“I’M GOING TO BE A NEGRO TONIGHT”: MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., BARACK OBAMA, AND THE “POSTRACIAL” PARADOX

Is it just serendipity that Martin Luther King’s eightieth birthday was celebrated one day before Barack Obama was sworn in as president? To many ebullient Americans, Obama’s triumph marked the fulfillment of King’s so-called color-blind dream. The new president has long positioned himself in the King lineage, whether paying homage to the iconic leader with coy indirection (“forty-five years ago today” Americans heard “a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream”) or citing phrases from King like “the fierce urgency of now.” Most vividly on election night, he channeled King’s words from the night before he was assassinated, “We as a people will get there.”

If we are truly to grasp the full significance of Barack Obama’s victory, at least for what it tells us about the emerging nature of belonging and identity in the United States, we need to be wary of glib invocations of the “postracial” endeavor that is said to conjoin Obama and King. The key problem with the term is not that it mystifies the state of race relations in the United States; despite the hand-wringing over Hillary Democrats and riled-up hillbillies, election results did not vindicate all the foreboding about covert racism. The problem with the postracial verdict is more fundamental. It misreads both King and Obama, misconstrues the meaning of the movement beyond race, and misses the true significance of the election of Barack Obama.

One could just as well point to the differences that separate King and Obama. The most obvious involves the circumstances of their heritage and their relationship to blackness. Simply put, Obama came late to his blackness. This delay lies at the heart of Obama’s narrative of self-fashioning in Dreams from My Father. In contrast to the imagery of Kenya-Kansas fusion that defines his most celebrated speeches, the paean to mixed bloodlines that often accompanies them, or his self-depiction as “a mutt” at his November 5 press conference, his autobiography pivots on the burgeoning force of racial (and religious) self-discovery.

As most of us know, Obama’s early years were a testimony to polyglot possibility. Typically, his secular humanist mother gave him a book of creation stories that ranged across cultures—Genesis, Prometheus and the gift of fire, the Vedic legend of the tortoise. After the departure of his African father, she married an Indonesian Muslim whose faith was tinged with Hindu and animist elements. Plunked down in Djakarta, the small boy Obama entered a world of evil spirits, Hanuman the monkey god, and beggars with leprosy.

Given his mixed-up beginnings and the role of his Kansas kin in raising him, one could imagine the biracial Obama embracing a mixed identity. Yet the departure of his father left a “gash in my heart” that helped drive his resolve to become black, although he describes that choice as a destiny (“I was too young to know that I needed a race”). But the content of that need remained obscure: “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.”[1]

Obama tried out the lingo of his black friends in Honolulu—“that’s just how white folks will do you”—but it sounded awkward. “I felt like a non-native speaker tripping over a difficult phrase.” And his mother’s smile kept flashing in his mind. He glimpsed another version of blackness in the elegant cool and swagger of the basketball court, but looking back, he rejects that as a posture, “living out a caricature of black male adolescence.” He scanned Ellison and DuBois for answers; taken with Malcolm X’s desire to expunge his white blood, Obama knows “my own white blood would never recede into mere abstraction.” At one point, his friend Ray lands a blistering jab, “I don’t need no books to tell me how to be black.”[2]

Obama’s determined efforts to define himself as black prompted Marie Arana, the Washington Post writer and longtime Book World editor, to rejoin, “Obama’s not black.” She sees Obama, and all those who tout him as “the first black president,” as victims of the reactionary force of the one-drop rule, which insists that we call “these hybrids by a reductive name”: Halle Berry, black; Ben Kingsley, white; Nancy Kwan, yellow. “With language like that, how can we claim to live in a post-racial society?” The scholar Shelby Steele also glimpses a contradiction between the idealism that Obama represents (“that race is but a negligible human difference”) and his “lifelong preoccupation” with black identity. As a result, the man who could free us from the obsessions of race is “a bound man.”[3]

Who can dispute the desire to free us from the rigidities of race? Yet Arana yields to her own version of biogenetic determinism, as if mixed bloodlines required a mixed identity. But why can’t a “mixed” person favor one side or another? And why can’t Obama’s sense of blackness coexist with his mixed identity and not compete with it? Steele too can’t accept Obama’s offering that he’s at once “rooted” in the black community and “more than that.” Steele simplifies Obama in another way; he confuses the vulnerable posturing of the late-adolescent with the connection felt by the maturing man. All the while he supports vast generalities about white people and black people with little more than his own clairvoyance. So Steele becomes the one who reduces the richness of human experience to the racial factor.

