HISTORIC OCCASION RECONSIDERED
Though it is not usually included in political commentators’ lists of the most memorable US presidential elections, the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States on November 4, 2008 was a historic event. In varying degrees, of course, all US presidents have shaped the course of US political history. Accordingly, historians often use presidential administrations as opportune points of departure for broadly surveying and identifying particular eras in the American past. Presidents do indeed make history.
Obama, however, is a history-maker and catalyst of a peculiar type. He joined the pantheon of black firsts and arguably became a black first that eclipsed all others. He will forever be known and remembered as being the first black president, even though comedian Chris Rock and novelist Toni Morrison bestowed that title upon former President Bill Clinton nearly two decades ago.1 Though the notion of Clinton’s honorary commander-in-chief blackness continues to receive some attention (as late as 2015, for instance, journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates sought to untangle and translate Morrison’s thoughts for The Atlantic readers), Obama now holds the undisputed title.
The American mainstream media was obsessed with Obama’s remarkable triumph and justifiably so. Until now, however, a great deal of print and online journalism as well as some trigger-happy scholars have haphazardly helped jettison Obama into the genealogy of black leadership and African American history and lore by portraying his presidency as an unprecedented milestone in the black freedom struggle, as evidence of America’s monumental progress in race relations since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Immediately following the 2008 election, droves of columnists, political pundits, and “everyday Americans” interpreted and presented Obama’s presidency as a landmark event that somehow atoned for and even expunged several centuries of overt racial oppression.
The New York Times headline “Obama: Racial Barrier Falls in Decisive Victory” was followed by an article written by then chief political correspondent Adam Nagourney, who dramatically declared: “Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United Sates on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.” Nagourney added that the election of 2008—“a striking symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history”—also “ended what by any definition was one of the most remarkable contests in American political history.” Even McCain in his concession speech could not ignore the historical significance of Obama’s election. “This is a historic election, and I recognize the significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight.” He continued, “We both realize that we have come a long way from the injustices that once stained our nation’s reputation.”2
The day after the election, renowned public intellectual Henry Louis Gates Jr. reiterated McCain’s and others’ prevailing sentiments with greater specificity but equal astonishment. For Gates, Obama’s accomplishment was “the symbolic culmination of the black freedom struggle, the grand achievement of a great, collective dream,” a sensational occasion that was only comparable to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Joe Louis’ June 22, 1938 revenge defeat of Max Schmeling, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s legendary 1963 “I Have a Dream” oration.3
For the vast majority of black America, Obama’s groundbreaking victory was their triumph as well. They took to heart his victory declaration—“I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to. It belongs to you. It belongs to you.” They personalized and derived collective pride from his becoming a black first in a similar manner to how, one hundred years earlier, African Americans across the nation celebrated Jack Johnson when he became the first black heavyweight champion of the world by trouncing Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia, and two years later when the brazen pugilist humiliated “The Great White Hope” James J. Jeffries in the “Fight of the Century.”
Through Obama, black Americans from all walks of life enjoyed the vicarious thrill of feeling affirmed. Obama’s coup unquestionably belonged to them and their forebears. The millions of African Americans who voted for him—especially between the ages of eighteen to forty-four years—recognized that they were shaping the trajectory of American political culture and making history; in other words, doing something consequential that had never been done before.
The symbolic importance of Obama’s victory and presidency to generations of African Americans cannot be overstated. Yet along with the triumph came a declaration that the era of Obama’s presidency represents a “post-racial” phase of American history. To those who scrutinize the contemporary realities of black life, this label is fallacious.
During Obama’s presidency, there was a resurgence in anti-black thought and behavior in American culture. On one level, this is nothing new. Dating back to the Civil War and the short-lived era of Reconstruction, whenever African Americans have made major headway, groups of white Americans have pushed back, often violently. Riots ensued after Johnson beat Jeffries and after James Meredith began his quest to be the first African American to graduate from the University of Mississippi. Similarly, violent anti-black rhetoric shadowed Obama’s victory, and violence against African Americans has mushroomed at the hands of police and domestic terrorists during and since his presidency. Just as it would have been optimistic to have thought that the Thirteenth Amendment would eradicate the exploitation of black labor or that Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) would swiftly put an end to Jim Crow segregation, it is naïve to assume that the status of African Americans would suddenly and magically improve under the administration of a black president.
Several years into Obama’s presidency, historian Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua tendentiously dubbed the period from 1979 until 2010 the “New Nadir,” contending that African Americans were living in “a state akin to the situation more than a century ago.” Despite a black president and a noticeable increase in the “black petty bourgeois and bourgeois classes,” Cha-Jua underscored that there had also been a rise in black incarceration, “spikes in racial violence,” the “marginalization of black workers,” and flagrant black disenfranchisement. “On most social indicators, since the decline of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements,” he continued, “African American progress has stagnated and in significant areas, regressed.”4
Looking back on Obama’s two presidential terms, public intellectual Michael Eric Dyson echoed Cha-Jua, unfavorably comparing him to presidents who are not considered progressive toward black people by any stretch of the imagination. Dyson, who provided a pensive and evenhanded assessment of the deeper meanings of “the black presidency,” wrote:
Under Obama, blacks have experienced their highest unemployment rates since Bill Clinton was in office. Obama doesn’t even compare favorably to his immediate predecessor … The ranks of the black poor have also swollen under Obama … In Obama’s administration, the disparity in wealth between blacks and whites nearly doubled … Obama’s failure to grapple forthrightly with race underscores a historical irony: while the first black president has sought to avoid the subject, nearly all of his predecessors have had to deal with “the Negro question” … It is unfortunate that our nation’s first black president has been for the most of his two terms uncomfortable with dealing with race; it is even more unfortunate that he could not, for the most part, openly embrace, in the course of his duties, the vital issues of the group whose struggle blazed his path to the White House.5
HISTORIANS AND THE “OBAMA PHENOMENON”
What journalist and op-ed columnist Bob Herbert dubbed the “Obama phenomenon” in early 2008 has spawned an earthquake of scholarship. “The historians can put aside their reference material,” Herbert declared, “This is new. America has never seen anything like the Barack Obama phenomenon.”6 Since he won
