Thomas Chatterton Williams, Culture11

http://www.culture11.com/print/32959

Black Man, White House

What the first African American president would mean for black America.

By Thomas Chatterton Williams, posted October 16, 2008

Category

• Ideas

How do you remember the 1990s? If you're white, you may recall Seinfeld, stock options, the Internet boom, Monica Lewinsky, reality television, and the idea that history has ended and democracy is the teleological last step. All in all, it wasn't such a bad time for you.

I spent the 90s looking at the news coming out of black America, however, and what I saw tended to depress me. Police brutalized Rodney King on camera and riots raged in Los Angeles. West Coast gangs racked up bodies for sport. Slain rappers were mourned like lost prophets. The tragicomedy of the OJ Simpson trial dominated cable news and polarized the country. The NYPD sodomized one innocent black man in a precinct bathroom, and murdered another on his doorstep. Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield's ear. Even the good news—declining poverty rates, the loosening of crack cocaine's stranglehold on inner city life—only reinforced the sense that the problems were dire over here. Imagine growing up black, watching all that as your news: the country is flourishing as young black men in particular are floundering.

A decade later black America's problems haven't changed, but the news coming out of here has: the country's most famous young black man is neither a rapper nor a criminal defendant, but an eloquent senator who is the frontrunner for the presidency. Given the news I'm accustomed to watching, I find this dizzying.

Should Barack Obama be elected, it is true that certain social and economic ills prevalent in black society, specifically in its poorest sections, will remain as potent: schools will keep struggling to graduate black students, unwed mothers will keep birthing black babies, and it will continue to be easier to buy a firearm than a fresh tomato in some black neighborhoods.

On television screens from Bedford Stuyvesant to South Central Los Angeles, however, images will be broadcast of a black family—a father, a mother, and two little girls—moving into the White House. Senator Obama says that this election isn't about him. He says it's about voters who desire change, and the policies that may result. But that's not true, at least not as far as blacks are concerned. Whatever you think of policy, the mere fact of electing a black man president, sending him to live in the nation's most iconic, so far whites only house, would puncture holes through the myth of black inferiority, violating America's racial narrative so fundamentally as to forever change the way this country thinks of blacks, and the way blacks think of this country—and themselves.

Consider what's been going on in black America for the last several decades. Even as the black middle-class has expanded its ranks and the tides of institutional racism have receded, the model for what constitutes blackness has devolved dramatically. The soaring black articulateness displayed by a James Baldwin or a Martin Luther King has been eclipsed, not by modern orators of the same skill, but by an Eazy-E or a Soulja Boy. The street has been glamorized on television, radio, and in film and sold back to blacks no longer in touch with the cultural traditions that sustained their ancestors throughout slavery and Jim Crow. Somehow, during the transition from the civil rights-era to the hip-hop-era, what is accepted as authentically black behavior—"keeping it real"—has come to mirror street behavior.

Paradoxically, while for the first time in the country's history a majority of African Americans have become middle class in economic terms, their children have cleaved to the ghetto in cultural ones. In the 1960s Ralph Ellison wrote, "The existence of a middle-class—with its intellectual, political, and social sophistication—is the most reliable sign of any group's qualitative growth and development." His analysis holds true for so many waves of immigrants. Irish, Italians, Jews, Asians, and to a lesser extent Latinos and West Indians, all became middle class and never looked back. Or, to put it another way, those who have made it don't mimic the cultural mores and stylistic tics of those who haven't.

The black American experience is a unique one—the centuries long institution of slavery renders any comparison to another group unfair. Still, in rejecting middle-class values in favor of street values, for whatever reasons and historical circumstances, black society sabotaged itself from the late 60s onward. Ellison saw it coming. Prior to hip-hop, with the rise of Black Power rhetoric, he worried that "black Americans may never transcend the valueless and directionless void in which we now find ourselves."

Culturally speaking, things have only gotten worse since Ellison wrote that.