As Dreams proceeds, Obama slips more naturally into a black “we.” He finds his way to Trinity Church, where Reverend Wright’s prophetic oratory taps something deep in the religious skeptic. At the foot of the cross, Obama tearfully fuses “ordinary black people” with “stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh.” Eventually, he makes his trek to Kenya and confronts the ghost of his father. By now, the blackness Obama has been fashioning seems shorn of its compensatory straining and righteous bristling. Felt rather than willed, it is full of bittersweet and existential reckonings, which the skillful narrator presages earlier in Dreams: “Our sense of wholeness would have to arise from something more fine than the bloodlines we’d inherited.”[4] In the end, Obama seems not like the bound man Steele discerns but quite the opposite: a man finally unbound and unburdened.

If Obama had to acquire his blackness and adopt his Christianity, King was born to both. The icon of agape who envisioned black and white children holding hands lived almost the whole first half of his life in separate black institutions—a black family, Ebenezer Baptist Church, Morehouse College, a black fraternity, the NAACP. On the coast of Java at great remove from the civil rights movement, Obama learned lessons of racial pride from a sympathetic white mother who exposed him to recordings of Mahalia Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr.; King learned those lessons in the Jim Crow South as a witness to the acts of a defiant black father who vowed to destroy all whites after observing a racist murder. From his perch in the backseat of the family car, the son watched as an irate Daddy King dressed down the white policeman who had pulled him over, “That’s a boy there; I’m Reverend King.” Years later, King, Jr., would remember his father’s insistence that he would oppose segregation “until the day I die.”[5]

Not entirely separate from his indelible sense of blackness, the Afro-Baptist brand of Christianity was no less a given of King’s life. As a teenager, King was embarrassed by the pyrotechnics of the black folk pulpit, but the little boy was mesmerized by his father whooping up in the pulpit. He absorbed those rhythms by a process of osmosis. By the age of six, King was convulsing church audiences with his rendition of “I Want to Be More and More like Jesus.” Trinity Church may herald itself as “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian”; the blackness and the Christianity of Ebenezer were so unapologetic there was never a need to proclaim it.

The transmutation of King into a symbol of beloved community did not diminish these primordial attachments. The organization King formed, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was steeped in identity politics, both black and Christian. Far more interested in rights for black people than in integration, King’s closest colleagues were strong race men who disdained “sucking up to white folks.” Kivie Kaplan, the icon of Jewish liberalism on the board of the NAACP, may have fretted to King, “I would certainly be happy that you have some Jewish leadership as well as Christian and possibly change the name to SOUTHERN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE.” But, as Adam Fairclough has written, only in 1966, “when its all-black board threatened to become an embarrassment, did King appoint whites to SCLC’s governing body.”[6]

Backstage with his black preacher buddies, King used the terms “cracker” and “nigger” and played the dozens, often with a wicked racial twist. “Lord, white folks made a big mistake, today,” he orated in one of the mock funerals he loved to perform. “They have sent home to glory your faithful servant, Andrew Young. Lord, have mercy on the white folks who did this terrible deed. They killed the wrong Negro. In Andrew Young, white folk had a friend so faithful, so enduring they should never have harmed a hair on his head. Of all my associates, no one loved white folks as much as Andy.”[7]

Before black audiences, King exulted in “fleecy locks and dark complexion.” In emotive rites of ancestor worship he paid homage to the slaves, sampling their words and celebrating their spirit (“They did an amazing thing!”). Never was King’s communion with his people more poignant than when he reprised the role of “that old slave preacher [who] would look at his people, he would say to ’em . . . ‘all week long you’ve been called a nigger. But I wanna say to you,’”—and here King’s thickening dialect created the impression that he was speaking the slave preacher’s words along with him—“You ain’t no slave, you ain’t no nigger, but you God’s chillun.”[8]

