delivers this line not knowing what you do: that James Earl Ray will be checking out of the New Rebel Motel in the morning and moving over to room 5B at Bessie Brewer’s boardinghouse on South Main. It is a room overlooking Mulberry Street, whose window Dr. King can see from the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, and whose occupant can likewise see him.
More serious than a baseball game, less so than the prelude to assassination, it is also how I feel when I watch the video from Grant Park in Chicago on November 4, 2008. It is difficult to gaze upon the multiracial crowd as they cheer the announcement that Barack Obama has just been elected president. It is more challenging still when his family, Michelle and Sasha and Malia, take the stage with him, because unlike them, I know what’s coming after. Obama, unlike Kennedy, will leave office upright, but as for the nation? That is a very different matter.
And yet, it is worth remembering that this scene happened. Surely there is a lesson here, even if it may be hard to discern at times. At least by now, we should know what the lesson isn’t, and perhaps that’s just as good for our purposes.
Immediately after Obama’s victory, a strange excitement befell a portion of white America. For the far right, the response was anger, but for this other group—relatively liberal and well-meaning—the reaction was different. Traveling through the Detroit airport the next day, I recall seeing white women going up to random black people whom they did not know and hugging them. From their behavior, one would have thought the election hadn’t been merely a victory for Barack Obama, Senator from Illinois, but also for Barack Obama, close friend of Denise, the Delta gate agent who was due some personal congratulations.
Trying not to be too cynical, I allowed that maybe these white folks were just cognizant of the overwhelming support Obama had received from black voters, and the sense that the historicity of the moment made it something to celebrate. And if they were Obama supporters, perhaps this was simply a clumsy but heartfelt attempt at racial ecumenism. But as the months ticked by, it became apparent the excitement wasn’t just about Obama. It was about a sense many seemed to have that with the victory of our first black president, the nation had become “post-racial” and fulfilled its promise.
Indeed, there had been stirrings of this for months. A year before the election, when Obama wasn’t even the front-runner, a few of his supporters were quoted in the Washington Post saying that what they liked about their candidate was that he “transcended” race, and didn’t have “the baggage of the civil rights movement.” It is hard to imagine why any Democratic voter in 2008 would consider civil rights activism “baggage,” let alone of an unseemly variety, but there it was. Then there was the poll taken a month or so before election night in which at least a quarter of white voters who admitted holding racist stereotypes of blacks as a group, insisted they were going to vote for Obama. He would be their political Cliff Huxtable, their black friend, their “I’m not a racist” card. It was a card they would play many times in years to come.
To these folks, Obama’s victory was a deliverance if not from racism itself, then at least from the conversation about it, or so they hoped. America’s never-ending dialogue about racism and its legacy could come to an end, or so they believed. This was the message from conservative pundits, unhappy about the election but prepared to use it to paper over ongoing racial divisions. So too was it believed by many a liberal, and not only white ones. Oprah Winfrey insisted that something “big and bold” had happened. Will Smith said Obama’s victory meant there were no more excuses for black people. If he could become president, Smith insisted, “don’t tell me you can’t get a job at the department store.”
It would not be long before the nation would be brought back to reality.
The essays in this section span the eight years of the Obama presidency and touch on the racial flashpoints that bookended his time in office. I travel from election night through the Tea Party backlash, and end with essays examining two of the most important racial events during his time in office—the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman and the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014. In this section I also explore the death of Osama bin Laden and the problematic nature of the national celebration, as well as Obama’s own comments about the event. Although not a racial story per se, given the way in which the United States has racialized Islam and terrorism, it feels as though there is a subtext to the killing of bin Laden that calls for the inclusion of this piece.
Obviously, more could be said about race in the Obama era, and many of the essays in later sections will touch on some of that. But these pieces reflect the tenor of the time, from the Tea Party uprising to the birth of Black Lives Matter. As I explained in my 2012 book, Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority, the Obama presidency, combined with economic collapse and significant cultural and demographic change, produced a perfect storm of white racial anxiety. That storm would wreak considerable havoc, culminating in the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
We’ll get to that soon enough. But for now, just watch the video, and try to forget what you know about the ending.
GOOD, NOW BACK TO WORK
THE MEANING (AND LIMITS) OF THE OBAMA VICTORY
OUR CHILDREN WERE asleep when it was announced last night that Barack Obama had been elected 44th president of the United States. But even if they had been awake they would have found it impossible to understand what had happened. At 5 and 7, they have only the most rudimentary awareness of the larger society, let alone its longstanding racial drama. They cannot comprehend how unlikely this outcome seemed even a year ago, or how absurd the mere suggestion of it would have sounded to their grandparents when their mother and I were the age our kids are now.
Sadly, after gauging reaction from around the web this morning, it is apparent that my children are not the only ones lacking the perspective to appreciate the evening’s events. But at least, given their age, they have an excuse. The same cannot be said for some of my compatriots on the left whose cynicism has already begun to blossom not even twelve hours later, and who insist there is no functional difference between Barack Obama and John McCain, between Democrats and Republicans.
Having been on the left a long time, I’ve long heard some among our ranks insist that we shouldn’t vote, because “the lesser of two evils is still evil.” It’s the kind of statement meant to signal that one has seen through the two-party “duopoly” and won’t be fooled by the Democrats again. The rest of us, they insist, are like battered spouses who refuse to leave their partners, only far less sympathetic. They, on the other hand, are like Julia Roberts in Sleeping With the Enemy, making their break with their tormentor, or like Farrah Fawcett (google her, young folks) in The Burning Bed, prepared to incinerate the whole system in service to their ideological purity.
All of this preciousness would be humorous, were it not so incredibly offensive. Because if you cannot conjure any joy at this moment, or appreciate what it means for millions of black folks who stood in lines for up to seven hours to vote, then your cynicism has become such an encumbrance as to render you useless to the liberation movement. Yes, Obama was a far-from-perfect candidate. Yes, we will have to work hard to hold him accountable. Still, it matters that he, and not McCain and the Christo-fascist Palin, emerged victoriously.
Those who say it doesn’t matter weren’t with me on the south side of Chicago this past week, surrounded by community organizers who go out and do the hard work every day. All of them know that an election is but a tactic in a larger struggle. None will now think their jobs superfluous, due to the election of Barack Obama. But all made it clear that this is the outcome they desired and that it matters. They haven’t the luxury of waiting for the Green Party to become something other than a pathetic caricature, no more able to sustain movement activity than it was eight years ago or will be eight years hence.
