A year after Barack Obama was inaugurated as America’s first black president, the nation has been gripped by a startling new reality: a cascading backlash of racially tinged anti-Obama sentiment. The breadth of antagonists has been wide: the 9/12 marchers against health-care reform brandishing signs labeling the president a traitor (and some carrying Confederate flags); Tea Party rallies objecting (sometimes with racial slurs) to real and imagined tax increases; a birther movement that insists (despite all evidence to the contrary) that Obama was born in Kenya.
Dreams that Obama’s election would usher in a post-racial age in America have faltered just as quickly as hopes that his administration would inspire an era of post-partisanship. The New York Times offered one of many recent postmortems on his first year in office with a story whose headline, “The President Whose Words Once Soared,” judged the administration disappointing.
Lost amid the angry polemics, ad hominem attacks, and mournful eulogies for wasted opportunity is the way in which Obama’s supporters and detractors missed larger warning signs about race and democracy within the maelstrom of a dizzyingly historic election season. During that period, Obama faced numerous questions about America’s willingness to elect an African-American president. Yet no one questioned how, if elected, we would respond if the once-unthinkable actually occurred. We are now finding out, and the results have been, at best, mixed.
By September, strains of Obama criticism had grown so strident that former President Jimmy Carter publicly declared that racism lay behind them. The White House distanced itself from Carter’s remarks, and conservatives pilloried them as an attempt to stifle legitimate criticism.
But we cannot avoid the issue: The fact that the criticisms are, in small and large ways, refracted through a racial prism supports the contention of the Harvard University sociologist Orlando Patterson that Obama represents “the fundamental paradoxes of race in America.” Those begin with a democracy founded on slavery and extend to our contemporary moment, when, despite the election of a black president, a disproportionate number of African-Americans languish in prison, are unemployed, and have inadequate access to good schools and health care. The ugly segregation of the Jim Crow era has receded to a cultural racism wherein black and white people still harbor prejudices, misunderstanding, and ambivalence about the racial past, present, and future.
Racial anger directed at Obama stems, in part, from the idea that his election would end racism. In retrospect the idea has proved not only premature but foolish. Rather than embracing Obama’s victory as a significant (and, yes, historic) step along America’s long road toward racial reconciliation and equality, many interpreted the achievement as proof that the nation had been purged of its original sin of racial slavery.
Obama’s own rhetoric has at times buttressed that postracial narrative. When his wife, Michelle, asked him during a 2006 conversation why he should run for president, he replied, “When I take that oath of office, there will be kids all over this country who don’t really think that all paths are open to them, who will believe they can be anything they want to be.” Indeed, Obama’s campaign embraced the symbolic power of his candidacy while largely sidestepping America’s racial past. When the candidate did confront the sordid legacy of slavery, in a speech in Philadelphia, he did so as much out of political expediency (his former pastor’s fiery remarks denouncing America had threatened to derail Obama’s candidacy) as genuine concern for healing the nation’s racial divide.
Our inability to craft a language to deal with the complexities of having a black president should come as no surprise to Americans or Obama. We have always been loath to forthrightly discuss racial matters. National conversations about race flare up periodically in the aftermath of racially charged violence and controversies, and occasionally during all-too-rare moments of racial triumph and reconciliation.
In a way, our national reluctance to squarely confront race is rooted in the extraordinary victories achieved from 1954 to 1965, the years that are rightly considered, by scholars and the larger public, as the civil-rights movement’s heroic period. To much of the public, that era featured a movement for citizenship and voting rights led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s principled commitment to nonviolence. In Obama’s best-selling memoir, Dreams From My Father, he embraced such robust idealism and political courage and plainly linked his activities as a community organizer in Chicago during the 1980s to the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s. Community organizing, like the civil-rights efforts, he said, provided a framework in which individual impulses could be elevated to a higher plane of collective empowerment. With a national holiday and a soon-to-be-built statue on the National Mall, in Washington, King continues to loom large over the civil-rights era, seen as a modern-day prophet who extolled the convergence of the nation’s political and moral imperatives. In fact, as historians have documented, it was less-glamorous figures who made King’s dream possible.
