Читать книгу Reclaiming the Black Past - Pero G. Dagbovie - Страница 7

In what ways did Barack Obama conceptualize African American history during his presidential terms? How did he mull over black history in front of his different audiences and represent specific episodes in black history at key moments and in major speeches, such as his “A More Perfect Union” oration in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008? What types of code-switching did Obama engage in when discussing black history or policies, such as affirmative action, that have concrete historical antecedents? In what particular manners does his standing and approach as a black trailblazer / black “first” and leader compare with similar black luminaries from the past? How did Obama portray and make sense of hip-hop within the context of African American history and culture?

Such inquiries guide what I consider in this chapter. As a historian of black intellectual thought, I prioritize analyzing Obama as an intellectual and strive to unpack his carefully calculated thoughts about and characterizations of black history.

A 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 the presidency, countless journalists, biographers, scholars, social commentators, and polemicists have published books on various dimensions of Barack Obama’s life, thought, and presidency. This steady flow of published writings has been inextricably bound to Obama’s evolving leadership strategies and events and controversies that have characterized and shaped his governance. It seems that no stone has been left unturned; all perspectives have been publicized in some venue or another. It is not an overstatement to conjecture that Obama’s presidency has been a lifeline for scores of academic careers.

More than any other single topic, the subject of Obama and race has been in vogue—and is still all the rage—among scholars and political pundits alike. After all, as Dyson has observed, “Race is the defining feature of our forty-fourth president’s two terms in office.”⁷ Simply put, the “Obama phenomenon” cannot be adequately deciphered without understanding, if not centering, the meaning and history of race and the African American struggle in the United States. For the last eight years, many African American intellectuals, in particular, have understood this and some have produced excellent essays and books. Moreover, leading African American Studies journals, such as The Black Scholar and The Journal of Black Studies, have published “special issues” on the meaning of Obama’s presidency and race.

In 2016 alone, the last year of Obama’s second term in office, books on Obama and race continued to multiply. Such books include Dyson’s wide-reaching and penetrating The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race, political scientist and Africana Studies scholar Melanye T. Price’s The Race Whisperer: Barack Obama and the Political Uses of Race, and Afrocentric pioneer Molefi Kete Asante’s provocatively entitled Lynching Barack Obama: How Whites Tried to String Up the President. Even comedian D. L. Hughley has joined the fray by writing Black Man, White House: An Oral History of the Obama Years. The January/February 2017 issue of The Atlantic features Ta-Nehisi Coates’s lengthy and somber appraisal of Obama’s years in office, “My President Was Black: A History of the First African American in the White House—And What Comes Next” and in October 2017, Coates’ contemplative We Were Eight Yearts in Power: An American Tragedy was released.

Thanks to numerous wordsmiths and scholars, we’ve learned a great deal about the ways in which race profoundly shaped Obama’s presidency and influenced his calculated stance toward African Americans. Much can also be learned, I argue, by looking at how Obama has interpreted, portrayed, sampled from, and even manipulated African American history. Obama’s relationship to African American history is kaleidoscopic. Yet Obama scholars have virtually ignored this subject, showing very little interest in his interpretation and approach to black history.

This may have something to do with the fact that professional historians, as a whole, have remained relatively quiet about the “Obama phenomenon.” While recent editions of popular African American history textbooks like The African-American Odyssey and From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans discuss Obama’s presidency within the general context of black life during the twenty-first century (both books also unsurprisingly feature emblematic images of Obama on covers of recent editions), only a few professional historians—Thomas J. Sugrue, William Jelani Cobb, and Peniel E. Joseph—published book-length studies focusing on Obama while he was still in office. Ever so hip to the historical moment that they were witnessing, these historians, whose books were all published in 2010, partook in the public intellectual enterprise and the much-needed writing of contemporary history.

In his controversial 2017 Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, historian David J. Garrow approaches Obama in a much different manner than Sugrue, Cobb, or Joseph. Garrow’s study is an exhaustive biography that drags on for close to 1,500 pages and details Obama’s political and personal life, putting a spotlight on his sex life and relationship with one former love interest in particular. Unlike Sugrue, Cobb, and Joseph who wrote about Obama in the moment, Garrow worked on his biography for close to a decade and even shared drafts of it with Obama.

Sugrue dubbed Obama “the nation’s most influential historian of race and civil rights.” Wearing the hat of biographer, Sugrue charts how Obama’s keen appreciation and interpretation of race, African American history, and the black freedom struggle transformed from his childhood through the beginning of his first term as president. He ultimately argues that Obama, the politician, had to adjust his treatment of black history by the time that he announced his candidacy for the US Senate. “Obama read widely in civil rights history; he taught antidiscrimination law; and he steeped himself in the historical and scholarly literature on race, poverty, and inequality,” Sugrue observed. “This was a history he knew better than all but a handful of Americans. But none of that history was particularly useful for an ambitious politician. Situating himself in a current of civil rights history that emphasized its radical currents would be political suicide.”⁸ Instead, Sugrue suggests, Obama memorialized benign versions of the black past in order to endear himself to white voters.

A passionate Black Power era aficionado, Joseph examines the election of Obama as the byproduct of decades of vigorous black political mobilization and activism. Ergo, “Obama’s climb to the top of American politics does not so much illustrate the end but rather the evolution” of a black politics that underwent significant transformations during the post–World War II era, especially during the highly contested and pigeonholed Black Power era. In Joseph’s estimation, the “Obama phenomenon” would not have existed without the Black Power era. Simply put, “Barack Obama is a direct beneficiary of this rich legacy,” a legacy that he perhaps consciously samples from but never really fully welcomed with open arms. Often drawing comparisons between Obama’s nuanced approach to dealing with America’s shameful racial history and democratic ideals and the strategies of civil rights activists as well as grassroots, militant champions of Black Power, Joseph repeatedly emphasizes that Obama “enjoyed the benefits of both the civil rights and Black Power movements while maintaining a safe distance from both.”⁹

Sugrue maintains that Obama was intimately informed by the black freedom struggle of the 1960s and 1970s and possessed an informed conceptualization of Black Power and black history more generally at least a decade prior to announcing his decision to run for president. By contrast, Joseph deduces that for Obama, the Black Power crusade “represents a kind of racial anachronism” and that Obama, like the general American (white) public, possessed a flawed understanding of this pivotal movement. This is especially intriguing because the discussions of race in American society that emerged during what has come to be known as “The Age of Obama” were reminiscent of those sparked during the Black Power era. Obama often, Joseph argues, avoided calling for “race-based solutions to historical discrimination” and “displays a lack of awareness of history that is at times stunning.”¹⁰ Joseph plays up the differences between Obama and Black Power era activists by taking notice of how many of these former militants were skeptical of and even opposed to Obama during his first presidential campaign. Still and all, Joseph does concede that Obama did in certain instances attempt to come face to face with the painful history of the oppression of African Americans during slavery and Jim Crow segregation.

Realizing that the immediate aftermath of election 2008 was too early to wholly historicize and evaluate Obama’s foray into the White House, historian and op-ed columnist Jelani Cobb foreshadowed Dyson’s The Black Presidency. Cobb’s study offers a balanced appraisal of the evolution and early stages of the “Obama phenomenon.” Like Dyson, who reminisces about his scatterings of interactions with President Obama, Cobb injects his own experiences into his narratives, vignettes that speak directly to the hip-hop generation. A salient phrase from Obama’s 2009 inaugural speech serves as a useful point of departure for Cobb’s portrayal of Obama: “There is not a black America or a white America … there is the United States of America.”¹¹

Of particular noteworthiness, Cobb explores and unpacks how Obama’s diplomatic and multidimensional oratory skills simultaneously galvanized blacks and whites, his “tortured relationship” with Jesse Jackson and other members of the “civil rights old-boy network,” how Obama’s candidacy represented a “death knell for civil rights–era leadership” while energizing the often maligned hip-hop generation, the Obamafication of US popular culture, the debates surrounding Obama’s biracial identity and 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 of race in American culture, the enduring nature of America’s consistent mistreatment of black people, and the lingering core and soul of particular strategies for combatting the oppression of black people.