Nor was King a stranger to racial anger. Whereas in his race speech Obama distanced himself from black anger by assigning it to another age—“for the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away”—King placed himself personally inside the community of black affliction. Embracing the Watts rioters as brothers, King confessed, “Now I know the temptation [to become bitter], I know the temptation which comes to all of us. We’ve been trampled over so long.”[9] That knowledge was hard won; as a child, King had gone through a period of hating all whites. As an adult, a glimpse of Malcolm X on television could start the old anger churning. “Ohhh,” he would concede, “I know it’s hard to love the white man.”

King was not even above sharing a laugh with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the supremacist Nation of Islam and arch-symbol of black racism. The jocular moment came during King’s only recorded meeting with Muhammad, which seems to have devolved into a fascinating, if oblique, ritual of black solidarity. King asked the Messenger, “‘Do you really believe that all white folks are devils? I know a lot of white people have a lot of devil in them, but are you going to say that all of them are devils?’ Mr. Muhammad smiled. ‘Dr. King,’ he said, ‘you and me both grew up in Georgia, and we know there are many different kinds of snakes. The rattlesnake was poisonous and the king snake was friendly. But they both snakes, Dr. King.’ And the two of them, the Messenger of Allah and the apostle of Christian love, had a hearty laugh.”[10]

Many commentators missed this blacker voice when they noted the echoes of King in Obama’s election night promise, “We as a people will get there.” Obama’s “we” was crowded and capacious; it incorporated all the American people. But when King assured, “we as a people will get there,” he meant the black nation within a nation.

King’s recourse to that imagery of people embodied the dual loyalty of his devotion to brotherhood no less than brotherhood. “I love black people,” King exulted in an Albany, Georgia, church. “My people, my people,” he tenderly orated after the long trek from Selma to Montgomery. “I’m in Selma,” King told a mass meeting, “because my people are here. I’m in Selma because my people are suffering.” My people!

It might be argued that to compare Obama’s Grant Park speech before the nation to King’s tender communion in a mass meeting in a black church hardly vindicates the thesis of difference. But King never banished his black voice from his crossover talk to whites, which is why Obama’s “American Promise” speech only appeared to mimic the civil religious themes of King’s March on Washington speech in 1963. True, it is possible to catch Afro-Baptist cadences in Obama’s oratory; after all, twenty years spent in the pews at Trinity Church could not have failed to have an effect. But relative fluency and artful borrowing by themselves are not signs of a speaker’s dominant speech community. To grasp the faintness of the traces of the black preaching tradition in Obama’s oratory, you only have to compare them to King’s hooping in his Ebenezer years, his resort to voice merging, his bending of notes, the quavering “ohhhs” he used as a punctuation mark, and of course the crashing crescendos. Many of Obama’s stirring gambits are Ciceronian as much as Afro-Baptist, and the black preaching tradition holds no monopoly on musicality. “I call him Mozart,” says David Axelrod, Obama’s adviser; he’s referring to Jon Favreau, Obama’s wunderkind chief speechwriter. Both, says Axelrod, “think in terms of . . . the cadence of the words, how they work together, how they sound ­together.”[11]

Beyond style, Obama very much speaks from within the broader American tradition in his civil religious talk. “My story,” he repeats, “is part of a larger American story.” Unlike King, he invokes the American Dream as historical actuality rather than prophetic potentiality. Nor is Obama’s attention to Lincoln only decorative. As James Wood analyzed the victory night speech, “Behind his speech were the ghosts of Lincoln’s First Inaugural, which moved anxiously over ‘every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land,’ and his Second, which promised to ‘bind up the nation’s wounds.’”[12]

King too offered a Lincolnian flourish in “I Have a Dream.” “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” But from the outset King made clear he was going to read American history in the light of the black experience, as an outsider looking in. Before he spoke a single word, he conjured the presence of his beloved slaves; he asked Mahalia Jackson to introduce him with the spiritual, “I Been ’Buked and Scorned.” Summoning a hypothetical white interrogator who wanted to know, “when will you be satisfied,” King stepped out of the civic religious frame, falling into a collective black “we”: “We can never be satisfied . . . as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating ‘for whites only.’”[13]

