Claude A. Clegg III - The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama

THE BLACK PRESIDENT

HOPE AND FURY IN THE AGE OF OBAMA

CLAUDE A. CLEGG III

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS

Baltimore

2021 Claude A. Clegg III

All rights reserved. Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Johns Hopkins University Press

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Names: Clegg, Claude Andrew, author.

Title: The Black president : hope and fury in the age of Obama / Claude A. Clegg III.

Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020051674 | ISBN 9781421441887 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781421441894 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Obama, Barack. | Obama, BarackPublic opinion. | Obama, BarackRelations with African Americans. | African AmericansPolitics and government. | African AmericansAttitudes. | United StatesRace relationsPolitical aspects. | United StatesPolitics and government2009-2017. | United StatesPublic opinion.

Classification: LCC E907 .C537 2021 | DDC 973.932092dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051674

Frontispiece: Barack Obama in Selma, Alabama, 2015

Cover and interior design by Amanda Weiss

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible.

To the ending of
mans inhumanity to man

ON THE NIGHT OF NOVEMBER 4, 2008, I WATCHED THE US ELECTION returns on CNN while chatting on the phone with a relative in his seventies. We were both engrossed by the prospect of a Black person being voted into the countrys highest office, a feat no one had ever seen. As we talked, suddenly on the TV screen appeared the words BARACK OBAMA ELECTED PRESIDENT. In that surreal moment, we both agreed to get off the phone in order to fully appreciate this unprecedented event.

I would learn later that my older relatives vote for Obama was the first ballot that he had cast in his life. The next time I saw him I asked how he had felt when Obama was elected. I suspected that he was being characteristically guarded in his response when he answered that he did not think that he would see such a day during his lifetime. Curious, I asked, Why not? He mused, I thought that the presidency was a white mans job. I probed further, Why? He retorted with a question: What number president is Obama? I said, Hes number forty-four. How many before him were white men? my relative asked. I conceded, Forty-three. Yep, he answered smugly as he checkmated me, you see, a white mans job. Blacks were not allowed to serve in the White House.

I still reflect on that conversation in thinking about the historic nature of Obamas two-term presidency and how history will eventually measure it. Soon after the 2008 election, I decided to write a book on the Obama White House years, specifically how they were witnessed, experienced, and interpreted by African Americans, his most supportive constituency. As an observer, I knew that this presidency was uniquely historic as it began and unfolded, but as a historian I wondered how to think about it historically just a few years after the Obamas left the White House. Unlike my previous books, the contemporary nature of this project seemed to demand a more flexible and real-time approach to the research and to the question of how the subject matter could eventually be historically construed. To put it a different way, witnessing the Obama presidency while trying to think about it in contextual terms placed me in the position of constructing a historical archive and a historically informed narrative without the benefit of historical hindsight. The real ability to view the Obama administrationin its entiretyin historical terms did not emerge until January 20, 2017, when his successor was sworn in. Consequently, what historians and the general public ultimately judge to be the significant historical outcomes of the Obama presidency will not come into clearest focus for many years hence.

Despite the immediate-term limitations of historical vision, it is imperative that historians bring their contextual tools and scholarly perspectives to bear on the recent past, lest their hesitance allow the interpretive void to be filled by simplistic narratives and disinformation that mislead the public and even corrupt its capacity for understanding events, contemporary and remote. All historical writings and interpretations are subject to later revision and refinement, which ideally benefit the human record; however, popular myths are hard to dislodge once they have gone unchallenged for too long by factual sources and informed reasoning. In this digital age when conspiracy theories, viral propaganda, and accusations of fake news so easily and quickly circulate globally, the grounded work of historians and other serious students of the past becomes all the more relevant and required. These observations thus suggest both the challenges and rewards of this book, which is among the first fully formed historical accounts of Obamas eight years in the White House.

As an interpretative history of the Obama presidency in its entirety, this volume situates the former president in his dynamic, inspirational, yet contentious political context. It captures the America that made Obamas White House years possible, while also rendering the America that resolutely resisted the idea of a Black chief executive, thus making possible the ascent of the most unlikely of his successors. In elucidating the Obama moment in US politics and culture, this book is also, at its core, a sweeping exploration of the Obama presidencys historical environment, impact, and meaning for African Americansthe tens of millions of people from every walk of life who collectively comprised his staunchest supporters and who most starkly experienced both the euphoric triumphs and dispiriting shortcomings of his years in office. In Obamas own words, his White House years were the best of times and worst of times for Black America. This book is vitally concerned with the veracity of this claim, along with how Obama engaged the aspirations, struggles, and disappointments of his most loyal constituency and how representative segments of Black America engaged, experienced, and interpreted his historic presidency.

The history presented here is rooted in three guiding themes. First, in this study I contend that the prolific diversity of Black America resulted in complex, layered, and fractured views and experiences of the Obama presidency and its meaning, ranging from the conflicted ruminations of politicians, academicians, clergy, and cultural figures to the realities of the everyday people who attempted to reconcile the historic election of a Black president with their own desperate struggles to survive the dire economic crises that marked his time in office. Second, I argue that the tension between the universalist, seemingly race-neutral policy prescriptions of the Obama administration and the adamant demands by some Black people for more targeted relief for African Americans suffering disproportionately from the effects of the Great Recession, institutional racism, and general marginalization was a persistent feature of the Obama years, and that this tension shaped how many view his White House tenure and eventual legacy. Third, I assert that Obama did, in fact, deploy the substance and symbolism of his office to forthrightly address the challenges and longings of African Americans in significant ways, though he typically couched such attention in official packaging and language meant to avoid conveying a racial favoritism that might offend white supporters and onlookers. As some of his critics regularly pointed out, Obama did occasionally use public platitudes and cultural signification to soothe Black pain and placate dissenters. However, even these gestures were fraught with their own share of potential dangers in the midst of the racial antagonisms and economic angst that characterized his time in the Oval Office.