monumental speech, however, Obama spoke out in a very personal and persuasive way about racial profiling and the criminalization of black men.
“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son,” Obama divulged in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room about one week after George Zimmerman was found not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter. “Another way of saying that is,” he added, “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.” These phrases from Obama’s speech made headlines nationwide and marked a noticeable shift in Obama’s stance toward racial profiling. What most newshawks ignored was important. Obama historicized Martin’s murder: “I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.” He expanded on this unchanging and persistent history:
The African American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws … And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case … [B]lack folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context. They understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.54
Several years later, Obama continued to speak out about the lingering impact of tragic aspects of black history. “We gather here today to commemorate a century and a half of freedom,” Obama introduced his fourteen minutes’ worth of remarks celebrating the 150th anniversary of the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. To soften the blow and connect with his white listeners in the US Capitol, he added that this ceremony was “not simply for former slavers, but for all of us.”55 Casting Lincoln as a stalwart abolitionist and honorary black freedom fighter in the company of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr., Obama memorialized Americans—“black and white,” “men and women”—who helped bring down slavery.
Conceivably steering away from potential queries about reparations (a struggle that he shrugged off early during his first presidential campaign), Obama did not mention how cotton was “King”; in other words, the incalculable wealth that slave labor generated for the US government for more than two hundred years. He did, nevertheless, make it plain that the legacy of slavery endured even though the country had made great progress. “For another century, we saw segregation and Jim Crow make a mockery of these amendments,” he proclaimed as he did when speaking to the NAACP, “And we saw justice turn a blind eye to mobs with nooses slung over trees. We saw bullets and bombs terrorize generations.”56 Obama had referenced lynching in earlier orations, but this is perhaps the only time that he linked past maltreatment of African Americans with domestic terrorism. As to be expected, he chased up this indictment with an optimistic request that “our generation be willing to do what those who came before us have done” in standing up for others’ freedoms.
In evoking lynching in this manner, Obama had come a long way since October 2009 when he signed off on the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Act. The brutal, ritualistic, and premeditated murder of Byrd by three white men was by definition a lynching, a “lynching-by-dragging” as it has been dubbed. It was reminiscent of instances when white mobs—“the assemblage of two or more persons”—murdered black men during the “nadir” period. In his remarks at the reception commemorating the Act, Obama neglected to point out in his description of Byrd’s death how similar his murder was to the killings of black men that were commonplace a century earlier. As historian Philip Dray has reminded us: “Almost every black family has a story in its history of an ancestor who ‘come up missing’ … Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks’ distrust of the legal system, fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation.”57
GENERATIONAL CRISSCROSSING: OBAMA, HIP-HOP, AND BLACK HISTORICAL MEMORY
I think that the most vibrant musical art form right now, over the last ten to fifteen years, has been hip-hop, and there have been some folks that have kind of dabbled in political statements, but a lot of it has been more cultural than political.
—Barack Obama, “Ask Obama Live: An MTV Interview with the President,” October 26, 2012
On June 7, 1979, President Jimmy Carter designated the month of June to be Black Music Month. In celebration of this event, he invited Chuck Berry to perform at the White House. Following Carter, American presidents continued to issue Black Music Month proclamations and hosted similar programs.
During the first year of his presidency on June 2, 2009, President Obama changed the name of this observance to African-American Music Appreciation Month. In his first proclamation for this commemoration, he held in high esteem a wide variety of black music traditions, including spirituals, gospel, blues, jazz, soul, and rock and roll. Complicating outworn notions of blackness, he alluded to how blacks had contributed to opera, classical symphony, and choral music. Hip-hop is conspicuously absent from Obama’s first African-American Music Appreciation Month proclamation.
This oversight is thought-provoking considering the widespread support that the man who once had the moniker “The Hip-Hop President” received from hip-hop generationers as a whole and from artists like Jay-Z, Nas, Jeezy, MC Jin, Kidz in the Hall, Common, Talib Kweli, Puff Daddy, and scads of other emcees. In his African-American Music Appreciation Month tributes that followed, he did give shout-outs to “the urban themes of hip-hop,” the “young wordsmiths,” and “the young poet putting his words to a beat.”
While campaigning for his first term, Obama’s references to hip-hop expanded far beyond the aforementioned token nods.58 He routinely disparaged young blacks from turning to hip-hop for salvation. In July 2008, Obama referenced Lil Wayne at a predominantly black town hall meeting in Powder Springs, Georgia. He directed his comments toward members of the millennial hip-hop generation. “You are probably not that good a rapper. Maybe you are the next Lil Wayne, but probably not, in which case you need to stay in school,” Obama declared.59
A year later, he reiterated this message during a speech in celebration of the NAACP’s centennial, insisting that young blacks who are socialized by millennial hip-hop should not primarily aspire to be a professional basketball player or rapper like Lil Wayne.60 Obama’s various calculated references to Lil Wayne—a device that he employed to demonstrate to young blacks that he was “down”—led one journalist to write a brief blog that chronicled the relationship between Young Weezy and Obama entitled “Does Obama Love Lil Wayne or What?”61 Perhaps Obama shared a common veneration of King with Wayne, who in his 2007 mix-tape track “Love Me or Hate Me” spit: “I are the illest nigga Martin Luther King died for.”
Obama has haphazardly been called “The Hip-Hop President” by more than a few newshounds. He is by no means a hip-hop head, and it is a stretch to label him a member of the hip-hop generation. He did not begin working with African American communities and intimately interacting with black culture until the late 1970s and the 1980s. He has disclosed that much of his intimate connections to African American culture grew out of his marriage to an African American woman. “I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners—an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters,” Obama narrated in his “Race Speech.”62 Obama himself has also confessed that he was not socialized during his younger formative years by “old school” hip-hop, but by black music from the 1970s. Though familiar with some of the popular hip-hop artists by way of his daughters and younger aides, he has said that he listens most to Stevie Wonder; Marvin Gaye; Earth, Wind, and Fire; and the Temptations.
To the great dismay and chagrin of Donald Trump and his many co-conspirators in the half-baked “birther movement,”