King even offered an oblique reference—“One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.”—to the full-blown lament he sometimes voiced before black audiences: “We read on the Statue of Liberty that America is the mother of exiles.” But whites “never evinced the same maternal care for black exiles” for whom the nation has been “a dungeon of oppression and deprivation.” Blacks, King observed, had absorbed that fact into the intimate regions of their psyche and song. “And isn’t it the ultimate irony . . . that the Negro could sing in one of his sorrow songs, ‘Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.’” As the audience erupted in applause and with his voice rising in intensity, King demanded, “What sense of estrangement, what sense of rejection, could cause a people to create a metaphor like that?”

That sense of estrangement was reflected in King’s tendency to locate the legitimacy of black claims in a source more primal than the formal teachings of the Constitution or the symbols of civil religion. “And I know what I’m talking about this morning. (Yes, sir),” King once preached. “The black man made America wealthy.” The last comment roused the audience into thunderous clapping and some yelling, and King shifted out of his indignation into a lyrical meter:

At times, King’s reflections on that history acquired a bitterly personal edge in black venues: “They kept us in slavery 244 years in this country, and then they said they freed us from slavery, but they didn’t give us any land. . . . And they haven’t given us anything! After making our foreparents work and labor for 244 years—for nothing! Didn’t pay ’em a cent.’” “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he told a black church audience around the same time, “that all men are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. . . . That’s a beautiful creed.” Moments later, King gibed, “America has never lived up to it. . . . The men who wrote it owned slaves.”[15]

At the March on Washington, King’s mood was driven by exalted hope more than bitter remembrance, but the tension between the civic and the ethnic was built into the very structure of his speech. Midway through, he spontaneously threw down the prepared remarks cautiously composed for the event and began to sing in the spirit. That swerve from text may have followed a bit of call and shout from Mahalia Jackson, who some heard cry out, “tell them about the dream, Martin.” In any case, King took off on a burst of fervent black preaching for all the nation to behold, transporting his audience to the biblical time of inspired prophecy, fusing the foretaste of the coming of the Lord with the savoring of freedom’s coming. As he approached the run-up to the end, he was blurring the boundaries between oration, sermon, and song.

This hybrid mix of a black and universal perspective culminated in the two moments of musical crossover that closed “I Have a Dream.” The first bit of music was an elegy to citizenship. Perhaps in the future, blacks would be able to sing with new meaning, “my country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty,” as black exiles reconciled musically with the land that had denied them maternal care. But King didn’t end with blacks crossing over into the national song. Giving the sacred black ancestor the last word, King reversed directions. All God’s children, blacks and whites, would again sing together, but this time they would blend their voices with “the words of that old Negro spiritual, and cry out in joy, ‘Free at last, free at last.’” Then, in a leap that ratified the communion at work, King made white people black and had them speak as Negroes in a universal black “we”—thank God almighty, we’re free at last”—and made the slave ancestors their own.

Does any of this mean that King was “blacker” than Obama? Surely, some American blacks initially felt the biracial man with a funny African-Muslim name wasn’t really black. One self-appointed “Malcolm X of Hip-Hop,” DJ Chuck T, claimed, “He’s not black, he’s bi-racial! And he wasn’t even raised by black people. . . . Barack doesn’t embody the values and characteristics we as black people are raised with.” Obama, critic Stanley Crouch pronounced, does not “share a heritage with a majority of black Americans.”[16] On more than one occasion, Obama has appeared to strain to make common cause with a black audience by suddenly acquiring a faux southern drawl, dropping his final g’s, and referring to that archetypal trifling black man, “Cousin Pookie.”

