Disintegration (19 page)

In short, he is what used to be called a “race man”—ever mindful of being African American, of serving African American interests, and of making breakthroughs on behalf of African Americans. It was striking, and on the surface somewhat puzzling, that such a race-conscious man would so ardently oppose the first serious attempt by an African American to win the presidency.

But in a way, that was the point. I dwell on Obama’s candidacy because it was such a Rorschach test for the Transcendent class. Bob Johnson’s mind-set was broadly representative
of those who stuck with the Clintons, in my view, and it was characterized above all by a certain rock-hard wariness. The elder Transcendents were used to surviving in terra incognita. They got where they are by being the “first black” this and the “first black” that, by taking on responsibilities that no African American had ever shouldered before, and by enduring the intense and unrelenting scrutiny that “first black” status always entails. They knew the experience of being the only black person around a boardroom table and always assuming—always knowing, they would say—that all eyes were on the one person who wasn’t like the others, who didn’t belong. They saw in Obama a man who gave no outward sign of harboring within him that hard nugget of suspicion—who seemed as if he were not artfully concealing the chip on his shoulder but in fact did not have one. They saw a man who seemed to glide through life on a cushion of good fortune. Never mind that this wasn’t true, as evidenced by Obama’s well-corroborated account of his hardly privileged childhood. Never mind that despite Obama’s not having had a “typical” African American upbringing, he had come to fully embrace his identity as African American—witness his marriage to Michelle, his work in Chicago’s black community, his membership in Jeremiah Wright’s church. Never mind that his tastes and mannerisms were indisputably African American, down to the way he walked. To some Transcendents, he wasn’t black enough.

Indeed, soon after Obama announced his candidacy in 2007, the media zeitgeist became briefly preoccupied with that very question—whether Obama was “black enough.” It was all the buzz in February when Obama visited my hometown of Orangeburg for a rally. I flew down to cover the event, and it was amusing to watch the reporters from national media outlets
fan out into the crowd at Claflin University’s Tullis Arena and buttonhole my old friends and neighbors with the “black enough” question. From Mainstream black Americans, I never heard concern or even speculation about the degree of Obama’s blackness. Yes, he was biracial—but anyone could see that he was black. Case closed. Plus, he was married to a black woman who radiated black pride, even without saying a word. Case definitively closed. I never heard the “black enough” question from Abandoned black Americans, either. All you had to do was look at him. What else was he going to be?

From a few Transcendents, however, I did hear that question. They phrased it differently, though. They asked about his political history, his relationship with the African American leadership, his air of calm and reserve. They observed the “post-racial” tone of his campaign—basically, don’t talk about race unless an uproar over Reverend Wright forces you to—and while they understood that this approach was politically necessary, they were unsettled. Transcendents I talked to worried that in all the ways that Bob Johnson is a “race man,” Barack Obama isn’t.

They worried that he was naïve about the power of race in American society. They worried that if he somehow managed to win the nomination, he would surely lose a general election that Clinton probably would have won—which would mean at least four more years in which issues vital to black Americans were ignored. A couple of people I talked to even looked ahead to a possible Obama victory, and worried that as the first black president, he would have to bend over backward to avoid being seen as favoring African Americans—which could mean less attention to the plight of Abandoned black Americans than under a Clinton administration. They worried that
the question that had driven and guided black leadership for more than a century—What is best for the race?—was not central enough for Obama. It wasn’t that Obama’s Transcendent black critics believed he was indifferent to the needs of African Americans, or that they believed Hillary Clinton was somehow more of a “race man” than Obama was. It was more that they saw the whole Obama phenomenon as a self-indulgent fantasy—one for which black Americans had no time, and for which these Transcendents had no patience.

With rare exceptions, Transcendents who are old enough to have lived through segregation don’t just remember the experience but cling to it. They use it to give them motivation, to inspire caution, to remind them how hard-won their success was and how radically the world can change within a human lifetime. Anyone who lived through Jim Crow knows firsthand that other people can reject you, even despise you, based on nothing but the color of your skin. This knowledge can be crippling, even paralyzing, or it can provide a reservoir of strength and defiance. But with that strength comes an indelible wariness and the knowledge that however meaningless race might be, it does matter.