Many scholars have compared Obama with Martin Luther King Jr. and other towering African American historical icons. For instance, Jelani Cobb has likened parts of Obama’s 1995 autobiography to Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and has pointed out the “historical, personal, and political” connections between Obama and Jesse Jackson. Similarly, Peniel Joseph has identified “striking biographical and political parallels” between Malcolm X and Obama. More than a few emcees have grouped Obama with civil rights icons like Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and King. In his classic track “My President,” Jeezy keenly associated Booker T. Washington, his “homie,” with Obama as members of the black first club. Perhaps Obama would not have been opposed to The Snowman’s observations.

Obama’s highest praise was reserved for John Lewis and King, but he did brand Washington “the leader of a growing civil rights movement,” extolling his discipline, commitment to education as a compulsory passageway to social mobility, and work ethic. “Booker T. Washington ran a tight ship,” he told the 2011 graduates of Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis, Tennessee. Playing historian, Obama created a humorous yet lucid and relatable anecdote about the iconic Washington:

He’d ride the train to Tuskegee and scare some of the new students. This is before YouTube and TMZ, so the kids didn’t recognize him. He’d walk up to them and say, “Oh, you’re heading to Tuskegee. I heard the work there is hard. I heard they give the students too much to do. I hear the food is terrible. You probably won’t last three months.” But the students would reply they weren’t afraid of hard work. They were going to complete their studies no matter what Booker T. Washington threw at them. And in that way, he prepared them—because life will throw some things at you.²⁰

Though they obviously lived during distinctly different times, the lives of Washington and Obama mirror each other in some interesting manners that merit exploration.

To begin, both are biracial, and this complex and at times overly theorized identity lead their contemporaries and biographers to psychoanalyze them, especially in Obama’s case. Both carefully constructed personal histories for public consumption in which they explained how they conceived their peculiar identities. In his widely selling neo-slave narrative Up From Slavery (1901) and his other autobiographies like The Story of My Life and Work (1900) and My Larger Education (1911), Washington rooted his identity in slavery and southern black culture while also, for his white readership, celebrating how white culture positively impacted him. In Dreams from My Father (1995), Obama grappled with how he discovered his blackness while being raised by his progressive white mother and her parents in Indonesia and Hawaii.

Both Washington and Obama were not nurtured by their biological fathers. Washington’s father was reportedly a white man who most likely took advantage of his enslaved mother. Obama’s parents divorced when he was a toddler and his Kenyan father, who died when Obama was twenty-one years old, did not play an active role in his son’s life. Psychologists could claim that, as young men, they longed and searched for father figures. Both found surrogates in elder white men when they were young—Hampton Institute’s founder and Civil War veteran S. C. Armstrong in Washington’s case; with Obama, his maternal grandfather and World War II veteran Stanley Armour Dunham.

On average, Washington traveled six months out of every year. Even so, family was an important dimension of his life. He maintained connections with his immediate family, enjoyed spending time with his children, and embraced the companionship that he shared with his three wives—he outlived his first two wives, Fannie Norton Smith and Olivia Davidson. His third wife, who he married in 1893, Margaret James Murray, served as the “First Lady” of Tuskegee until Washington’s death. She was also a leader in her own right, focusing her energies on matters concerning black women in organizations like the Tuskegee Women’s Club and the National Association of Colored Women.

“It just so happens that I’m fortunate enough to be surrounded by women. They’re the most important people in my life,” Obama wrote candidly in an essay in MORE magazine in 2015. “They’re the ones who’ve shaped me the most. In this job, they are my sanctuary.” Obama testified how he makes it his duty to frequently eat dinner with the family and dubbed First Lady Michelle Obama “the rock” of the family who truly sustains him.²¹ Like other first ladies, Mrs. Obama was her husband’s political partner and, like Margaret Murray Washington, she initiated many programs for African American women and girls.

Washington and Obama were both thrust into realms of leadership quite rapidly, causing onlookers to wonder, “How did that happen?” Relatively unknown on the national scale until more than a decade after he founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in 1881, Washington became black America’s sanctioned-by-whites leader in 1895 following the death of former slave and elder statesman Frederick Douglass and the delivery of his famous “Atlanta Compromise” oration in Atlanta, Georgia. More of a symbolic leader of black America than Washington, Obama rapidly rose through the ranks before officially announcing his candidacy for president on February 10, 2007.

Historians have not had too much trouble identifying black messiah leader(s) in each generation or major historical phase in the African American experience who not only achieved reverence from the black masses, but also the attention and support of white Americans. Washington and Obama were the most powerful black leaders of their respective times. In 1947, historian John Hope Franklin christened the period from 1895 until 1915 (the year of Washington’s death) “The Age of Booker T. Washington.” Analogously, the eight years of Obama’s presidency are routinely called “The Age of Obama.” Those historical personalities who have eras named after them have celebrity status. Washington and Obama both achieved megastar status, something usually reserved for actors, actresses, musicians, and athletes. As historian Michael Bieze has convincingly argued, Washington was truly a celebrity with his own sophisticated branding and propaganda. After he was elected president, “Obamamania”—the state of being a particularly enthusiastic supporter of Obama—swept across the nation.²²

That Washington and Obama had their fair share of detractors and critics within the collective black community and among segments of white America is striking. Washington was attacked by major black leaders of the Progressive Era like Du Bois and his colleagues in the short-lived Niagara Movement, Guardian editor William Monroe Trotter, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, and others. Du Bois and company cried out for Washington to publicly denounce multileveled attacks on blacks’ human and civil rights. “The Intellectuals,” as Washington referred to his faultfinders, echoed some of the concerns raised by Obama’s most fervent critics. Similarly, Cornel West, Tavis Smiley, Julianne Malveaux, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Eric Dyson, and at one time Jesse Jackson and other civil rights veterans, among others, summoned Obama to abandon his strategy of race neutrality.

Although Washington’s and Obama’s unique posts as black leaders were dependent upon white patronage, both were caricatured, vilified, and attacked by white supremacists. Washington was demonized as being a black nationalist by The Clansman author Thomas Dixon Jr., was regularly called a “darkey” and “coon” by racist white southerners, was threatened so much that he at one point hired a private patrol to protect him, and was even brutally beaten by a white man in New York City in 1911.

Obama and Jesse Jackson are the only presidential candidates to have received death threats before receiving a nomination from their party.²³ From 2007 until 2017, Obama was the target of assassination attempts and purported conspiracies. Moreover, one only need to type Obama into any Internet search engine to uncover countless hateful and racist depictions of him.

The most overriding connection between Washington and Obama is conspicuous, yet largely overlooked: by virtue of being representatives of “the race,” or black leaders whose power-broking capital and abilities were more often than not subject to white approval and backing, they were compelled to master the art of communicating with two primary audiences—black and white America—separately and in some cases simultaneously. As they recounted in their autobiographies, this unique skill was something that they developed in their early years.

When interfacing with predominantly white audiences in the spoken and written word, Washington presented himself as a humble, nonthreatening, and compliant mouthpiece for black America. He personified the quintessential “safe Negro” leader. In Up From Slavery, he rewrote black history by labeling slavery a school for those in bondage, he claimed that the Ku Klux Klan no longer existed in 1901, he pandered to wealthy white philanthropists, he extolled the progress of US race relations since Reconstruction, and he publicized his own Horatio Alger tale as living evidence that all blacks descended from slaves could go on to accomplish great things.

