THE BLACK PRESIDENCY
Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America
Michael Eric Dyson
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
346 pages; $27
What happens when the nation's foremost voice on the race question is also its most confined and restrained? Michael Eric Dyson raises this question about President Barack Obama in his book, The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America. The book inspires one to raise similar questions about Mr Dyson himself. For, while hardly restrained, he appears noticeably boxed in by the limitations placed on celebrity race commentators in the Age of Obama.
The book argues that Americans live under a black presidency - not so much because the president is black, but because Mr Obama's presidency remains bound by the rules and rituals of black respectability and white supremacy. Even the leader of the free world, we learn in the book, conforms principally to white expectations. (Mr Dyson maintained in the November issue of The New Republic that Hillary Clinton may well do more for black people than Mr Obama did.) But Mr Obama's presidency is "black" in a more hopeful way, too, providing Americans with an opportunity to better realise the nation's democratic ideals and promises.
A certain optimism ebbs and flows in the book, but only occasionally does it refer to white Americans' beliefs about race. Far more often, Mr Dyson hangs hope on Mr Obama's impromptu shows of racial solidarity. One such moment was the president's remarks after the 2009 arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr (who was arrested trying to get into his own home). Another was Mr Obama's public identification with Trayvon Martin. Both acts may have been politically risky, but they also greatly heartened African-Americans. Hope builds, and by book's end, readers find a chapter-long celebration of the president's soaring invocations of "Amazing Grace" during last year's memorial service for the slain parishioners of Emanuel A M E Church. For Mr Dyson, the eulogy at Emanuel seems to serve as a sign of grace that black America may still yet enjoy from the Obama White House.
Its cresting invocations of hope aside, the book ably maintains a sharp critical edge. Mr Dyson uncovers a troubling consistency to the president's race speech and shows that in spite of Mr Obama's reliance on black political networks and black votes during his meteoric rise, he chose to follow a governing and rhetorical template largely hewed by his white predecessors. As both candidate and president, Mr Obama's speeches have tended to allay white guilt. They have scolded African-Americans for cultural pathology and implied that blacks were to blame for lingering white antipathy.
That characterisation overlooks how liberal pragmatism functions as ideology. If the Obama era proved anything about liberalism, it's that there remains little room for an explicit policy approach to racial justice - perhaps especially, under a black president. As Mr Obama himself explains to Mr Dyson: "I have to appropriate dollars for any programme which has to go through ways and means committees, or appropriations committees, that are not dominated by folks who read Cornel West or listen to Michael Eric Dyson."
All but the last two of the book's eight chapters begin with the author placing himself in close, often luxurious, proximity to Mr Obama. The repetition has the effect of a Facebook feed. Here is Michael at Oprah's California mansion during a 2007 fund-raiser, sharing a joke with Barack and Chris Rock. Here is Michael on the private plane and in the SUV, giving the candidate tips on how to use a "'blacker' rhetorical style" during his debates against a surging Hillary Clinton.
Moments like these have a secondary effect. They illuminate a tension cutting through and limiting The Black Presidency as a work of political commentary. Regardless of who Mr Dyson may have been to Mr Obama the candidate, time and circumstance have rendered Mr Dyson increasingly irrelevant to Mr Obama's presidency.
When Bill Clinton decided to chronicle his own historic turn in the White House, he called on Taylor Branch and recorded with the historian some 150 hours of interviews over 79 sessions. Mr Dyson, in 2015, gets far shabbier treatment. Chapter five, "The Scold of Black Folk," opens: "I was waiting outside the Oval Office to speak to President Obama. I had a tough time getting on his schedule." In response to Mr Dyson's request for a presidential audience, the White House offered the author 10 minutes. By his own telling, Mr Dyson "politely declined" and pressed Mr Obama's confidante, Valerie Jarrett, to remember his history with and support of the president. "I eventually negotiated a 20-minute interview that turned into half an hour." It appears to be the only interview Mr Dyson conducted for the book.
In the end, The Black Presidency possesses a loaves-and-fishes quality. Drawing mostly on the news cycle, close readings of carefully crafted speeches and a handful of glittering encounters, Mr Dyson has managed to do a lot with a little. The book might well be considered an interpretive miracle, one performed in fealty and hope for a future show of presidential grace, either from this president or, should she get elected, the next one.
Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America
Michael Eric Dyson
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
346 pages; $27
What happens when the nation's foremost voice on the race question is also its most confined and restrained? Michael Eric Dyson raises this question about President Barack Obama in his book, The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America. The book inspires one to raise similar questions about Mr Dyson himself. For, while hardly restrained, he appears noticeably boxed in by the limitations placed on celebrity race commentators in the Age of Obama.
The book argues that Americans live under a black presidency - not so much because the president is black, but because Mr Obama's presidency remains bound by the rules and rituals of black respectability and white supremacy. Even the leader of the free world, we learn in the book, conforms principally to white expectations. (Mr Dyson maintained in the November issue of The New Republic that Hillary Clinton may well do more for black people than Mr Obama did.) But Mr Obama's presidency is "black" in a more hopeful way, too, providing Americans with an opportunity to better realise the nation's democratic ideals and promises.
A certain optimism ebbs and flows in the book, but only occasionally does it refer to white Americans' beliefs about race. Far more often, Mr Dyson hangs hope on Mr Obama's impromptu shows of racial solidarity. One such moment was the president's remarks after the 2009 arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr (who was arrested trying to get into his own home). Another was Mr Obama's public identification with Trayvon Martin. Both acts may have been politically risky, but they also greatly heartened African-Americans. Hope builds, and by book's end, readers find a chapter-long celebration of the president's soaring invocations of "Amazing Grace" during last year's memorial service for the slain parishioners of Emanuel A M E Church. For Mr Dyson, the eulogy at Emanuel seems to serve as a sign of grace that black America may still yet enjoy from the Obama White House.
Its cresting invocations of hope aside, the book ably maintains a sharp critical edge. Mr Dyson uncovers a troubling consistency to the president's race speech and shows that in spite of Mr Obama's reliance on black political networks and black votes during his meteoric rise, he chose to follow a governing and rhetorical template largely hewed by his white predecessors. As both candidate and president, Mr Obama's speeches have tended to allay white guilt. They have scolded African-Americans for cultural pathology and implied that blacks were to blame for lingering white antipathy.
That characterisation overlooks how liberal pragmatism functions as ideology. If the Obama era proved anything about liberalism, it's that there remains little room for an explicit policy approach to racial justice - perhaps especially, under a black president. As Mr Obama himself explains to Mr Dyson: "I have to appropriate dollars for any programme which has to go through ways and means committees, or appropriations committees, that are not dominated by folks who read Cornel West or listen to Michael Eric Dyson."
All but the last two of the book's eight chapters begin with the author placing himself in close, often luxurious, proximity to Mr Obama. The repetition has the effect of a Facebook feed. Here is Michael at Oprah's California mansion during a 2007 fund-raiser, sharing a joke with Barack and Chris Rock. Here is Michael on the private plane and in the SUV, giving the candidate tips on how to use a "'blacker' rhetorical style" during his debates against a surging Hillary Clinton.
Moments like these have a secondary effect. They illuminate a tension cutting through and limiting The Black Presidency as a work of political commentary. Regardless of who Mr Dyson may have been to Mr Obama the candidate, time and circumstance have rendered Mr Dyson increasingly irrelevant to Mr Obama's presidency.
When Bill Clinton decided to chronicle his own historic turn in the White House, he called on Taylor Branch and recorded with the historian some 150 hours of interviews over 79 sessions. Mr Dyson, in 2015, gets far shabbier treatment. Chapter five, "The Scold of Black Folk," opens: "I was waiting outside the Oval Office to speak to President Obama. I had a tough time getting on his schedule." In response to Mr Dyson's request for a presidential audience, the White House offered the author 10 minutes. By his own telling, Mr Dyson "politely declined" and pressed Mr Obama's confidante, Valerie Jarrett, to remember his history with and support of the president. "I eventually negotiated a 20-minute interview that turned into half an hour." It appears to be the only interview Mr Dyson conducted for the book.
In the end, The Black Presidency possesses a loaves-and-fishes quality. Drawing mostly on the news cycle, close readings of carefully crafted speeches and a handful of glittering encounters, Mr Dyson has managed to do a lot with a little. The book might well be considered an interpretive miracle, one performed in fealty and hope for a future show of presidential grace, either from this president or, should she get elected, the next one.
© 2016 The New York Times News Service