The Obamas know that, too. But they have been clever enough to “code” their major initiatives in such a way that they are designed to provide sorely needed benefits to African American and other disadvantaged communities—without explicitly being aimed at any one group.

Michelle Obama’s most high-profile cause, fighting childhood obesity, is a case in point. The problem is serious among all segments of American society, as a walk through any shopping mall will demonstrate. Among whites, about 31 percent of children are obese. But among African American children,
the obesity rate is 35 percent; and among the children of Mexican Americans, an alarming 38 percent.
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Any success the First Lady’s campaign has will be beneficial to the health and well-being of all the nation’s children, but the need is more acute—and the impact will be greater—among minorities.

Likewise, President Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment, won at the price of tons of his political capital, will also disproportionately benefit minorities. About 18 percent of black Americans lack health insurance, and while that figure is only marginally higher than the 16 percent of whites who are uninsured, the gap among black children and white children is greater. Among Latino Americans, a striking 33 percent are without insurance.
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Race-neutral policies, it turns out, do not always have race-neutral impacts.

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One of my favorite episodes of the long campaign, at least in terms of entertainment value, occurred in February 2008 after reporters noticed that parts of an Obama speech were strikingly similar to passages of a speech given by one of his campaign chairmen. On Fox News, commentator Geraldo Rivera sputtered with outrage through his famous mustache: “When I saw that they were the same words that Deval Patrick, the black guy who won as Massachusetts mayor—as Massachusetts governor—had used, I said to myself, it seems so premeditated. It’s almost as if they went to a camp where these black geniuses got together and figured out how to beat the political system … What’s the other formula that they’re going to use?”
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“Black Genius Camp” was a delightful image to play with—you could imagine Denzel Washington and Maya Angelou sitting around the campfire, listening to Condi Rice tell corny jokes in Russian. But there was actually a germ of truth in what Rivera said.

Obama represents a next-generation cohort of black political and economic leaders whose experience of being black in America is radically different from that of their elders. In that Oval Office interview after his NAACP speech, Obama told me: “If we haven’t already reached this point we’re getting close to reaching it, where there are going to be more African Americans in this country who never experienced anything remotely close to Jim Crow than those who lived under Jim Crow. That, obviously, changes perspectives.”
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That change is especially pertinent when the perspectives in question are those of African Americans with Transcendent power, influence, or wealth. In the political realm, this younger group includes Deval Patrick, the first black governor of Massachusetts and only the second African American elected governor of any state (after Virginia’s Douglas Wilder); Newark mayor Cory Booker; D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty; Alabama congressman Artur Davis; and a host of other rising young officeholders, or aspiring officeholders, around the country. There is no evidence that they actually attended a genius camp together, but there are so many connections among them that they do constitute a network. They tend to have attended the same elite schools, and they have been instrumental in getting one another elected. They are surrounded and supported by a much larger group of black professionals—the friends from college or law school who decided not to go into politics and
instead became partners in big law firms or rose through the ranks in the corporate world.

These young Transcendents, generally in their forties, are indeed too young to have lived through Jim Crow. They are not too young to know what it was, and certainly not too young to believe as passionately as their elders in the need to keep fighting to advance the unfinished project of black uplift. But there is a difference between knowing what it is like to face racism and discrimination, which this next-generation black elite does, and knowing what it is like to be consigned by law and police authority to second-class citizenship, which it does not. In that sense, the post-segregation Transcendents carry less baggage through life.

And perhaps, having just missed the epochal civil rights triumph, this generation of Transcendents feels it has something to prove—that it is time for the aging lions of the civil rights struggle to step aside, and that new strategies and tactics are required for a new era.