In the multilayered, five-minute speech that he delivered on September 18, 1895, at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, Washington offered temporary solutions to the so-called “Negro Problem” that did not disrupt the white South’s racial hierarchy. He meekly instructed blacks to remain in the South, to accept their positions as agricultural laborers, to obey the South’s convoluted system of racial etiquette in the public sphere, to clinch onto vocational and industrial education, and to place notions of political and social equality on the back burner. Washington reassured southern whites that they would be “surrounded by the most patient, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world had seen” and accepted segregation, famously declaring: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet, one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”²⁴

Be that as it may, when holding court with students in the Tuskegee Chapel during his routine “Sunday Evening Talks” or sermonizing to black Southerners during his whistle-stop speeches or educational tours from 1908 until 1912 that historian David M. Jackson meticulously sifted through, Washington propagated fundamental tenets of black nationalism—self-help, self-determination, economic independence, and perseverance. Like all influential black leaders of his times, he also believed in racial uplift and the politics of respectability.

The founder of Tuskegee Institute was bilingual, a master code-switcher who was well-versed in hamming it up with whites who believed in black inferiority; connecting with politicians (from congressmen to US presidents); keeping it real with poor black southerners; debating with his adversaries; and captivating his supporters abroad.

Linguists H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman are spot on in arguing that Obama’s “ability to style-shift is one of his most compelling and remarkable linguistic abilities.” They note that he knew when to speak ‘‘familiarly Black.’’²⁵ To be sure, in order to become the bona fide “first black president,” Obama was compelled to study, get a grip on, and eventually master the art of consolidating and style-shifting, while communicating with black and white Americans. A mature chameleon, he calibrated his language and swag daily.

More important (and like Washington before him), Obama—who deliberately and logically avoided discussing issues of race and the unfavorable status of black America as much as possible during his campaigning and presidency—had to speak simultaneously to black and white America (to say nothing of other groups) about sensitive past and present racial matters. In perhaps the most consequential speech of his political career, “A More Perfect Union” (2008), Obama masterfully appeased large segments of both black and white listeners. In a sense, this speech foreshadowed Obama’s future stratagem for coming to grips with issues of race and dreadful episodes in black history to white listeners.

Still, in numerous speeches that he delivered to predominantly black audiences, such as the NAACP, African American congregations, students at historically black colleges and universities, and impromptu meetings with African Americans, Obama spoke “familiarly Black” and more frankly revisited the black past and its lingering influence on African Americans’ contemporary status. In speaking “familiarly Black,” as Washington did when kicking it with black farmers, Obama also echoed the “pick yourself up by your own bootstraps” ethos and respectability politics of Washington and his contemporaries.

When deciphering Obama’s rendering of African American history, as is the case with Washington and other crossover black leaders, one thing is crystal clear: it is essential to recognize to whom he was speaking and the specific circumstances and context.

REMIXING BLACK HISTORY: HISTORICAL DEBTS, MEMORIES, AND REVIVALISM

While running for the US Senate in Illinois, Obama delivered a memorable keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Boston in which he endorsed the then US senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry, in his quest to become the next commander-in-chief of the United States. While serving in the Illinois Senate from 1997 until 2004, Obama delivered numerous speeches, yet with this well-rehearsed seventeen-minute talk he captured notable attention, truly captivating and electrifying his audience. It marked a turning point in his political career. Three years later, on February 10, 2007, he officially announced his candidacy for President of the United States. From this point on, he further honed his prowess as an orator by delivering thousands of different speeches.

In terms of substance, subject matter, and rhetorical style, Obama adjusted and modified his speeches based upon the racial and generational makeup of his targeted audiences. Certain features stand out when reading, listening to, or watching talks that he gave to predominantly white and black audiences and multiracial crowds. Obama offered these distinct audiences discrete and in some cases mismatched and conflicting depictions and interpretations of African American history.

In his 2004 DNC keynote address, for instance, he famously declared: “There’s not a black America and white America …” He also intimated to his largely white audience that he was the epitome of the ever so elusive “American Dream” and owed a debt to his nation. “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all those who came before me, and that in no other country on earth is my story even possible.”²⁶ Compare this to other speeches that Obama bequeathed unto his African American audiences and one immediately notices a different modus operandi. “And for most of this country’s past, we in the African American community have been at the receiving end of man’s inhumanity,” Obama preached to the congregation—his “brothers and sisters” as he affectionately called his eager spectators—at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, ten months before he was elected President of the United States.²⁷ Similarly, in many heart-to-hearts with overlapping generations of African Americans, Obama emphasized that his success was due to the sacrifices of famous and uncelebrated black civil rights activists, that he indeed stood on the “shoulders of giants.”

Of the many speeches that Obama delivered to predominantly black audiences, his first keynote address at a “Bloody Sunday” commemoration on March 4, 2007, at Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama, was one of his most history-centric. It was in this sermonlike address that Obama established his often-cited discussion of the Moses and Joshua generations. The fact that Obama transmitted such an account in a black church is not surprising. He knew the importance of the black church, “our beating heart,” as a conduit of black liberation theology and a vital movement center. His former mentor, pastor emeritus of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, taught him this. In late June 2015 while reflecting upon the murder of Reverend Clementa Pinckney of Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Obama gave prominence to the black church. “The church is and always has been at the center of African-American life—a place to call our own in a too often hostile world, a sanctuary from so many hardships.” All too often, however, black churches were terrorized as well. For him, the “Charleston Church Massacre” on June 17, 2015, “was an act that drew upon a long history of bombs and arson and shots fired at churches, not random, but as a means of control, a way to terrorize and oppress.”²⁸

Obama launched into his “Bloody Sunday” address by praising Congressman John Lewis, C. T. Vivian, and other members of the civil rights, or Moses, generation who paved the way for him. “It is because they marched that I stand before you today,” Obama reiterated. After validating his Afro-diasporic blackness by drawing stark parallels between the British colonial system that oppressed his Kenyan grandfather and Jim Crow segregation in the United States (“Sound familiar?”), Obama underscored that the Joshua generation—those who came of age after the “classic” phase of the civil rights movement—owed a “debt,” conceivably unrepayable, to their selfless predecessors.

Obama evoked a knowledge of the black past as a prerequisite for the Joshua generation’s responsibility to “fulfill that legacy.” He pronounced:

I think that we’re always going to be looking back, but there are at least a few suggestions that I would have in terms of how we might fulfill that enormous legacy. The first is to recognize our history. John Lewis talked about why we’re here today. But I worry sometimes—we’ve got black history month, we come down and march every year, once a year. We occasionally celebrate the events of the civil rights movement, we celebrate Dr. King’s birthday, but it strikes me that understanding our history and knowing what it means, is an everyday activity.²⁹

He then enumerated the lingering problems facing the collective black community, from educational inequities to poverty to low-quality health conditions. Central to Obama’s homily was his belief that the Moses generation set unattainable standards for everything from social and political activism to perceptions of “sacrifice,” “dignity,” “hard work and discipline,” and morality. In doing so, upon more than a few occasions, he chastised young black people, mainly members of the millennial hip-hop generation. “I can’t say for certain that we have instilled that same sense of moral clarity and purpose in this generation,” Obama lamented as he joined forces with the Moses generation and beseeched the Joshua generation to become politically active and to “do for ourselves.”

There are discernable patterns and themes concerning the meaning, utility, and application of black history from Obama’s 2007 “Bloody Sunday” oration that would continue to surface in his future talks to black listeners. When sounding off to his “brothers and sisters,” Obama positioned civil rights activists (the Moses generation) as being the progenitors and standard bearers of the long black freedom struggle, he situated himself within the history of black leadership, he drew connections between the past and the present, he commented on habitual obstacles that African Americans overcame, and he argued that the contemporary black community owed a debt to the past. Still, Obama often sidestepped indicting white America for its mistreatment of African Americans before black audiences.

