The Obama Effect

Multidisciplinary Renderings of the 2008 Campaign

Heather E. Harris, Kimberly R. Moffitt, Catherine R. Squires

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781438436616
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études afro-américaines

November 4, 2008 ushered in a historic moment: Illinois Senator Barack Obama was elected the forty-fourth President of the United States of America. In The Obama Effect, editors Heather E. Harris, Kimberly R. Moffitt, and Catherine R. Squires bring together works that place Barack Obama's candidacy and victory in the context of the American experience with race and the media. Following Obama's victory, optimists claimed that the campaign signaled the arrival of an era of postracism and postfeminism in the United States. This collection of essays, all presented at a national conference to discuss the meaning and impact of the nomination of the first presidential candidate of African descent, remind the reader that reaching a point in U.S. history where a biracial man could be deemed "electable" is part of a still-ongoing struggle. It resists the temptation to dismiss the uncertainty, hope, and fear that characterized the events and discourse of the two-year primary and general election cycle and brings together multidisciplinary approaches to assessing "the Obama effect" on public discourse and participation. This volume provides readers with a means for recalling and mapping out the enduring issues that erupted during the campaign—issues that will continue to shape how our society views itself and President Obama in the coming years.

Section III: Identities

Post-Soul President: Dreams from My Father and the Post-Soul Aesthetic

Bertram D. Ashe

Three o'clock in the morning. The moon-washed streets empty, the growl of a car picking up speed down a distant road. The revelers would be tucked away by now, paired off or alone, in deep, beer-heavy sleep, Hasan at his new lady's place—don't stay up, he had said with a wink. And now just the two of us to wait for the sunrise, me and Billie Holiday, her voice warbling through the darkened room, reaching toward me like a lover.¹

—Barak Obama, Dreams from My Father

A twenty-year-old Barack Obama sits alone in the darkness of the small hours, as he and Lady Day “wait for the sunrise.”The party is over, his roommate and the guests have gone, and as chapter 5 of Dreams from My Father opens, Obama recalls the evening as one in which he not only surveys his postparty house, but also looks critically at his life. One of the things on which he's reflecting is his relationship with Regina, a young student who had angrily left the party earlier. But in a more expansive way, he's also likely ruminating on three additional Occidental College students: Joyce, Tim, and Marcus. Chapter 5 is the culmination of the period of his life I'm calling “The Barry Era,” and it focuses intently on these students’ sometimes vexed and sometimes voluntary relationship with the black community.

The last section of the chapter begins, “I rose from the couch and opened my front door, the pent-up smoke trailing me out of the room like a spirit. Up above, the moon had slipped out of sight, only its glow still visible along the rim of high clouds. The sky had begun to lighten; the air tasted of dew.”² A page and a half later, Obama ends the chapter by circling back to Billie Holiday: “For a few minutes more I sat still in my doorway, watching the sun glide into place, thinking about the call to Regina I'd be making that day. Behind me, Billie was on her last song. I picked up the refrain, humming a few bars. Her voice sounded different to me now. Beneath the layers of hurt, beneath the ragged laughter, I heard a willingness to endure. Endure—and make music that wasn't there before.”³

The entire chapter, then, takes place in a thought bubble hovering above Barry's head as he sits and thinks. That early morning, he's about contemplation, about assessment, and even though the chapter informs and explains to his reader his life at Occidental College and his views on everything from the difference between being ambitious and being a “good-time Charlie,”⁴ to the difference between being “educated” and being “trained,”⁵ the surface-level narrative action for the balance of the chapter is this: twenty-year-old college student sits alone in the late-night/early-morning hours, thinking about his life. It is Barack Obama, the writer, however, who actually fills the narrative space with his own mature retrospective of what young Barry must have been thinking in that moment. It's true that he kept a journal,⁶ and it's certain that he consulted it, but the wisdom and wide-ranging knowledge that he brings to this crucial chapter belies that of the deepest and most self-aware twenty-year-old. And anyway, Barry Obama didn't write Dreams from My Father—Barack Obama did. Early in chapter 6, having transferred to Columbia University, Obama will sharply correct his new New York roommate: Instead of answering to “Barry,” he will insist on “Barack.”⁷ In a narrative that widely tracks Obama's search for self, chapter 5 focuses as narrowly as possible on his attempt to find a stable, workable black identity.

