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,”