blackness, the important role of Michelle Obama in her husband’s quest to become president, and how Obama can be compared to other “First Blacks” as well as to Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Like Sugrue, Joseph, and political scientist Frederick C. Harris, Cobb turns a spotlight on the fact that Jesse Jackson laid the foundation for Obama. “Examine Jackson’s campaign, and you will begin to see the DNA of an Obama candidacy.”12 While Obama did routinely honor the “Moses generation,” Cobb ultimately argues that Obama often denied his connection to the black past (as epitomized by his separation from Reverend Jeremiah Wright). Cobb reasoned:
While his predecessors had struggled to prove themselves worthy of insider status, Obama became vastly successful by doing just the opposite: masterfully positioning himself as an outsider. In reflecting the old ways, he necessarily blew off a portion of that history and that struggle. It was collateral damage of change.13
In the coming years, scholars and social commentators will certainly probe more deeply into the meaning, significance, and impact of the Obama years. The real explosion of Obama-centered African American historiography (that is, scholarship on Obama authored by professional historians who specialize in African American history) will most likely have to wait until around the 2030s, unless future African Americanist historians engage more deliberately in contemporary history (namely African American history since the late twentieth century and the dawning of the new millennium) and more explicitly draw connections between the past and the present.
ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL
As America’s first black president, Obama inevitably encountered a unique set of challenges when addressing the country’s checkered history of race relations. During his presidential campaigning and his administrations, Obama tactically discussed, depicted, and sampled from African American history in a variety of manners most profoundly shaped by the venue and historical context in which he spoke, the composition of his audiences, and the major talking points. Like black spokespersons from previous eras, he knew what was up. It is therefore unsurprising that some of Obama’s most compelling insights about African American history sprang up in informal settings. After visiting the Cape Coast Castle (a slave fortress) in Ghana, for instance, he remarked: “I think that the experience of slavery is like the experience of the Holocaust. I think it’s one of those things you don’t forget about.”14 Likening slavery or the transatlantic slave trade to the Holocaust is controversial to say the least, and Obama would never say this in front of a podium in the Oval Office.
In deciphering Obama’s references to, and descriptions of, black history, it is also important to pay attention not only to what he said, but when, during his eight years as president, he said it. For example, he tended to be more outspoken during his second term. Obama’s vision of African American history has been relatively consistent in its malleability. Further, in his mind, black history has always been American history.
“Now, we gather to celebrate Black History Month, and from our earliest days, black history has been American history,” Obama opened his remarks at a White House Black History Month reception in 2016. He insisted that black history should not be detached from “our collective American history” (another term for normative US history that prioritizes white America) or “just boiled down to a compilation of greatest hits” or a “commemoration of past events.”15 He also believes that black history can teach people about the value of balancing themes of victimization and perseverance. In his remarks at the groundbreaking ceremony for the National Museum of African History and Culture in Washington, DC, Obama announced: “I want my daughters to see the shackles that bound slaves on their voyage across the ocean and the shards of glass that flew from the 16th Street Baptist church.” At the same time, he added, he wanted “them to appreciate this museum not just as a record of tragedy, but as a celebration of life.”16
Clearly Obama and those in his camp were not wet behind the ears. They were cognizant of the racial maneuverings and power struggles that permeate American politics. An African American male seeking to become President of the United States could not focus on, draw excessive attention to, or critically unpack black America’s past or present conditions when speaking directly to white audiences. Obama almost never discussed African Americans’ historical or contemporary realities in his widely televised State of the Union Addresses and when he did, he was tactful and evasive. “We may have different takes on the events of Ferguson and New York. But surely we can understand a father who fears his son can’t walk home without being harassed,” Obama declared in his 2015 State of the Union Address, “And surely we can understand the wife who won’t rest until the police officer she married walks through the front door at the end of his shift.”17
The ways in which Obama talked about black history broadened over time. This is epitomized by the evolution of his National African American History Month proclamations considered in the next chapter, his routine speeches to the NAACP, and an assortment of unceremonious exchanges. Over time, he became increasingly forthright. When asked in 2008 if his daughters should benefit from affirmative action measures, Obama shrewdly responded that they should not be afforded “preferential” treatment. In the same year, he also did not endorse reparations. Yet, in an interview with the New Yorker in his last year as president, he opined that “racial preferences” should be applied in colleges and universities. Deciphering and untangling Obama’s views of black history is a challenging endeavor.
This task is not made any easier by the fact that Obama delivered thousands of speeches and remarks on the eve of, and during, his presidency. Frederick C. Harris has reasonably cautioned and criticized those who have attempted to pry too deeply into Obama’s mind, “the armchair psychologizing of Obama that too often passes for serious political analysis” as he puts it. “Trying to dig into the inner thoughts of the president’s view on race is at best left to presidential historians who, as time passes, will have the benefit of primary sources and the distance of time to reflect on Obama’s views,” Harris argues.18
Nevertheless, in order to unravel and appreciate Obama’s varied renditions of black history, I argue that it is crucial to excavate his inner thoughts and strategies by closely reading his speeches and placing them within their proper contexts, paying special attention to his particular audience, actual and intended. In this sense, I engage in African American intellectual history, a subspecialty of black history that in some measure seeks to get into the minds and decipher the ideas of historical characters.
Though labeling Obama a “black leader” in the conventional sense is misleading, he can be considered among and compared with the pantheon of lionized African American icons. The similarities between Booker T. Washington (arguably the most powerful black leader during the Progressive Era) and Obama are remarkably appreciable.
OF MR. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON AND OBAMA
In one of the two most famous and enduring essays in The Souls of Black Folk, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” Du Bois broke his silence and publically lashed out against Washington for asking African Americans to renounce political power, civil rights, and “higher” (liberal arts) education. He also grouped Washington with an earlier tradition of black leadership that championed a similar approach of “conciliation” and “submission.”19
Following in the footsteps of the “father of the black intelligentsia,” writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have drawn parallels between Washington and successive generations of so-called “conservative” black leaders and (in the case of Adolph Reed Jr.) popular black public intellectuals of the 1990s. Such comparisons of black spokespersons from distinctly different historical epochs are now fairly commonplace. Cross-generational juxtapositions can be wrought by oversimplifications, sometimes leading students of history to give in to historic recurrence (“history repeats itself”). Still, such imaginative exercises speak to the ubiquitous nature