A few exceptions stand out. On May 5, 2007, and June 5, 2007, Obama spoke to black mayors in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and black ministers in Hampton, Virginia, respectively. In both of these speeches, Obama denounced white America’s mistreatment of black people. Reflecting upon the beating of Rodney King and the riots that ensued in Los Angeles, he candidly remarked: “Much of what we saw on our television screens 15 years ago was Los Angeles expressing a lingering, ongoing, pervasive legacy—a tragic legacy out of the tragic history this country has never fully come to terms with.” Obama added that Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath was “a powerful metaphor for what’s gone on for generations.” Throughout these talks, Obama outlined the major problems facing black Americans and US society as a whole, called for collective action, and concluded by highlighting the value of historical memory—“We won’t forget where we came from. We won’t forget what happened nineteen months ago, fifteen years ago, two hundred years ago.”³⁰

A well-traveled commander-in-chief, Obama was not reluctant to share this notion of a “tragic legacy” with non-white audiences abroad. For instance, when speaking in South Africa at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service and at the University of South Cape Town in 2013, he drew correlations between race relations in South Africa and America. During his visit to slave castles at Gorée Island, Senegal, Obama remarked, “For an African American, and an African American President to be able to visit this site I think gives me even greater motivation in terms of the defense of human rights around the world.”³¹ This echoed his sentiments after visiting the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana in the summer of 2009. Similarly, when addressing the Turkish Parliament in 2009 about the troubled relationship between Turkish and Armenian people, he admitted that the US “is still working through some of our darker periods in our history” and “still struggles with the legacies of slavery and segregation.”³² That Obama brought up America’s mistreatment of black people within the context of the Armenian Genocide or Holocaust adds further complexity to his representation of black history.

“REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS LIKE”: BLACK HAGIOGRAPHY

From time to time, Obama gave nods to abolitionists and early twentieth century black historical icons, but his favorite historical role models came of age as activists and leaders during the 1950s and 1960s, like Congressman John Lewis and, of course, Martin Luther King Jr. Other civil rights champions that he paid tangential tributes to include Shirley Chisholm, Diane Nash, Julian Bond, Thurgood Marshall, Fred Shuttlesworth, and C. T. Vivian.

Obama hailed Lewis as “somebody who captures the essence of decency and courage, somebody who I have admired all my life.” He added, “and were it not for him, I’m not sure I’d be here today.” He routinely reminded his black listeners, especially those from the millennial hip-hop generation, that they could learn a lot from the sacrifices of John Lewis who was but “a twenty-five-year-old activist when he faced down billy clubs on the bridge in Selma and helped arouse the conscience of our nation.” Obama told members of the NAACP in Cincinnati that he modeled his life after those who had paved the way for him. He explicitly placed himself in the context of black leadership history. “I turned down more lucrative jobs,” he announced while reflecting upon his community organizing in Chicago, “because I was inspired by the civil rights movement and wanted to do my part in the ongoing battle for opportunity in this country.”³³

Although he did not actually mention King by name in his historic acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver on August 28, 2008 (in passing he identified King as “a young preacher from Georgia” to the chagrin of public intellectuals Cornel West and Julianne Malveaux), throughout his two terms as president, Obama routinely praised him. In fact, Obama alluded to King in every speech that he delivered dealing with African American history or civil rights and gave him a shout-out in his second inaugural address in 2013.

Six months before his 2008 acceptance speech, he delivered a moving sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. Martin Luther King Sr. led this church from 1931 until 1975 and his son became co-pastor in 1960. King Jr.’s funeral was held in this sacred space, which is a National Historic site and annually hosts events in honor of King and Black History Month.

In his thirty-minute oration on these consecrated grounds, Obama noted the abiding and transcendental nature of King’s message of empathy and cooperation—“Unity is the great need of the hour.” Furthermore, he annually released Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday proclamations and delivered a passionate tribute to King in October 2011 in honor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial located near the National Mall. He told the large crowd that Americans needed to heed King’s teachings “more than ever.” He placed King on the highest pedestal and often directly and indirectly sampled from him, in mannerisms and rhetoric. As he noted in a 2013 speech commemorating the fiftieth anniversary for the March on Washington, “His [King’s] words belong to the ages, possessing a power and prophecy unmatched in our time.”³⁴

Between 2009 and 2016, Obama delivered more than twenty commencement addresses at a variety of colleges and universities. He spoke at several historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and First Lady Michelle Obama spoke at more HBCUs than her husband. Obama did exhibit a commitment to these institutions beyond speaking at a few commencements. He regularly supported National HBCU Week and the White House Initiative on HBCUs that was established by an executive order from President Reagan in 1981. In February 2010, he signed Executive Order 13532, “Promoting Excellence, Innovation, and Sustainability at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.” For Obama, National HBCU Week served to “remember our history” and to “look forward to the future.”

In 2013, during his thirty-three-minute commencement address at Morehouse College, he reflected on the history of this venerable university and celebrated King, who enrolled in Morehouse at age fifteen, and longtime Morehouse president Benjamin Mays. He called upon the graduates to embody the reformist and sacrificial leadership spirit that Mays encouraged and embodied.

“So the history we share should give you hope,” Obama declared after describing the oppressive times that Mays, “black men of the ‘40s and ‘50s,” and the Moses generation overcame. Juxtaposing them with those who came of age during the era of Jim Crow segregation, Obama told the Morehouse class of 2013 that they were “uniquely poised for success unlike any generation of African Americans that came before it.” He brought to the fore that their collective experience of struggle “pales in comparison” to what previous generations coped with and insisted that they could draw great inspiration from their ancestors. Morehouse men, he declared, should, like Du Bois’s “Talented Tenth,” be committed to serving as role models and servants of the black masses. He challenged them to use Mays as a guiding light. “Live up to President’s Mays’s challenge … I promise you, what was needed in Dr. Mays’s time, that spirit of excellence, and hard work, and dedication, and no excuses is needed now more than ever.”³⁵

Whom Obama praised to his black listeners often depended upon his particular audience. For instance, when speaking to members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) in 2009, Obama conjured up a relatively overlooked black politician, George Henry White, a Republican congressman from North Carolina from 1897 until 1901 and the last black congressman until 1928. Obama used White’s prophecy—an optimistic prognosis that in the future other black congressmen would “rise up”—as a source of faith and inspiration for the CBC. He concluded by rallying members of the CBC to consider White’s and others’ struggles. “Remember what it was like for George Henry White in the early days of the twentieth century, as he was bidding farewell to the House of Representatives, the last African American to serve there for a quarter century.” White and other early black politicians, Obama pleaded, did so much “to make it possible for us to be here tonight, to make it possible for you to be here tonight, to make it possible for me to be here tonight.”³⁶

“A LONG LINE OF STRONG BLACK WOMEN”

Like other black male spokespersons, leaders, and politicians, Obama tended to prioritize the legacies of black male heroes and icons. Beyond nominal remarks about Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Shirley Chisholm, Diane Nash, and “women of soul” Patti LaBelle and Aretha Franklin; his 2012 National African American History Month proclamation, a tribute to black women as “champions of social and political change”; his honoring of two black women historians with the National Medal of the Arts and Humanities Awards (Darlene Clark Hine and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham); or his Senate floor speeches commemorating the deaths of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, he rarely celebrated black women’s contributions to the black freedom struggle or black women’s history. Black women were not, however, totally absent from his historical revivalism.

On April 20, 2010, Obama offered remarks at the funeral of Dr. Dorothy Height, chronicling why she deserves “a place in our history books.” He praised Height for her work in the National Council of Negro Women and beyond—for fighting for “the cause” without needing “fanfare.” In his commencement address at Hampton University, Obama used Height’s life and work as a source of inspiration. As he said when referring to John Lewis and others, he imparted that she is “one of the giants upon whose shoulders I stand.” He shared with Hampton graduates Height’s struggle to get a college degree in hopes of motivating them to be tenacious:

But I want you to think about Ms. Dorothy Height, a black woman, in 1929, refusing to be denied her dream of a college education … Refusing to let any barriers of injustice or ignorance or inequality or unfairness stand in her way. That refusal to accept a lesser fate; that insistence on a better life, that, ultimately, is the secret not only of African American survival and success, it has been the secret of America’s survival and success.³⁷

Height was not the only black female civil rights heroine who Obama honored. On February 27, 2013, Rosa Parks became the first black woman to have a life-size statue erected in the Capitol. In National Statuary Hall, Obama delivered the dedication. “Rosa Parks tells us there’s always something we can do.” He continued, her “singular act of disobedience launched a movement.” With these words Obama contributed to the archaic top-down notion of the civil rights movement. Yet, like her leading biographer Jeanne Theoharis, he acknowledged that before and after refusing to give up her seat on the bus, Parks was and continued to be an activist.