Given the theater of images of gangsters and thugs that we have come to recognize as black, it's no surprise that an outside observer, a white writer at The Huffington Post, mused recently whether an Obama administration might not usher in a new fashion era for black youth. Voluminous, sagging jeans and billowy white T-shirts would be rendered passé and sleek suits, or at least pants that fit, would be all the rage, she imagined. For the ladies, Michelle Obama would redefine chic like an African American Jackie O.

But the impact of the most famous black man in America wearing a suit to work everyday extends far beyond the sartorial sphere and addresses what Ellison had in mind specifically. Black children would be able to avoid internalizing what James Baldwin called "the propaganda of race inferiority," since every night on the news there would be a visible reminder that there is nothing whites can do that blacks cannot. That is the real change Obama offers—all of a sudden the world young black kids imagine themselves inhabiting would seem a richer place to live, one without an upper limit. To Biggie Smalls' dismal list of career options afforded young black males—"You either slang crack rock / Or you got a wicked jump shot"—we could add the office of president. And in response to what Jay-Z cynically defined as the black man's lot in life—"All we got is sports and entertainment/ Until we even, thievin"—we could say, No, not anymore.

To be sure, a President Obama is not a panacea for black America. There will be a lot of kids in failing schools who—let's be frank—would be wrong to imagine they have a shot at one day being commander-in-chief.

Of course, that fantasy would be scarcely more absurd than the idea of playing in the NBA, a career goal that nevertheless drives countless black men to dream and sacrifice and strive. Neither dream is very realistic. But I can imagine a clever ten-year-old black boy in Newark or Watts turning on the news instead of Rap City and making the conscious decision to emulate Barack Obama's brand of articulateness instead of Nas Escobar's—a decision which would carry with it powerful ramifications, for now he would be equipping himself to succeed not in the street, but in the middle-class and beyond.

And it would not be absurd at all to think, for example, that this boy—or girl—might see in someone like Michelle Obama the proof that you can grow up black and not privileged and make it all the way to Princeton if you work hard. The less clever children around him might take note, too, and understand that he isn't selling out or acting white when he imitates the Obamas. If that happens, what it means to keep it real, to be authentically black, would alter drastically—and that would be revolutionary, a change not to public policy affecting blacks but to something even more important: our cultural priorities.

None of this is to suggest that middle-class black role models are lacking or invisible. The Cosby Show is an old but often cited example; there are multiple black CEOs running Fortune 500 companies; countless black men and women are not famous but are strong examples in their own communities; and Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Clarence Thomas—however controversial—are educated, upper-middle-class, and black. The essential distinction to be drawn in the case of Barack Obama, however, is that the presidency is conspicuous and meaningful in ways with which no other position in life can compete. Clichés become cliché for a reason: the White House is the last and highest glass ceiling left to break.

Is there anything particularly special about how Barack Obama might change our racial culture? Absolutely. Obama is capable of displaying a remarkable blend of oratorical and writerly talents that both black and white America would benefit from seeing again. The kind of public black articulateness—and make no mistake, it is black articulateness, not "talking white"—that was born in Frederick Douglass and has passed through W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, and that has been very nearly exterminated in the hip-hop-era, suddenly would live again. And it would live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which would make Barack Obama not only the most visible black leader in the history of the world, but also one who, unlike all the others, holds a position representing not only blacks, but America as a whole.

Is America ready to elect a black president? That's a more difficult question and one this election may not answer regardless of the outcome. It is true that there is a chilling number of white men and women across the country willing to admit to any pollster who asks that (a) race is an important issue for them and (b) they will under no circumstances cast a ballot for Barack Hussein Obama. Many of those people are democrats, which makes it impossible to predict how things will play out in November.

Holdouts die hard, history shows. But they do die. Forty years ago many more whites were willing to reveal far uglier views about Martin Luther King and the movement he represented. In 1956, William Faulkner famously boasted he'd be in the street "shooting Negroes" before he'd let the south be integrated.

It happened anyway.

Should Obama be elected, another pivotal lesson will be learned: That clever child in Watts or Newark will see that although racism exists, he can succeed in spite of it.

Therein lies the surprising skepticism among some African Americans vis-a-vis a President Obama. They'll vote for him, sure, but they are doubtful, even hostile to the notion that his victory could benefit black America in tangible ways. The truth is that it could and it would.