I use the words “black identity” advisedly. Genetically, of course, Barack Obama is biracial. By no means am I blithely ignoring this fact. But the familiarity of his identity journey, a journey made by countless post-civil-rights-movement blacks who, like Obama, were born or came of age after the civil rights movement, suggests that while his biracial status was an important factor in his quest for identity, the search itself is one that is less about being biracial and more about being bicultural. Here's the way Obama put it early in that fifth chapter: “Grow up in Compton and survival becomes a revolutionary act. You get to college and your family is still back there rooting for you. They're happy to see you escape; there's no question of betrayal. But I hadn't grown up in Compton, or Watts. I had nothing to escape from except my inner doubt. I was more like the black students who had grown up in the suburbs, kids whose parents had already paid the price of escape. You could spot them right away by the way they talked, the people they sat with in the cafeteria.”⁸ The suburbanite black kids Obama refers to aren't biracial, but they are bicultural, and it is with those young blacks Barry identifies. I won't be talking much, here, about Obama's biracial status as such; I'm more concerned about why and how Obama both lived, as a youth, and represents, as an adult writing about his youth, a peculiar and particular aspect of the post-civil-rights-movement era called the post-soul aesthetic (or PSA).

The term “post-soul,” as I define it, generally refers to art produced by African Americans who were either born or came of age after the civil rights movement. I limit the post-soul aesthetic to artists or writers of the post-civil-rights-movement era for one important reason: These artists were not adults—or adolescents, for that matter—during the civil rights movement. Mark Anthony Neal, in Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic, sums it up nicely: “The generations(s) of black youth born after the early successes of the traditional civil rights movement are in fact divorced from the nostalgia associated with those successes and thus positioned to critically engage the movement's legacy from a state of objectivity that the traditional civil rights leadership is both unwilling and incapable of doing.”⁹ Post-soul artists such as memoirist Obama explore the hazy, ill-defined blackness of the post-civil-rights era, a blackness that stands in marked difference from the raised-clenched-hst, say-it-loud, I'm-black-and-I'm-proud conception of blackness from the 1960s, or even the purposeful sense of presumed monolithic blackness in the 400 years before that.

Obama's memoir in general—and more specifically his fifth chapter—is an example of post-soul “blaxploration” (I'm intentionally signifying the “blaxploitation” term of the previous era).¹⁰ Obama and his fellow post-soul artists and writers are recognized by their embodiment of the “cultural mulatto” archetype, to use a term Trey Ellis coined in his seminal 1989 essay, “The New Black Aesthetic.” Here's Ellis's definition:

Just as a genetic mulatto is a black person of mixed parents who can often get along fine with his white grandparents, a cultural mulatto, educated by a multiracial mix of cultures, can also navigate easily in the white world. And it is by and large this rapidly growing crop of cultural mulattoes that fuels the NBA. We no longer need to deny or suppress any part of our complicated and sometimes contradictory cultural baggage to please either white people or black. The culturally mulatto Cosby girls are equally as black as a black teenage welfare mother. Neither side of the tracks should forget that.¹¹

Ellis possesses an unabashed enthusiasm for his conception of the cultural mulatto, but it is important to balance Ellis's upbeat view of the post-civil-rights-movement possibilities of blackness with, say, novelist Reginald McKnight's far less encouraging use of the term “cultural mulatto” in his short story “The Honey Boys,” published a year before Ellis's essay: “Black was nothing more than a color to me. I was a cultural mulatto.… My color was a nuisance. I was too black to be white, too white to be black.”¹² McKnight's literary photograph of the “cultural mulatto” seems to have had no flashbulb; it's a much darker portrait of this post-civil-rights-movement phenomenon than Ellis's. As Madhu Dubey writes in The Black Scholar, “For McKnight, ‘mulatto’ signifies the tragic plight of ‘victims’ of the Civil Rights movement, caught between two worlds and burdened by anxieties about their racially ambivalent status.”¹³

Obama's blaxploration begins with Barry similarly “burdened” by anxieties about his “racially ambivalent status.” Indeed, the set of five characters (including a younger version of himself) Obama discusses in chapter 5 of Dreams from My Father illustrate well the three-pronged definition of the cultural mulatto to which Ellis refers in his essay: “Today's cultural mulattoes echo … ‘tragic mulattoes’ only when they too forget they are wholly black. Most self-deluding cultural mulattoes desperately fanaticize themselves the children of William F. Buckley. However, a minority affect instead a ‘superblackness’ and try and dream themselves back to the ghetto.”¹⁴