All question of straining aside, Obama confronted the matter of his perceived strangeness in his 2008 Father’s Day speech at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago. “You remember at the beginning,” Obama reflected, “people were wondering—how come he doesn’t have all the support in the African American community. Do you remember that? That was when I wasn’t black enough. Now I’m too black.” The audience responded with laughter and applause.[17] The previous year in Selma, Alabama, at a commemoration of the voting rights bill, Obama noted that “a lot of people been asking, well, you know, your father was from Africa, your mother, she’s a white woman from Kansas. I’m not sure that you have the same ­experience.”

But the African substitutions he offered by way of closing distance only emphasized his need to travel outside the American experience to find parallels. “And I tried to explain, you don’t understand. You see, my Grandfather was a cook to the British in Kenya. Grew up in a small village and all his life, that’s all he was—a cook and a house boy. And that’s what they called him, even when he was 60 years old. They called him a house boy. They wouldn’t call him by his last name. Sound familiar? He had to carry a passbook around because Africans in their own land . . . could not move about freely. They could only go where they were told to go.” “So,” Obama concluded, “don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, ­Alabama. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, ­Alabama.”[18]

Some of the black uncertainty about Obama, at least as voiced by the black political class, was also a response to his rhetorical strategy, which struck some as untoward squeamishness about race. Slipping into the vernacular, Tavis Smiley complained, “[You] never run away from your blackness, you ain’t gotta be talking about race transcendence, or postracial this or postracial that. King didn’t do that.”[19] Obama’s reluctance to buck up John Lewis after Lewis decried the specter of George Wallace he sensed in Sarah Palin rallies would seem to vindicate Smiley’s point. Obama resisted blackening in other ways. When Obama declared, “our time has come,” he had exorcized the “our” of any of the ethnic ­resonance of Jesse Jackson’s chant in the 1984 Democratic primary.

Before one gets carried away with some putative “flight from blackness,” however, one needs to remember that King and Obama played very different roles. Obama was running not to be president of black America but the United States of America. King was a black Moses, leading his people up from bondage. That simple structural fact explains much of the different racial framings of the two men. Obama had to take heed of white opinion in ways that King did not. If King worried about avoiding Klan assassination squads in McComb, Mississippi, Obama was concerned with assuaging disgruntled Reagan Democrats in Macomb County, Michigan. His pathbreaking victory in many states—Indiana, for example; North Carolina, for another—rested on boosting Democratic levels just enough to turn red counties a slightly more pallid pink. Rather than fleeing from his blackness, Obama was running toward a progressive vision of national belonging whose premise, both strategic and ideological, was universalism. The “One America” mantra from his breakout speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention was a prescient anticipation of Howard Dean’s fifty-state strategy and a repudiation both of left identity politics and right-wing culture war.

Obama’s self-presentation clearly paid off. In the waning days of the election, Republicans targeted swing Democratic bastions with replayed snippets of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Still, Obama won over the white ethnics of Levittown, Pennsylvania, and Michigan’s lunch pail precincts. Decades earlier, they had heard a corollary of menace in “Our time has come”: Your time is over. The disaffected Democrats in Stanley Greenberg’s famous 1980s Macomb focus groups “expressed a profound distaste for black America. . . . Blacks constituted the explanation . . . for almost everything that had gone wrong in their lives.” By contrast, Greenberg and his associates found in 2008, “This is a very different Macomb and these are very different times. Welfare, crime, reverse discrimination, blacks and Detroit were never mentioned in the discussion of why the country and state are off track.” Most voters rejected the idea that Obama was like Jesse Jackson or would put the interests of black people first.[20]

Nor was Obama’s strategy of downplaying race offensive to vast numbers of black Americans. Around the time of the election, the warning of Michael Baisden, the host of the important, nationally syndicated black drive-time radio show, that Obama would be the president of all Americans, drew overwhelming audience recognition and approval. “Show ’em your white side,” urged Washington D.C. hip-hop artist Bomani Armah in a facetiously pragmatic mood. “He needs to start posing with his mother’s family a lot more, not the United Nations crew of brothers and cousins he’s normally seen running with.”[21] The morning after Obama’s victory, a satirical e-mail went out to black students prescribing the appropriate etiquette to be shown in mixed settings—basically a disavowal of the kind of triumphalism—no high fives, no theatrical victory dances—that unnerved many whites after the O. J. Simpson verdict.