One of Obama’s speeches stands out for its treatment of black women: his 2015 oration at the CBC’s 45th Annual Phoenix Awards Dinner. On this occasion, he zeroed in on black women, past and present, because he, speaking for the black male collective, wanted them “to know how much we appreciate them, how much we admire them, how much we love them.” Echoing scores of black women historians from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Obama pointed out that black women were at the forefront of the civil rights movement, “a part of every great movement in American history even if they weren’t always given a voice.” He stressed that black women were working “behind the scenes … making things happen everyday.” We are all, he pressed home, “beneficiaries of a long line of strong black women.”³⁸ Obama, whose biological mother is white, closed ranks with black motherhood.

In addition to heaping praise upon black women, Obama was also critical of his male predecessors who at the March on Washington nearly five decades earlier snubbed black women, only allowing Daisy Bates the “honor” of introducing male speakers. “The men gave women just 142 words,” Obama continued:

America’s most important march against segregation had its own version of separation. Black women were central in the fight for women’s rights, from suffrage to the feminist movement and yet despite their leadership, too often they were also marginalized. But they didn’t give up. They were too fierce for that. Black women have always understood the words of Pauli Murray—that “Hope is a song in a weary throat.”³⁹

In the remainder of his speech, Obama linked the past marginalization of black women to their present status by stressing the necessity of continuing to fight for the “full opportunity and equality” for black women and girls. He identified the pressing challenges facing black women (namely unemployment, health disparities, unequal pay, stereotypes, incarceration, violence, and sexual abuse), yet celebrated black women’s accomplishments in business, education, and motherhood.

He wrapped up his speech in a familiar tone, giving thanks to those nameless black women who “risked everything” not only for their survival but also for the welfare of future generations: “Their names never made the history books. All those women who cleaned somebody else’s house, or looked after somebody else’s children, did somebody else’s laundry, and then got home and did it again, and then went to church and cooked—and then they were marching.”⁴⁰

“THANK YOU TO THE NAACP”

One of Obama’s primary black audiences was the NAACP. On July 16, 2009, Obama spoke at the organization’s centennial in New York City. This thirty-seven-minute speech was clearly crafted for a majority black audience, albeit middle class. There were certainly hip-hop generationers in the audience—it should not be overlooked that the then organization’s president and chief executive officer, Benjamin Todd Jealous (b. 1973), is a hip-hop generationer who took office in 2008.

Immediately, Obama referenced the “journey” that African Americans had made since that time “when Jim Crow was a way of life; when lynchings were all too common, and when race riots were shaking cities across a segregated land.” Unlike in “A More Perfect Union,” in which he credits all Americans for challenging the past racial status quo, in this speech he specifically credited black leaders and civil rights activists like W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, the Little Rock Nine, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, “all the civil rights giants,” and even Emmett Till’s uncle, Mose Wright, for making history and paving the way for his presidency. He also affirmed personal links between himself and black America’s past.

Obama unpacked how historical discrimination impacts the present by highlighting the major historically rooted problems that disproportionally affect black America and offered rudimentary remedies. Invoking the long tradition of black self-help and seemingly sampling from Malcolm X, Obama posited that African Americans have internalized oppression. “We need a new mindset, a new set of attitudes—because one of the most durable and destructive legacies of discrimination is the way that we have internalized a sense of limitation; how so many in our community have come to expect so little of ourselves.” He also pointed to himself as being a role model for the hip-hop generation. He declared that “our kids” need to

set their sights higher. They might think they’ve got a pretty good jump shot or a pretty good flow, but our kids can’t all aspire to be the next LeBron or Lil Wayne. I want them aspiring to be scientists and engineers, doctors and teachers, not just ballers and rappers. I want them aspiring to be a Supreme Court Justice. I want them aspiring to be President of the United States.⁴¹

Sampling from James Weldon Johnson’s classic poem/song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (later known as the Black National Anthem), Obama rounded off his speech by invoking a connectedness to the black past as well as to enduring spirits of survival and perseverance that characterize the African American experience. Sharing his family’s experience at the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, he avowed:

There, reflecting on the dungeon beneath the castle church, I was reminded of all the pain and all the hardships, all the injustices and all the indignities on the voyage from slavery to freedom … I was reminded that no matter how bitter the rod or how stony the road, we have persevered. We have not faltered, nor have we grown weary … One hundred years from now, on the 200th anniversary of the NAACP, let it be said that this generation did its part; that we too ran the race; that full of the faith that our dark past has taught us, full of the hope that the present has brought us, we faced, in our own lives and all across this nation, the rising sun of a new day begun.⁴²

In July 2015, Obama delivered one of his most fervent speeches to a large energized NAACP audience at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, a critical appraisal of the US criminal justice system, “one aspect of American life that remains particularly skewed by race and by wealth.” This assessment of this flawed institution was more critical than the one he delivered eight months earlier at the Rutgers University Center for Law and Justice. Celebrating its 106th anniversary, Obama praised the NAACP for battling against lynching, segregation, and disenfranchisement and repeated one of his catchphrases—“I would not be here, and so many would not be here, without the NAACP.” He observed that young blacks’ life chances were threatened by a biased criminal justice system that had historically oppressed black America. “Part of this is a legacy of hundreds of years of slavery and segregation, and structural inequities that compounded over generations,” Obama pronounced. “There’s a long history of inequity in the criminal justice system in America.”⁴³

What’s more, he suggested that this was a conspiracy of some sort: “It did not happen by accident.” This declaration was welcomed with resounding applause. Despite their relatively privileged status and adherence to the age-old politics of respectability, his black listeners knew exactly what their commander-in-chief was saying. They gave credence to the time-honored belief in many black communities that the subjugation of African Americans has been and still is part of the American way of life. Such sentiments have been expressed by scores of African American radicals and conspiracy theorists. Obama echoed those figures as well as civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander, who in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), detailed how mass incarceration systematically ravaged black communities.

He did, however, oversimplify how black communities were profiled and policed in the past. “Historically,” he claimed, “the African American community oftentimes was under-policed rather than over-policed. Folks were very interested in containing the African American community so it couldn’t leave segregated areas, but within those areas there wasn’t enough police presence.” There were certainly fewer state and federal resources invested into segregated black communities. Even so, Obama implied that black communities “historically”—during the vast era of Jim Crow segregation—were not policed. On the contrary, since Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and earlier, black communities have been hyperpoliced. During the infamous “race riots” during the “Red Summer” of 1919 and the early 1920s ( Tulsa and Rosewood), whites—sanctioned by the police and state—invaded black communities. This was, without question, turbocharged policing. Nevertheless, for the purposes of his argument, Obama effectually made his point.

Before his death, Booker T. Washington wrote an indictment of lynching that was published posthumously in the New Republic. He challenged and documented lynchings prior to 1915, yet refrained from publically speaking out against this genocide because he knew all too well that his power-broking abilities were sanctioned by white America. Similarly, during his first presidential administration, Obama did not subject the anti-black nature of the criminal justice system to critique in the blatant way that he did in 2015 toward the end of his second term in office.

“A WHITEWASH OF OUR HISTORY”?

In late August 2008 on “The Tavis Smiley Show,” public intellectuals and outspoken Obama critics Cornel West and Julianne Malveaux rebuked Obama for failing to talk about African American history in his momentous acceptance speech, “The American Promise,” at the National Democratic Convention in Denver, Colorado, on August 28, 2008, a date that marked the forty-fifth anniversary of the March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” oration. West charged that Obama was “trying to escape from history” in order to win over white voters. Malveaux’s criticisms were especially unsparing. “I think the brother dropped the historical baton,” she declared. “The fact is that he basically perpetrated a whitewash of our history.” She had hoped that Obama would have spoken more directly about the activism of King. Obama’s reference to King (“a young preacher from Georgia”) was prudent and inappreciable. Given Americans’ lack of historical consciousness, it is not a stretch to conclude that many listeners did not realize that Obama was alluding to King.

