want them aspiring to be a Supreme Court Justice. I want them aspiring to be President of the United States.41
Sampling from James Weldon Johnson’s classic poem/song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (later known as the Black National Anthem), Obama rounded off his speech by invoking a connectedness to the black past as well as to enduring spirits of survival and perseverance that characterize the African American experience. Sharing his family’s experience at the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, he avowed:
There, reflecting on the dungeon beneath the castle church, I was reminded of all the pain and all the hardships, all the injustices and all the indignities on the voyage from slavery to freedom … I was reminded that no matter how bitter the rod or how stony the road, we have persevered. We have not faltered, nor have we grown weary … One hundred years from now, on the 200th anniversary of the NAACP, let it be said that this generation did its part; that we too ran the race; that full of the faith that our dark past has taught us, full of the hope that the present has brought us, we faced, in our own lives and all across this nation, the rising sun of a new day begun.42
In July 2015, Obama delivered one of his most fervent speeches to a large energized NAACP audience at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, a critical appraisal of the US criminal justice system, “one aspect of American life that remains particularly skewed by race and by wealth.” This assessment of this flawed institution was more critical than the one he delivered eight months earlier at the Rutgers University Center for Law and Justice. Celebrating its 106th anniversary, Obama praised the NAACP for battling against lynching, segregation, and disenfranchisement and repeated one of his catchphrases—“I would not be here, and so many would not be here, without the NAACP.” He observed that young blacks’ life chances were threatened by a biased criminal justice system that had historically oppressed black America. “Part of this is a legacy of hundreds of years of slavery and segregation, and structural inequities that compounded over generations,” Obama pronounced. “There’s a long history of inequity in the criminal justice system in America.”43
What’s more, he suggested that this was a conspiracy of some sort: “It did not happen by accident.” This declaration was welcomed with resounding applause. Despite their relatively privileged status and adherence to the age-old politics of respectability, his black listeners knew exactly what their commander-in-chief was saying. They gave credence to the time-honored belief in many black communities that the subjugation of African Americans has been and still is part of the American way of life. Such sentiments have been expressed by scores of African American radicals and conspiracy theorists. Obama echoed those figures as well as civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander, who in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), detailed how mass incarceration systematically ravaged black communities.
He did, however, oversimplify how black communities were profiled and policed in the past. “Historically,” he claimed, “the African American community oftentimes was under-policed rather than over-policed. Folks were very interested in containing the African American community so it couldn’t leave segregated areas, but within those areas there wasn’t enough police presence.” There were certainly fewer state and federal resources invested into segregated black communities. Even so, Obama implied that black communities “historically”—during the vast era of Jim Crow segregation—were not policed. On the contrary, since Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and earlier, black communities have been hyperpoliced. During the infamous “race riots” during the “Red Summer” of 1919 and the early 1920s ( Tulsa and Rosewood), whites—sanctioned by the police and state—invaded black communities. This was, without question, turbocharged policing. Nevertheless, for the purposes of his argument, Obama effectually made his point.
Before his death, Booker T. Washington wrote an indictment of lynching that was published posthumously in the New Republic. He challenged and documented lynchings prior to 1915, yet refrained from publically speaking out against this genocide because he knew all too well that his power-broking abilities were sanctioned by white America. Similarly, during his first presidential administration, Obama did not subject the anti-black nature of the criminal justice system to critique in the blatant way that he did in 2015 toward the end of his second term in office.
“A WHITEWASH OF OUR HISTORY”?
In late August 2008 on “The Tavis Smiley Show,” public intellectuals and outspoken Obama critics Cornel West and Julianne Malveaux rebuked Obama for failing to talk about African American history in his momentous acceptance speech, “The American Promise,” at the National Democratic Convention in Denver, Colorado, on August 28, 2008, a date that marked the forty-fifth anniversary of the March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” oration. West charged that Obama was “trying to escape from history” in order to win over white voters. Malveaux’s criticisms were especially unsparing. “I think the brother dropped the historical baton,” she declared. “The fact is that he basically perpetrated a whitewash of our history.” She had hoped that Obama would have spoken more directly about the activism of King. Obama’s reference to King (“a young preacher from Georgia”) was prudent and inappreciable. Given Americans’ lack of historical consciousness, it is not a stretch to conclude that many listeners did not realize that Obama was alluding to King.
West and Malveaux’s observations that Obama skirted any discussion of an African American historical experience that has been most profoundly shaped by slavery and an enduring struggle for basic civil and human rights were certainly valid and refreshing. They also prompted the question: how did Obama represent black history at key moments before predominantly white audiences?
Months before his acceptance speech at the National Democratic Convention, on March 18, 2008, Obama delivered his monumental “A More Perfect Union” speech in Philadelphia, one of the speeches that he himself invested a great deal of time writing.44 The mainstream American political media dubbed this speech his “Speech on Race” or “Race Speech,” implying that this was his one and only speech dedicated to “race,” a code word in white American society for “black people.” In her introduction to the largely pro-Obama anthology The Speech: Race and Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” (2008), T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting insightfully pinpointed the significance of this speech as well as Obama’s possible motivations:
“A More Perfect Union” is “The Speech” that many say Obama always knew he would have to give someday in his run for the presidency. Despite his quasi-rock star status and numerous media-driven attempts to cast him as “post-racial” … Barack Obama is a black man, and one who had in March 2008 gone further than any other black man who had sought the American presidency. He could not avoid addressing the perilous conundrums of race and racism in America, though he may have wished otherwise … And if