There was, then, a certain dynamic of generational succession at work in some of black response to Obama. The old guard who had grown up on race politics resisted being displaced by post–civil rights leaders like Deval Patrick and Cory Booker. This was likely the source of the far-fetched sally by former Martin Luther King, Jr., colleague Andrew Young, “Bill [Clinton] is every bit as black as Barack. He’s probably gone with more black women than Barack.” Sharpe James, the disgraced former mayor of Newark, also retorted that Booker was not “black enough” to be the mayor; in James estimation, Booker was “a faggot white boy.”

But in countless, oblique ways, Obama gave off signals, no matter with how much bird-whistle stealth, that young blacks, and perhaps most blacks, period, did not fail to heed. When paying the bill in Ben’s Chile Bowl in Washington last January and asked if he wanted change, Obama created a minor stir with his reply, “Nah, we straight.” (Some media outlets cleaned up the grammatical lapse, just as they did when King once slipped into the vernacular in a public setting.) Ta-Nehisi Coates’s parsing of Obama’s silent declaration of his “deeper black” caught the dynamic well. Instead of the business-like handshake, Obama “offers the sort of dap—a little English in the wrist and a one armed hug—that black males spend much of their adolescence perfecting.” Meanwhile, Obama lets off election day jitters by shooting hoops, and his favorite TV character is Omar of “The Wire.” All in all, says Coates, “Forget about the Confederate flag, marching through Jena and Duke lacross. Barack Obama is black in the Zen-like way in which white people are white—without explanation. Without self-consciousness. Without permission.”[22]

That King was born to blackness and Obama discovered it or that a particular instance of King’s crossover talk was somehow “blacker” than Obama’s thus doesn’t really signify much. Each found distinctive ways to affirm blackness, membership in America, and the broader reach of humanity, all at the same time. No matter how much he loved his people, King always had a knack for entering the imaginative universe of every sort of person. “I am an untouchable,” he told a black church audience after his trip to Kerala, India. In a kind of “Jew face,” he cast himself as a German Gentile during the Nazi reign who would don the yellow star of affliction.

As these forays indicate, King did not transcend race so much as leap back and forth across its borders. Grounded in his blackness, King was neither limited by it nor by any one definition of blackness. The same is true of Obama, which is why he is truly heir to the actual King endeavor more than the one-dimensional King featured in pop hagiography. Freed of the retro debate that pits integration against nationalism, King emerges as a modern figure who anticipates the postethnic ideal, well described by David Hollinger, that “prefers voluntary to prescribed affiliations, appreciates multiple identities, pushes for communities of wide scope, recognizes the constructed character of ethno-racial groups, and accepts the formation of new groups as part of the normal life of a democratic society.”[23]

In his speech on race, “A More Perfect Union,” Obama’s swerve into blackness was provoked by coverage of Rev. Wright’s bitter sentiments. Obama embraced his race but not the anger. “I can no more disown [Rev. Wright] than I can disown the black community.” Just as King played the role of racial tour guide who translated the word “wait” for clueless whites (“It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. It has almost always meant never.”), Obama illuminated for whites the murky backstage of black anger, which “may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends.” None of those moments precluded Obama’s flip into whiteness. Presenting himself as a son of the dustbowl heartland and a grandson of the great generation of Rosie the Riveter and Patton’s army, Obama had long paid homage to his Kansas ancestors. This time, he went further. Not only did he welcome aggrieved Reagan Democrats back to the fold by casting opposition to quotas and busing as “legitimate” concerns rather than disguised racism; he adopted resentful whites by placing his grandmother in the kindred of white anxiety. She uttered racial stereotypes “that made me cringe.” Through a fluke of genetics, Obama was able to bring racially resentful whites into his family.