Given these two poles—blacks either unnaturally tending toward attributes traditionally associated with whiteness or pointedly adopting a “superblackness”—the implication is that the optimal PSA standpoint is some-where in the middle. Indeed, a “healthy” cultural mulatto is one who realizes that the goal is not to stand firm on either pole, falsely conforming to black or white society's ideals, but to enjoy surfing the midrange, riding the always-shifting center of the cultural mulatto teeter-totter. Obama refers to this himself, echoing Ellis's words from “The New Black Aesthetic,” when he writes of learning to “slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structure of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.”¹⁵ Obama learns, eventually, to feel a sense of multifaceted cultural comfort, even as—especially as—one is fully embodying a bicultural status. Novelist Zadie Smith, for example, writes that the tale Obama tells “is not the old tragedy of gaining a new, false voice at the expense of a true one. The tale he tells is all about addition. His is the story of a genuinely many-voiced man. If it has a moral it is that each man must be true to his selves, plural.… For Obama, having more than one voice in your ear is not a burden, or not solely a burden—it is also a gift.”¹⁶

For healthy cultural mulattos, the idea, in the end, is to embrace cultural difference: Lisa Jones, in Bulletproof Diva: Tales of Race, Sex, and Hair, employs “difference as pleasure,” and almost seems to be envisioning a future, mature Barack Obama as she explains her phrase: Not difference “as something feared or exotic, but difference as one of the rich facts of one's life, a truism that gives you more data, more power, and more flavor.”¹⁷ Jones, in her book, articulates a critically informed stance that is, indeed, shared by writers such as Obama, and not just because both of them are biracial. Eventually, as cultural mulattos move through the sort of black identity journey Obama tracks in his book, many do—eventually, self-consciously—adopt a “difference as pleasure” view toward blackness. A hybrid, fluid, elastic sense of black identity marks Dreams from My Father, and authorial blaxploration seems a critical part of Obama's goal: the decentering, destabilizing, expansive exploration of black identity.

“Difference as pleasure” is merely a destination, however; the road to get there is marked with painful trial and difficulty. And our readerly access to that road is focused and shaped by the writer. Certainly, there's Obama's life-as-lived, breathing and moving, second by second, from his birth through this very moment, as you read this. But more importantly, for our purposes, there's Obama's life as represented through the narrative Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. As with all autobiographical writing, as we read his narrative we straddle an interpretive fence: through the power and skill of his writing we're immersed in the world of young Barry Obama—yet it's always the mature Barack Obama who's constructing that world, who's making that very immersion possible. He gives us a vivid, compelling view into his formative years, but the way he does it is indicative of the end-result of those very same years. In other words, his successful maturation into a healthy cultural mulatto—the standpoint from which he writes—greatly informs his tale of how he came to attain that health.¹⁸

The act of narrative construction, then, is Obama's key blaxploration gesture in Dreams from My Father. Like all writers of memoir, Obama's past life lay before him, ready to be compiled and organized into words, paragraphs, and chapters (one can imagine him sitting and reflecting about what to write, in much the same way he describes a scene of such reflection in the epigraph above). The (re)construction of that life, on the page, required him to sift through his youth and the events and people he encountered therein, ordering and structuring those events into narrative, recalling and emphasizing certain experiences—and relaying those experiences in a certain way—while “forgetting” others, deemphasizing them, in order to present a coherent narrative, one that does what all memoirs do: present a constructed version of past reality, from a specific, present-day perspective. That's why, from the beginning of this essay, I've made a distinction between the two Obamas: I call him “Barry” when describing a scene in which the younger Obama appears, but refer to him as “Obama” when talking about how the mature writer is constructing that scene.¹⁹

These five characters, then, are as much constructs as characters, set in motion by a mature Barack Obama not only to describe his life, but also to execute an incisive bit of blaxploration as he recalls attending Occidental College for the first part of his undergraduate education. Novelist and poet Paul Beatty, one of the most noteworthy of PSA artists, wrote an essay in 1994 called “What Set You From, Fool?” Deep into the essay, he constructed the Beatty Scale of Quintessential African-American Blackness. During the culmination of Obama's Barry Era, I see him metaphorically locating these students on the Beatty Scale. The four categories Beatty employs on his scale are “Jet Black,” with people like Billie Holiday and Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X), and Charles Barkley; “Flat Black,” with people like Wynton Marsalis, Thur-good Marshall, Rosa Parks, and Charles Barkley; “Glossy Black,” with people like Public Enemy, W. E. B. Du Bois, The Congressional Black Caucus, and Charles Barkley; and “Gray...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Section I: Rhetoric
• Section II: New Media
• Section III: Identities
• Section IV: Publics
• Section V: Representations
• Epilogue
• List of Contributors