West and Malveaux’s observations that Obama skirted any discussion of an African American historical experience that has been most profoundly shaped by slavery and an enduring struggle for basic civil and human rights were certainly valid and refreshing. They also prompted the question: how did Obama represent black history at key moments before predominantly white audiences?

Months before his acceptance speech at the National Democratic Convention, on March 18, 2008, Obama delivered his monumental “A More Perfect Union” speech in Philadelphia, one of the speeches that he himself invested a great deal of time writing.⁴⁴ The mainstream American political media dubbed this speech his “Speech on Race” or “Race Speech,” implying that this was his one and only speech dedicated to “race,” a code word in white American society for “black people.” In her introduction to the largely pro-Obama anthology The Speech: Race and Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” (2008), T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting insightfully pinpointed the significance of this speech as well as Obama’s possible motivations:

“A More Perfect Union” is “The Speech” that many say Obama always knew he would have to give someday in his run for the presidency. Despite his quasi-rock star status and numerous media-driven attempts to cast him as “post-racial” … Barack Obama is a black man, and one who had in March 2008 gone further than any other black man who had sought the American presidency. He could not avoid addressing the perilous conundrums of race and racism in America, though he may have wished otherwise … And if nothing else, Obama also clearly understood that despite all attempts—academic, scientific, and otherwise—to render race a social construction with no biological relevance, Americans cling, desperately, irrationally even, to race making, or “racecraft.”⁴⁵

The importance of this speech for Obama’s debut presidential campaign cannot be overstated. He had to strategically respond to the nature of his relationship with the demonized Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In doing so, he tapped into his ability to speak to many different audiences simultaneously. In one sense, the speech is similar to Booker T. Washington’s famous 1895 address. Whereas Washington belittled his militant contemporaries (“the wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly”),⁴⁶ Obama rejected Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s indictment of (white) America.

Geneva Smitherman and H. Samy Alim have argued that Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech was central to the hip-hop generation’s admiration of him. “In the midst of the racially charged Reverend controversy,” they suggest, “it was Barack’s delivery of the ‘Race Speech’ in Philadelphia that was perhaps the single most important event that captured the heart of Hip Hop.”⁴⁷ Smitherman and Alim add that members of the hip-hop community respected how Obama faced his critics head on and “rather than backing down, stood up and said the very words that his detractors were hoping to hear” about Wright. Still, Obama carefully calculated his statements and in the tradition of Booker T. Washington, satisfied large constituents of both blacks and whites in America. At one point, Obama “condemned, in unequivocal terms” Wright’s indictments of America’s racist past and present. Embracing his catchy “hope” and “change” slogans, he rejected Wright’s, and many African Americans’, beliefs that America “is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.”⁴⁸

This goes against what he said on several occasions to black audiences. At the same time, he praised Wright for what he did in his Chicago community and deduced that his former pastor, like all people, “contains within him the contradictions—the good and the bad—of the community that he has served diligently for so many years” and was molded by his coming of age during an era when racial segregation reigned. In not totally disowning Wright but condemning his sentiments and rhetoric, he strategically compared him to his beloved white grandmother who, Obama confessed, adhered to anti-black racial stereotypes from time to time.

On one level, one could argue that from the generic hip-hop perspective—despite the sentiments of elder statesmen emcees who praised the “Race Speech” like David Banner, Common, and Jay-Z—Obama did not “keep it real.” Obama’s portrayal of African American history in his speech is multilayered and complex. This is similar to how many emcees rap about black history in passing, verses that simply rhyme well and are not necessarily linked to the other messages within the song.

Early in this long speech (approximately forty minutes in length), Obama deemed slavery “this nation’s original sin,” a description that he used years earlier and repeatedly later. He then gave kudos to “Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part” to “deliver slaves from bondage.”⁴⁹ Unlike when addressing black audiences, he did not, by choice, offer a roll call of enslaved African Americans who themselves contributed to the destruction of slavery. He did not mention any of the countless slave revolts of the Nat Turner type. He did not empower African Americans with agency and did not position the abolition of slavery as a part of the enduring black freedom struggle. Instead, echoing Washington in his famous 1895 Atlanta oration, he understandably talked about all Americans “working together” to “move beyond some of our old racial wounds.”⁵⁰

At the same time, without delving deeply into the “history of racial injustice in this country,” he maintained that “so many of the disparities that exist in the African American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.” He praised African Americans in the past who “overcame the odds” while also calling upon them to embrace “the burden of our past without being victims of our past.” He did not summon his white audience to face the tangible realities of white privilege, but instead to realize that “the legacy of discrimination … is real and must be addressed.” Obama ended his speech with a plea to Americans to unite in the spirit of “many generations” of Americans “over the course of the two hundred and twenty-one years since a band of patriots” created the US Constitution, a document that legalized slavery and the slave trade, created a fugitive slave law, and introduced the three-fifths clause.⁵¹

In arguably the most important speech in his political career, Obama established an approach to publicly speaking about black history to white America that he would continue to use. Most important, he further honed his skills at code-switching.

“My fellow citizens: I stand here today,” Obama opened his historic inaugural address on January 20, 2009, “humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you’ve bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.” If my fellow citizens were removed from these opening lines, it would not be unreasonable to assume that Obama was addressing a predominantly black audience. After all, he routinely celebrated the far-reaching sacrifices made by previous generations of African Americans, especially the Moses generation. As was the case with “A More Perfect Union,” in his inaugural address, he was, of course, speaking to a predominantly white audience; therefore, in evoking our, us, and we he was referring to all Americans. “Our ancestors” and “our forebears” for Obama was a double entendre: catch-all terms for past generations of Americans and a patriotic reference to “our Founding Fathers.” In fact, he spoke of the proslavery “Founding Fathers” in a manner similar to how he previously and later hailed the Moses generation to black audiences. “Our Founding Fathers,” he pronounced, were “faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine.” Under such circumstances, he maintained, they persevered and created enduring ideals. “We are keepers of this legacy,” Obama announced. In charting the “work of remaking America,” he revisited the black past only in passing, mentioning those who “endured the lash of the whip” and “tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation.”⁵²

Without delving into America’s troubled racial history, Obama assured Americans that one of the best ways for the nation to move forward was by returning to the values and “truth” of the past, “the quiet force of progress throughout history.” In doing so, he ignored the widespread oppression of African Americans. He concluded his inaugural address by citing the “timeless words” of George Washington. How did the first black president reconcile the fact that in 1799 America’s first president owned 123 slaves at Mount Vernon? His veneration of Washington was similar to his praise song to “the small band of patriots” in his annual remarks on the South Lawn in honor of the Fourth of July. If Obama had been speaking to one of his black audiences, he would have most likely quoted Martin Luther King Jr. or another icon from the civil rights era (maybe even Douglass’s famous 1852 speech).

At the beginning of his second term, Obama spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington. He highlighted the interracial nature of the march and credited the marchers with profoundly altering American society—“Because they marched,” he repeated. He expressed that Americans owed a debt to these activists, an obligation similar to the one that he assigned to younger blacks toward the Moses generation. In identifying martyrs, he strategically eulogized black and white freedom fighters—Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and Martin Luther King Jr.—and, in a sense echoing white conservatives who have appropriated King’s “dream,” he de-raced King’s sentiments. “What King was describing has been the dream of every American,” he commented. And whenever he singled out African Americans, he added “all races” or the phrase “regardless of race.” He drew connections between 1963 and 2013, acknowledging that the 1960s belonged to a much more challenging era than the new millennium but that parallels did exist between the two. For Obama, the most important legacy of the March on Washington was unity, cross-racial coalitions and exhibiting “empathy and fellow feeling.” For him, “the lesson of our past” is that “when millions of Americans of every race” unite, monumental change can be brought about.⁵³

A month prior to this monumental speech, however, Obama spoke out in a very personal and persuasive way about racial profiling and the criminalization of black men.