For King and Obama, racial crisscrossing wasn’t always somber. “Preachers, “ King once warned, “we can’t spend all of our time trying to learn how to whoop and holler. (Yes, Lord). . . . Not a Negro gospel (No man); not a gospel merely to get people to shout and kick over benches.” Moments later, King zigzagged. “Now I’m going to holler a little tonight, because I want to get it over to you. (Yes) [laughter]. I’m going to be a Negro tonight [laughter].”[24]

Meanwhile, on “The Daily Show,” Obama acted out the war between his black side and the white one that resisted voting for him. Raising the possibility of the Bradley Effect, Stewart asked, “are you concerned that you might go into the voting booth,”—sensing where Stewart was headed, Obama interrupted, “I won’t know what to do”—“and your white half might suddenly decide ‘I can’t do this,’” Obama confessed with his boyish smile, “it’s a problem. . . . I’ve been going through therapy to make sure that I vote properly.” During the South Carolina primary debate, Obama accepted the role of arbiter of black authenticity when a black reporter asked, “Do you consider Bill Clinton the first black president?” Denying Clinton automatic admission to brotherhood, Obama cracked wise. “I would have to . . . investigate Bill’s dancing abilities . . . before I accurately judge whether he was in fact a brother.”

The willingness to publicly air a certain kind of ethnic banter or vulgar stereotype reflects a decline of the virulence that requires people to step gingerly. The stretching of such boundaries reminds us that identity politics and civil religion are not simply static oppositions but are dynamically evolving notions and not necessarily contradictory ones. Civil religion, after all, is not so much a body of creedal tenets as a set of speech rules that govern how we talk in public about our particularistic religious, racial, and ethnic identities. In the postwar period, that mainly entailed a banishment of denominational triumphalism in favor of giving “no offense,” to use the sociologist John Cuddihy’s terms, incarnated in the marker, “I happen to be Jewish.” Over time, the multicultural revolution would challenge and modify those rules with flagrant, “offensive” declarations of difference in the public sphere.

Obama’s glide into the brother persona in the midst of a “postracial” campaign was thus the ultimate homage to King, the logical culmination of a process that began across the South when ordinary black people did not go beyond race but brought their black song and sermon and selves out of black enclaves and paraded them in public. Singing “I’ve got the light of freedom, I’m going to let it shine” at once declared a love of humanity and a love of blackness. King was only one of the shining emblems of the process that over time would invite out-gays, yarmulke-wearing Jews, and proud evangelicals to declare their presence. Label it what you might, this is the evolution of the classical dynamic of American pluralism.

NOTES

1. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004[1995]), 76.

2. Obama, 80–1, 79, 86, 87.

3. Marie Arana, “He’s Not Black,” The Washington Post, November 30, 2008, B01; Shelby Steele, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited about Obama and Why He Can’t Win (New York: Free Press, 2008).

4. Obama, 204.

5. Jonathan Rieder, The Word of the Lord Is upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 51.

6. Rieder, 58.

7. Rieder, 52.

8. Rieder, 127.

9. Rieder, 38.

10. Rieder, 45–46.

11. www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/08/axelrod-on-jon-favreau-i_n_172848.htm.

12. James Wood, “Victory Speech: Close Reading,” The New Yorker, November 17, 2008.

13. This paragraph and the two that follow the next one draw heavily from Rieder, The Word of the Lord Is upon Me, 328–336.

14. Rieder, 113–114.

15. Rieder, 169–170; 168.

16. Cited in the New York Daily News, August 26, 2008, www.dailynews.com/news/2008-08-26_convenion_confidential_spike; http:/gawker.com/news/stanleu-crouch/Stanley-crouch-ethnologist-211951.php.

17. You Tube, June 15, 2008.

18. http://www.barackobama.com/2007/03/04/selma_voting_rights_march_comm.php

19. “The Tavis Smiley Show,” May 22, 2008.

20. Stanley B. Greenberg, James Carville, Andrew Baumann, Karl Agne, and Jesse Contrio, “Back to Macomb: Reagan Democrat and Barack Obama” (Greenberg, Quinlan Rosner Research/Democracy Corps, 2008), 14.

21. Bomani Armah, “Okay, Barack. Now Show ’Em Your White Side,” The Washington Post, March 23, 2008, B01.

22. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “A Deeper Black,” The Nation, May 1, 2008.

23. David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 116.

24. ²⁴ Rieder, 134–5.