The Making of African America (33 page)

The contrapuntal narrative—movement and place, fluidity and fixity, routes and roots—that has characterized black life throughout American history has not always followed the same course. But, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and the fourth great migration, it would continue to shape African American life.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the latest—although doubtless not the last—of the great migrations continues to remake African American and American life. This massive transformation has affected every aspect of American society but perhaps none as much as the unlikely presidential candidacy of the son of a Kenyan goat herder. Barack Obama's triumphant election speaks directly to the changes set in motion with the legislation that President Lyndon Johnson signed some four decades earlier in the extraordinary year of 1965. The Civil Rights Act permitted African Americans to participate fully in the electoral arena from which they had been excluded nearly a century earlier. Equally significantly, the Immigration and Nationality Act allowed people of African descent from all over the world to enter a nation from which nearly all had been excluded for almost two centuries. The changes in politics and people created a new African America and a new America.

That much had been anticipated of the Civil Rights Act, whose origins could be found in centuries of struggle capped by a decade of intense, often violent conflict. Black leaders who gathered in the nation's capitol in the summer of 1965 and witnessed President Johnson sign the historic legislation affirmed its special significance. Armed with fresh guarantees of the franchise and refusing to be intimidated by legal challenges and extralegal violence, black men and women rushed to register to vote and to take their place on the hustings. As they did, they made swift and lasting changes to American politics.

The new politics changed everything. Embracing the Democratic Party, which had abandoned its historic defense of white supremacy to usher in black enfranchisement, African Americans cut their remaining ties to the party of Lincoln. Republicans did little to prevent the departure. Instead, they hurriedly shed the last remnants of their emancipatory inheritance. First under the guise of Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy, Republicans welcomed white Democrats and others who had opposed the Civil Rights revolution. In the years that followed, Republicans employed the politically charged issues of busing, welfare, and affirmative action to become the party of racial reaction. By 1980, it seemed only fitting that Ronald Reagan would announce his candidacy for the presidency in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the murder of three civil rights workers. As Republicans used barely disguised racialist code words of “law and order” and “neighborhood schools,” invented the myth of the black welfare queen, and publicized a recidivist Willie Horton to secure their political hegemony, Democrats became identified—often to their dismay—with programs favored by black Americans. By the end of the twentieth century, black voters had become the Democratic Party's most reliable constituency.
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Although centuries of movement had made and remade African and African American life, few Americans—certainly few black Americans—expected that the Immigration and Nationality Act would have a similar impact on African American life. While black leaders rejoiced at the passage of the Civil Rights Act, they paid little attention to immigration reform. In the decade following the passage of the new law, little happened to alter their response. Even as the number of black immigrants increased during the 1980s, African Americans viewed the new arrivals with a mixture of indifference and suspicion. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the changing demography of black life could no longer be ignored. The large-scale mixing of diverse peoples of African descent, some newly arrived and some deeply rooted in this country, once again began to remake the way African Americans saw themselves collectively. The old story of movement and rootedness was about to play itself out yet once again.

As hip-hop reverberated from boom boxes and then iPods, the presence of black immigrants began to have a more influential role in the politics and culture of African America. At first, newcomers focused on access to visas, the treatment of asylees, and other matters that revealed a greater preoccupation with their old homelands than their new one. However, in late 2006, with the beginning of the American presidential campaign, that changed dramatically. Suddenly, the immigrants' presence loomed large, as the newly arrived found a candidate who not only looked like them but shared many of their experiences.
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Barack Obama's father did not arrive in the United States under the new legislation, and his son was born prior to the historic reform of civil rights and immigration. However, Barack came of age in a society shaped by the changes initiated by those two laws. The interplay between them propelled him to a position that suggested how the fourth great migration had begun to redefine the lives of African Americans, and then American life, at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. New circumstances demanded a new narrative.

Like the children of immigrants in passages past, Barack Obama struggled to define a sense of self. In his autobiography, he reveals his complex genealogy, his peripatetic childhood, and the discovery that he “needed a race” as he mapped the multiple meanings of blackness between Jakarta and Nairobi until finding his own African American self on the South Side of Chicago.
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As the interplay of movement and place that had made and remade African American life in the past again reshaped lives of black men and women, Obama—like others who shared his experience—became an exemplar of the remaking of African American society and its history.

In 1991, returning to Chicago with a Harvard law degree and ambitions aplenty, Obama gravitated to the Democratic Party, which recently elected a Democratic mayor and which dominated that city's African American politics much as it did the nation's at large. He played a small role in a voter registration drive during the 1992 election and began “constructing a political identity for himself.” Four years later, drawing on his record as a community organizer, Obama won a Democratic seat in the Illinois state senate, where he gained a reputation as a political comer.