“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son,” Obama divulged in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room about one week after George Zimmerman was found not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter. “Another way of saying that is,” he added, “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.” These phrases from Obama’s speech made headlines nationwide and marked a noticeable shift in Obama’s stance toward racial profiling. What most newshawks ignored was important. Obama historicized Martin’s murder: “I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.” He expanded on this unchanging and persistent history:

The African American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws … And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case … [B]lack folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context. They understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.⁵⁴

Several years later, Obama continued to speak out about the lingering impact of tragic aspects of black history. “We gather here today to commemorate a century and a half of freedom,” Obama introduced his fourteen minutes’ worth of remarks celebrating the 150th anniversary of the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. To soften the blow and connect with his white listeners in the US Capitol, he added that this ceremony was “not simply for former slavers, but for all of us.”⁵⁵ Casting Lincoln as a stalwart abolitionist and honorary black freedom fighter in the company of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr., Obama memorialized Americans—“black and white,” “men and women”—who helped bring down slavery.

Conceivably steering away from potential queries about reparations (a struggle that he shrugged off early during his first presidential campaign), Obama did not mention how cotton was “King”; in other words, the incalculable wealth that slave labor generated for the US government for more than two hundred years. He did, nevertheless, make it plain that the legacy of slavery endured even though the country had made great progress. “For another century, we saw segregation and Jim Crow make a mockery of these amendments,” he proclaimed as he did when speaking to the NAACP, “And we saw justice turn a blind eye to mobs with nooses slung over trees. We saw bullets and bombs terrorize generations.”⁵⁶ Obama had referenced lynching in earlier orations, but this is perhaps the only time that he linked past maltreatment of African Americans with domestic terrorism. As to be expected, he chased up this indictment with an optimistic request that “our generation be willing to do what those who came before us have done” in standing up for others’ freedoms.

In evoking lynching in this manner, Obama had come a long way since October 2009 when he signed off on the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Act. The brutal, ritualistic, and premeditated murder of Byrd by three white men was by definition a lynching, a “lynching-by-dragging” as it has been dubbed. It was reminiscent of instances when white mobs—“the assemblage of two or more persons”—murdered black men during the “nadir” period. In his remarks at the reception commemorating the Act, Obama neglected to point out in his description of Byrd’s death how similar his murder was to the killings of black men that were commonplace a century earlier. As historian Philip Dray has reminded us: “Almost every black family has a story in its history of an ancestor who ‘come up missing’ … Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks’ distrust of the legal system, fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation.”⁵⁷

GENERATIONAL CRISSCROSSING: OBAMA, HIP-HOP, AND BLACK HISTORICAL MEMORY

I think that the most vibrant musical art form right now, over the last ten to fifteen years, has been hip-hop, and there have been some folks that have kind of dabbled in political statements, but a lot of it has been more cultural than political.

—Barack Obama, “Ask Obama Live: An MTV Interview with the President,” October 26, 2012

On June 7, 1979, President Jimmy Carter designated the month of June to be Black Music Month. In celebration of this event, he invited Chuck Berry to perform at the White House. Following Carter, American presidents continued to issue Black Music Month proclamations and hosted similar programs.

During the first year of his presidency on June 2, 2009, President Obama changed the name of this observance to African-American Music Appreciation Month. In his first proclamation for this commemoration, he held in high esteem a wide variety of black music traditions, including spirituals, gospel, blues, jazz, soul, and rock and roll. Complicating outworn notions of blackness, he alluded to how blacks had contributed to opera, classical symphony, and choral music. Hip-hop is conspicuously absent from Obama’s first African-American Music Appreciation Month proclamation.

This oversight is thought-provoking considering the widespread support that the man who once had the moniker “The Hip-Hop President” received from hip-hop generationers as a whole and from artists like Jay-Z, Nas, Jeezy, MC Jin, Kidz in the Hall, Common, Talib Kweli, Puff Daddy, and scads of other emcees. In his African-American Music Appreciation Month tributes that followed, he did give shout-outs to “the urban themes of hip-hop,” the “young wordsmiths,” and “the young poet putting his words to a beat.”

While campaigning for his first term, Obama’s references to hip-hop expanded far beyond the aforementioned token nods.⁵⁸ He routinely disparaged young blacks from turning to hip-hop for salvation. In July 2008, Obama referenced Lil Wayne at a predominantly black town hall meeting in Powder Springs, Georgia. He directed his comments toward members of the millennial hip-hop generation. “You are probably not that good a rapper. Maybe you are the next Lil Wayne, but probably not, in which case you need to stay in school,” Obama declared.⁵⁹

A year later, he reiterated this message during a speech in celebration of the NAACP’s centennial, insisting that young blacks who are socialized by millennial hip-hop should not primarily aspire to be a professional basketball player or rapper like Lil Wayne.⁶⁰ Obama’s various calculated references to Lil Wayne—a device that he employed to demonstrate to young blacks that he was “down”—led one journalist to write a brief blog that chronicled the relationship between Young Weezy and Obama entitled “Does Obama Love Lil Wayne or What?”⁶¹ Perhaps Obama shared a common veneration of King with Wayne, who in his 2007 mix-tape track “Love Me or Hate Me” spit: “I are the illest nigga Martin Luther King died for.”

Obama has haphazardly been called “The Hip-Hop President” by more than a few newshounds. He is by no means a hip-hop head, and it is a stretch to label him a member of the hip-hop generation. He did not begin working with African American communities and intimately interacting with black culture until the late 1970s and the 1980s. He has disclosed that much of his intimate connections to African American culture grew out of his marriage to an African American woman. “I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners—an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters,” Obama narrated in his “Race Speech.”⁶² Obama himself has also confessed that he was not socialized during his younger formative years by “old school” hip-hop, but by black music from the 1970s. Though familiar with some of the popular hip-hop artists by way of his daughters and younger aides, he has said that he listens most to Stevie Wonder; Marvin Gaye; Earth, Wind, and Fire; and the Temptations.

To the great dismay and chagrin of Donald Trump and his many co-conspirators in the half-baked “birther movement,” in 2011 Obama released an official copy of his birth certificate, once and for all proving that he is a natural-born citizen of the United States and, therefore, eligible to serve as the President of the nation.

Several months before his birth in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961, a group of civil rights activists known as the Freedom Riders left Washington, DC, on a courageous quest to challenge the nonenforcement of the desegregation of public buses in the South. Obama belongs to a generation of African Americans who were not old enough to have been active in the classic phase of the civil rights struggle or even the heyday of the Black Power era. Nearing age sixty, he is also too old to be considered part of the hip-hop generation as delineated by journalist Bakari Kitwana—who, in 2002, identified “the birth years 1965–1984 as the age group of the hip-hop generation.”⁶³ Situating Obama within a conventional generation in American culture is perhaps easier than placing him within a distinct African American generation. He belongs to the earliest cohort of Generation X (Gen X) and can also be considered a late “baby boomer.”

Obama has directly spoken about hip-hop on several occasions. In a brief interview with BET’s Jeff Johnson in early 2008 that has received roughly one million views on YouTube and has been sampled by more than a few deejays, Obama conveyed his stance toward hip-hop after he was asked a straightforward question: “Do you like hip hop?”⁶⁴ He promptly answered, “Of course.” When he was asked which artists he admired, he responded that he had been listening to Jay-Z’s popular tenth solo album, American Gangster (2007); that he appreciated it because it “tells a story.” He also remarked that he was fond of Kanye, who he would later call a “jackass” for his shenanigans at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards show. Obama qualified his veneration of modish hip-hop by insisting that he was “still an old-school guy.” “Honestly,” he said, “I love the art of hip hop, I don’t always love the message of hip hop.” Without specificity, he then criticized Jay-Z and Kanye for sometimes denigrating women, using “the n-word,” and being preoccupied with making money and materialism. This mainstream and often elicited critique of hip-hop is something that Obama would continue to summon up.

