Toward Freedom: The Case against Race Reductionism by Touré F. Reed

Author:Touré F. Reed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

Obama’s Metaphysical Blackness and Mythological Progressive-Universalism

“My President Was Black” echoes many of his earlier criticisms of President Obama; nevertheless, the essay also reveals Coates’s affection for him. Indeed, not only do Coates’s reflections on the former president hint at his admiration for Obama’s intellect, his charisma and his savviness as a politician, but Coates manages to convey a feeling of kinship with the nation’s first black president. What is striking about the bond that Coates feels with Obama, however, is that it is rooted in a retrograde discourse centered on cultural authenticity. Having been raised by his relatively prosperous white mother and grandparents in Hawaii, Obama had an atypical childhood characterized by lack of want and whites who loved and nurtured him. Though Coates concedes that Obama knew the sting of discrimination, he asserts, “The kinds of traumas that marked African Americans of [Obama’s] generation—beatings at the hands of racist police, being herded into poor schools, grinding out a life in a tenement building—were mostly abstract for him.” Instead, Obama “was gifted with a well-stamped passport and admittance to elite private schools—all of which spoke of other identities, other lives and other worlds where the color line was neither determinative nor especially relevant.” Despite having the opportunity to grow “into a raceless cosmopolitan,” however, Obama made what Coates describes as an admirable choice to be a part of the black community—taking his first steps down this path on the basketball court.24

Anyone who has actually seen President Obama should have some difficulty conceiving how he might have lived a life as a “raceless cosmopolitan.” This assertion ultimately reflects Coates’s conflation of both culture and class with race. He praises Obama for his decision to “download black culture” via the game of basketball and for his willingness to pay a price “for living black, for hosting Common, for brushing dirt off his shoulder during the primaries, for marrying a woman who looked like Michelle Obama.”25 For Coates, then, Obama’s blackness is derived not from legal or cultural frameworks that classify people with his parentage as black; Obama’s blackness is wed to his embrace of specific consumer tastes, dating choices, idiomatic expressions and, ultimately, swag. To be sure, Coates sees the aforementioned markers of racial authenticity as outgrowths of a common experience. But African Americans whose experiences deviate from what Coates sees as “the black experience” are not really black. Indeed, while Coates lauds Obama for his decision to embrace black culture, he describes the former president as less black than another African American Chicago politician, mayor Harold Washington. To be clear, Coates sees Obama as less black than Mayor Washington because Obama’s experiences do not conform to Coates’s view of “the black experience.” And while there is little doubt that Obama’s childhood paralleled that of few other black Americans, in his memoir Between the World and Me, Coates likewise describes the upscale African Americans in the Prince George’s County of his youth—a community that is not so unusual—as essentially less black than his peers in West Baltimore.

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