It is also true, however, that for some young Transcendents, maintaining or developing any sort of common touch is a challenge. A case in point is Harold Ford Jr., the former Tennessee congressman who is one of the best and brightest of his generation. The scion of the most powerful black family in Tennessee politics, Ford was born in 1970 and grew up mostly in Washington while his father served in Congress. He graduated from St. Albans, the most prestigious boys’ prep school in the capital, and went on to the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan Law School before winning the congressional seat his father had long held.
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Political handicappers saw Ford as handsome, charming, and bright enough to be a kind of Southern-fried Obama. In 2006, Ford came
close to duplicating Obama’s feat and winning a seat in the U.S. Senate. He ran in his home state of Tennessee, and the contest became infamous because of a last-minute attack ad by his opponent that had clear racial overtones: It ended with a ditzy-seeming blonde pantomiming a telephone and asking Ford to “call me,” and seemed designed to stoke the primal Southern fear of black men consorting with white women. Dispassionate analysis of the election returns suggest, however, that Ford probably would have lost even if the ad had never aired.

Ford moved to New York and joined Merrill Lynch as a senior adviser—a “rainmaker,” basically. He prepared to run for the Senate again, but this time from New York, where being labeled a “carpetbagger” is hardly the kiss of death—witness Hillary Clinton’s election as a senator from New York, and Robert Kennedy’s before her. Ford seemed to be well-positioned, but then he gave what came to be seen as a disastrous interview to
The New York Times
in which he talked about his life as a New Yorker—but not a regular New Yorker, a Master of the Universe New Yorker. He mentioned a flight he had taken to Palm Beach. He disclosed that he had only visited Staten Island once, and that was by helicopter. He let slip that he has breakfast most mornings at the Regency Hotel, which is on Park Avenue. And, as a kind of coup de grace, he revealed that he gets frequent pedicures.
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Ford soon announced that he would not be running for the New York Senate seat after all. It is a measure of how far we’ve come that an African American man has breakfast at the Regency and a regular pedicure appointment—and that, like so many privileged white politicians before him, he can be so tone-deaf.

When I asked Obama about generational succession and its impact on African Americans, this is what he said:

“I think now young people growing up realize, you know what, being African American can mean a whole range of things. There’s a whole bunch of possibilities out there for how you want to live your life, what values you want to express, who you choose to interact with. I would say that the downside of this is you don’t have the same unifying experience, even though it was a negative experience, of discrimination that let people, at least in the early ’60s, all to be on the same page, or to be largely on the same page in terms of how to make progress as a group.

“And I do think it is important for the African American community, in its diversity, to stay true to one core aspect of the African American experience, which is we know what it’s like to be on the outside, we know what it’s like to be discriminated against, or at least to have family members who have been discriminated against. And if we ever lose that, then I think we’re in trouble. Then I think we’ve lost our way.”

Coming from almost anyone else, that would make perfect sense. But it rings somewhat false to hear the president of the United States—the ultimate insider—talk about staying true to the feeling of being “on the outside.” Obama lays out the essential contradiction that Transcendent black Americans struggle constantly to resolve: not being outside anymore. For the younger Transcendents, this means holding on to experiences they never actually had—not an act of remembering but of imagining.

I
n May 2009, Bemnet Faris, a junior at Albert Einstein High School in Maryland, wrote a letter to President Obama. Her hope was “to illuminate the massive economic, political, and social chaos the Ethiopian dictator Prime Minister Meles Zenawi is inflicting on the innocent Ethiopian people.” Bemnet wrote that she feared Meles Zenawi was leading the nation “into complete anarchy and an inevitable genocide.” The letter went on to describe the situation in Ethiopia in specific and exhaustive detail, highlighting opponents of the regime who had been jailed or killed and building a strong case against Meles Zenawi’s rule. In the name of human rights and regional stability, Bemnet argued for action by the U.S. president. Her manifesto read as if it had been written by an exiled Ethiopian scholar or opposition leader, or perhaps a think tank’s resident expert on the region. Coming from a high-school student, it was remarkable—even from a girl who has an unblemished record of straight A’s, hopes to go to Harvard, and intends to become a pediatric neurosurgeon.