Thousands of students, from elementary schools to colleges, embarked on a political crusade in the early 1960s that fundamentally changed American democracy. The sit-in movement ignited the direct-action phase of the civil-rights movement and inspired the Freedom Rides. It also pushed King into a more boldly confrontational posture. Southern black sharecroppers risked their lives and property (aided by Northern allies, in a largely untold story) in search of citizenship rights that reporters (then and now) too often boiled down to the vote. That has flattened our understanding of the era and narrowed the way in which the movement sought to broaden the contours of American democracy beyond the ballot, and included far-reaching (and still unresolved) debates about poverty, employment, prisons, health care, education, and war.
Obama’s vision of American democracy fits squarely within a simplified story of the civil-rights era that primarily emphasizes its successes. “In the sit-ins, the marches, the jailhouse songs, I saw the African-American community becoming more than just the place where you’d been born or the house where you’d been raised,” he wrote. Work as a community organizer required “shared sacrifice” and a belief that “the larger American community, black, white, and brown” could remake itself. It was, Obama recalled, “a promise of collective redemption.”
Collective redemption cannot be purchased at the price of ignoring the real story of a complex and scattered civil-rights movement—one that was, at its core, a movement for radical democracy. Struggles for racial justice formed beachheads for antiwar protest, labor activism, and women’s demands for equality in virtually every major American city. Scholars are increasingly recognizing that aspect of the movement, especially in documenting King’s latter-day antiwar activism and Poor People’s Campaign, but it’s a side that the majority of Americans still largely ignore.
The civil-rights era also featured more-strident voices, like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, who identified with black-power militancy. In spite of their very public criticism of American society, black-power militants attempted to transform democracy through bruising street protests, pragmatic antipoverty activism, and participation in local elections. They confronted American democracy’s jagged edges and, in the process, raised the stakes for national race relations. At times that led to rancorous debates with civil-rights activists, but just as often it featured unlikely alliances. And at times it created a backlash within a society that preferred not to confront questions about race, poverty, and democracy.
America’s journey from the militancy of the black-power era to Obama’s presidency defies the narratives of linear democratic and racial progress that initially greeted his election. The creeping racial anxiety surrounding the Obama administration’s domestic and foreign-policy agenda, lingering doubts about Obama’s patriotism and commitment to America’s military, and racially charged caricatures of the first black president attest to that. The fact that Obama has received an unprecedented number of death threats, coupled with the seemingly increased energy and visibility of extremist right-wing groups and increased gun sales, offers another, less often discussed, face of American society.
The civil-rights movement’s heroic period never followed a simple narrative arc that saw good triumph over evil, integration defeat Jim Crow, and national unity overcome ancient and bitter racial and sectional divisions. Instead it lurched, day by day, toward both remarkable victories and incremental measures, all the while enduring unexpected setbacks and unanticipated crises.
Obama’s stated belief that his election would present a more positive image of America globally has proved true. Much of his administration’s foreign-policy agenda has been embraced abroad. But America’s embrace of Obama, like our national civil-rights story, is more complicated. Despite receiving a record number of popular votes, the president faces a backlash that, again paralleling the civil-rights era, is at least partially rooted in race and culture. While some opponents of Obama, like past critics of civil-rights legislation, oppose him on race-neutral grounds, the net effect serves to stoke feelings of racial division rather than start a robust national conversation about race and democracy, one that is needed now more than ever.
While presidential leadership on race relations no doubt matters (as seen in the actions of Obama’s own presidential hero, Abraham Lincoln, and in the civil-rights advocacy of Lyndon B. Johnson), it may be too much to ask the nation’s first black president to also occupy the role as racial healer-in-chief. The burden instead falls on ordinary citizens, as well as educators and civic leaders, to use this extraordinary opportunity to finally jump-start a national discussion that, while offering no easy solutions or fantasies of postracial enlightenment, might help to foster an environment whose robust and serious engagement with issues of race and democracy will stand in marked contrast to the unfortunate politics of race-baiting and reaction that we have been witness to over the past year.