But as Obama attempted to expand his political reach, he found that his immigrant origins confounded his ambitions. In 2000, he challenged Bobby Rush, the Democratic incumbent representing South Side Chicago, for his seat in the House of Representatives. Obama identified Rush, a former Black Panther who had recently been defeated in the Democratic mayoral primary, with “a politics that is rooted in the past.” Rush, who had spent his life in Chicago, happily conceded the point. He advertised his own place as a founder of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and dismissed Obama as an outsider with a strange lineage, a foreign upbringing, a peculiar name, and little knowledge of the African American experience. “Barack Obama went to Harvard and became an educated fool,” Rush informed his constituents. “Barack is a person who read about the civil rights protests and thinks he knows all about it.” Others were even more direct. “Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community,” asserted one South Side politico. Many believed the charge to be self-evident. Rush crushed the newcomer, winning reelection by a two to one margin.
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By 2004, Obama had recovered from defeat, redoubled his ambitions, and declared his candidacy for the United States Senate. His black Republican opponent, Alan Keyes, drawing a lesson from Rush's victory, sought to undercut Obama's support within the black community by counterposing his family's roots in the slave South to Obama's peculiar lineage.
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This time Obama was ready, demonstrating his rootedness not only by rehearsing his community service but also by his choice of recreation—pickup basketball.

Obama dispatched Keyes but not the concerns Keyes had raised about Obama's relationship to the historic African American experience. When Obama announced his presidential bid, the issue exploded on the national stage. Stanley Crouch, a combative African American music critic and syndicated columnist who sounded more like the nativist Henry Cabot Lodge of another era, reiterated Keyes's campaign screed—“lived the life of a black American”—in a manner that soon found its way to the front page of the
New York Times, Newsweek,
and other like venues. Is “Obama really black?” asked Crouch in a manner that anticipated his answer. “Other than color, Obama did not—does not—share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves. So when black Americans refer to Obama as ‘one of us,”' Crouch concluded, “I do not know what they are talking about.”
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The question of whether Obama was “black enough” soon reverberated across the Internet as bloggers of all persuasions seized the issue; simultaneously, the debate animated neighborhood barbershops and beauty parlors.
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While some fixated on matters of Obama's mixed racial origins, class standing, and elite education, in his broadside Crouch kept the focus on the increasingly tangled relations between African Americans and the newly arrived people of African descent. As yet another commentator described it, “In such distinctions between black immigrants and African Americans lay buried a history of competitive intraracial tensions and cultural differences that have never been resolved.”
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Again, the tensions that once played out between Africans and creoles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between old-timers and newcomers in the nineteenth-century black belt, and between Old Settlers and the new middle class in the twentieth-century urban North were manifesting themselves, although this time for a national audience.

Debra Dickerson, a journalist whose work explores matters of African American identity, drew the lines even more sharply. “ ‘ Black,' in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves. Voluntary immigrants of African descent (even those descended from West Indian slaves) are just that, voluntary immigrants of African descent with markedly different outlooks on the role of race in their lives and in politics. At a minimum, it can't be assumed,” she insisted with mind-chopping logic, “that a Nigerian cabdriver and a third-generation Harlemite have more in common than the fact a cop won't bother to make the distinction. They're both ‘black' as a matter of skin color and DNA, but only the Harlemite, for better or worse, is politically and culturally black, as we use the term.”
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Parsing the differences between Nigerian cabdrivers and third-generation residents of Harlem was no idle matter, for, at base, Dickerson saw them as central to the very meaning of the African American experience and who would define it. “We know a great deal about black people,” Dickerson observed in defining the intraracial struggle. “We know next to nothing about immigrants of African descent (woe be unto blacks when the latter groups find their voice and start saying all kinds of things we don't want said).”
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Much the same could be noted of immigrants of African descent from other parts of the world. Louis Chude-Sokei, a professor of literature at the University of California, whose mixed Nigerian and Jamaican origins suggest that he may have heard those voices of woe and hence understood the matter precisely as had Dickerson. “As the numbers of black immigrants and their progeny grow to challenge the numerical supremacy of the native black minority, can a challenge to African Americans' cultural dominance, racial assumptions and politics be far behind?”
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Obama eventually defused the controversy over whether he was black enough. Reiterating the traditional American measure of race, he pointed to the inexorable function of the one-drop rule. “When I leave this interview and go out on the street and attempt to hail a taxi,” Obama told television interviewer Charlie Rose, “there is no question who I am.”
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But Dickerson had already conceded that litmus test—“a cop won't bother to make the distinction.” While the fealty of cabdrivers and policemen to the one-drop rule may have satisfied the “rank-and-file black voters”—“as long as Obama acts black and does us proud”—it did nothing to satisfy Dickerson and perhaps others, except to confirm that such men and women were “no less complicit in this shell game we're playing.”
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The shell game—the shifting meaning of blackness under the cover of the persistence of race—had been played in mainland North America at least since John Rolfe purchased those “twenty Negars.” It had hardly ended at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Obama's struggle “to raise myself to be a black man in America” spoke precisely to the reality that the millions of other black immigrants and children of immigrants had confronted and continue to confront. After graduating from Columbia University, Obama took his search for groundedness to Chicago, with its charismatic black mayor, and began a job as an organizer in a dilapidated Chicago housing development. Later he joined an African American church and married into a family with deep roots in the city and, beyond that, in the slave south. Obama had found his place; he was rooted, finding in Chicago “a vision of black life in all its possibilities, a vision that filled me with longing—a longing for place, and a fixed and definite history.”
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Obama, in short, had moved beyond the blood quotient of the one-drop rule to the ideological terrain upon which race had always rested. But in convincing some that he was black enough, Obama had become too black for many white Americans. While the suspicions of some white Americans—along with his own electoral successes—affirmed Obama's racial credentials in the eyes of black Americans, his new position required a fuller, more public explication of race. He found the occasion in quelling the firestorm created by the angry racial musing of his pastor.