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