On July 28, 2008, Christopher Brian Bridges (aka Ludacris) released his mixtape, The Preview, produced by DJ Drama. On the track “Politics as Usual,” Ludacris leveled insults toward Hilary Clinton, George Bush, Jesse Jackson, and John McCain. A spokesperson for the Obama campaign quickly issued a statement condemning this “dis” track. “As Barack Obama has said many, many times in the past, rap lyrics today too often perpetuate misogyny, materialism, and degrading images that he doesn’t want his daughters or any children exposed to.” The Obama campaign spokesperson politicked:

This song is not only outrageously offensive to Mrs. Clinton, Rev. Jackson, Mr. McCain and President Bush, it is offensive to all of us who are trying to raise our children with the values we hold dear. While Ludacris is a talented individual he should be ashamed of these lyrics.⁶⁵

This was situational politics in its purest form; Obama welcomed Ludacris into the White House in 2009 and 2015.

In his interview with BET in 2008, Obama pointed out that hip-hop could be effectively used to help educate African American youth. He remarked that hip-hop had the potential to help the youth think more critically; he labeled hip-hop “smart” and “insightful” and conceded that emcees can deliver, in his words, “a complex message in a very short space.” He also urged artists to move beyond hip-hop’s essence of “keepin’ it real” and chronicling the realities of everyday life in urban America. Instead, he appealed for emcees to awaken the possibilities of a brighter future and “change.” They should, he concluded, embrace his mantra, “the audacity of hope.”

Several years after his interview with BET, on October 14, 2010, Rolling Stone magazine featured an absorbing interview with Obama. In response to the questions, “What music have you been listening to lately? What have you discovered, what speaks to you these days?” Obama rejoined:

My iPod now has about 2,000 songs, and it is a source of great pleasure to me. I am probably still more heavily weighted toward the music of my childhood than I am the new stuff. There’s still a lot of Stevie Wonder, a lot of Bob Dylan, a lot of Rolling Stones, a lot of R&B, a lot of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Those are the old standards. A lot of classical music. I’m not a big opera buff in terms of going to opera, but there are days where Maria Callas is exactly what I need. Thanks to Reggie [Love, the president’s personal aide], my rap palate has greatly improved. Jay-Z used to be sort of what predominated, but now I’ve got a little Nas and a little Lil Wayne and some other stuff, but I would not claim to be an expert. Malia and Sasha are now getting old enough to where they start hipping me to things. Music is still a great source of joy and occasional solace in the midst of what can be some difficult days.⁶⁶

Obama’s reference to Jay-Z is not surprising. The hip-hop mogul whose net worth is estimated at approximately half a billion dollars had been supporting him since the early days of his first presidential campaign. Obama included Nas most likely because of his 2008 “Black President” track. Obama’s reference to Lil Wayne is more perplexing, especially given the subject matter of the vast majority of his rhymes. I wonder which Young Weezy tracks Obama had in his iPod and if he would be willing to share this with the public.

Since the Fisk Jubilee Singers performed for President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872 or soprano Marie Selika Williams sang for President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878, numerous African American entertainers have showed off their skills in the White House. Obama has set himself apart from his post-Carter predecessors by welcoming hip-hop in the Oval Office. More than a few emcees—Doug E. Fresh, Jay-Z, Queen Latifah, Common, Big Sean, Wale, and Kendrick Lamar—visited and/or spit rhymes in the White House during Obama’s presidency.

In May 2011, Obama was criticized by various Republicans, conservative political pundits, and police authorities for inviting Common to perform at the White House for Michelle Obama’s “White House Music Series.” Common’s critics were offended by his anti-Bush, anti-police brutality, and pro-Assata Shakur lyrics. A veteran New Jersey State Trooper deemed the black activist who Common celebrated in his 2000 tribute, “A Song for Assata,” “a domestic terrorist” who “executed” a New Jersey State Trooper on May 2, 1973.

In “A Song for Assata” from his commercially successful first solo album Like Water for Chocolate, Common played the role of an amateur historian; he evoked the story-telling tradition of hip-hop’s early years in detailing the struggle of Assata from about 1973 until her escape to Cuba in 1979. Informed by Shakur’s autobiography and interviews that he conducted with her in Havana, Cuba, Common stressed the relationship between her activism and the present state of black America. “I read this sister’s story, knew that she deserved a verse / I wonder what would happen if that would’ve been me? / All this shit so we could be free, so dig it, y’all,” Common rhymed.⁶⁷ This approach of imagining what life was like for previous generations of African Americans is something that Obama espoused when lecturing to young blacks.

Public intellectual Mark Anthony Neal has convincingly lambasted Common for his sexism and “hyper-masculine” worldview. Yet, the Chicago-born emcee did produce one of the most elaborate and widely played tributes to a black leader in the history of hip-hop.⁶⁸ Unlike his male predecessors who at best have perhaps given “props” to Harriet Tubman, Common also venerated a black female leader.

Obama and his administration must have been aware of Common’s politicized rap. By inviting him to the White House, Obama was, in a sense, validating Common’s appreciation of Black Power era history and his commemoration of a prototypical black radical who was added to the FBI’s “New Most Wanted Terrorist” list at the beginning of Obama’s second term.

Dressed in “all black everything” (rocking ripped jeans, a tight long-sleeve shirt, and an unostentatious gold chain with a cross pendant) and sporting Allen Iversonesque cornrows, 2015 Grammy award-winning emcee and future Pulitzer Prize winner Kendrick Lamar visited Obama in the White House in January 2016. Prior to this visit that received widespread attention on social media, Obama told People magazine that his preferred song of 2015 was “How Much a Dollar Cost” from Lamar’s highly acclaimed To Pimp a Butterfly album. He added that he favored the Compton emcee over Drake. The differences between these two commercially successful emcees are numerous and clear, especially when one considers the content of their rhymes and freestyling abilities. Though he spits about struggle (“Started From the Bottom”), Drake does not rhyme about black history. Lamar, on the other hand, has creatively rapped about black history since his imaginative track “HiiiPower” (2011).

Inviting Lamar to the White House did not evoke the same response as Common’s visit to the Oval Office did. Though he can be considered a “conscious” rapper (however problematic this label is), Lamar is also a black entertainer who has enjoyed white mainstream success. In choosing Lamar over Drake, it is not unreasonable to deduce that Obama approves of the more introspective, complex, and soul-searching rhymes. With “How Much a Dollar Cost,” Lamar pleads guilty to turning his back on the poor, to abandoning the “Golden Rule” and Jesus’s dedication to giving to the unfortunate.

During his first term, very few emcees—namely Dead Prez, Killer Mike, Lupe Fiasco, and Lowkey—openly condemned Obama for his racial neutrality and, in their minds, imperialistic foreign policy. Most emcees and members of the hip-hop community and expansive generation embraced Obama in part because he validated them, in some instances side-by-side with revered civil rights elders who shaped history profoundly. Hip-hoppers view Obama’s presidency as epoch-making. As was the case with his philosophy of black history, Obama’s outlook on hip-hop vacillated throughout his political career. As hip-hop studies scholars Erik Nielson and Travis L. Gosa noted in a 2015 Washington Post editorial, after Obama was elected, his relationship with hip-hop artists and activists began to deteriorate and hip-hop heads “took notice.”⁶⁹ Rather than remembering Obama as “The Hip-Hop President,” it would be more accurate to describe him as being a cautious consumer of and prudent apologist for hip-hop music and culture.

Whether speaking to or interacting with the millennial hip-hop generation, black and white audiences from various age groups, the mainstream media, or his fellow politicians, Obama made conscious decisions about how to portray African American history. Obama, who left the White House in January 2017, no longer needs to practice the hyper social awareness that he did during his presidency. He can now speak more plainly about a range of issues, including African American history. I would not be surprised if the Obamas’ forthcoming Netflix series produces films and documentaries on dimensions of black history. As touched upon in the next chapter on Black History Month, his handling of this annual observance reflects his calculated stance toward the black past.