Nation of Cowards: Black Activism in Barack Obama's Post-Racial America

“I Know What’s in His Heart”

37 Barely a year into Barack Obama’s presidency, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid captured national headlines when his pre-election perspective on Obama’s chances of becoming the nation’s first black president came to light. Seeking to generate interest in their then upcoming book Game Change (which chronicles the behind-the-scene maneuvering during the 2008 campaign), journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann released a juicy excerpt in which Reid expresses his belief that America was ready for a black president and that Senator Barack Obamafitthebillperfectly.WhatlandedReidinhotwaterwashisqualifying statement about the aspects of Obama’s “blackness”—physically and culturally speaking—that would be especially appealing to white voters.ThesequalitiesincludedthefactthatObamawas“light-skinned” and spoke “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one” (36). Predictably,theGOP establishment,includingthenewlyelectedandfirst black RNC chairman Michael Steele, went on the attack, accusing Reid of beingraciallyinsensitiveandcallingforhimtoresign.Moreover,they accused the Democratic Party—who rallied around Reid—as having a doublestandardonmattersof raceandracism.HadaRepublicansenator and majority leader used such language to characterize Barack Obama or blacks, they argued, Democrats would be calling for his or her head. Most of the air was taken out of the story quickly, of course, because BarackObamaacceptedReid’sprofferedpublicandprivateapology—is2 “I Know What’s in His Heart” Enlightened Exceptionalism and the Problem with Using Barack Obama as the Racial Litmus Test for Black Progress and Achievement 38 Nation of Cowards sued almost immediatelyafter thestory firstbroke—without hesitation. More specifically, Obama announced in a White House press release, that he accepted Reid’s “apology without question because I’ve known him for years, I’ve seen the passionate leadership he’s shown on issues of social justice and I know what’s in his heart. As far as I’m concerned, the book [on this controversy] is closed” (Holland, my emphasis). He reiterated his feelings more strongly in an interview with black CNN commentator Roland Martin, saying Reid “is a good man who’s always been on the right side of history. For him to have used some inartful language in trying to praise me, and for people to try to make hay out of that makes absolutely no sense. He apologized, recognizing that he didn’t use appropriate language, but there was nothing mean-spirited in what he had to say” (online). Reid’s controversial racial comments and, indeed, Obama’s apologist response to them, recall the controversy during the kickoff of the Democratic presidential primaries when Senator Joe Biden described Obama as the first “mainstream African American [presidential candidate ] who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” (Balz). When Obama was later asked if he took offense to Biden’s comments , he opined, “I have absolutely no doubt about what is in his heart and the commitment he’s made to racial equality in this country” (Sargent , my emphasis). Obama “closed the book” on Biden’s suspect racial attitude in most dramatic fashion: he tapped Biden to be his running mate in the general election. If, as the old political adage goes, a “gaffe” in Washington is when a politician slips up and tells the truth, then there is much more to Reid’s and Biden’s comments about Obama than meets the eye. Indeed, the racial thinking that undergirds both Reid’s and Biden’s praise of Barack Obama’s talents is what white antiracist scholar-activist Tim Wise refers to as “enlightened exceptionalism.” Essentially an updated version of white supremacy, enlightened exceptionalism allows whites to carve out acceptable space for individuals such as Obama who strike them as different, as exceptions who are not like the rest. That this “enlightened exceptionalism” manages to accommodate individual people of color, even as it continues to look down upon the larger mass of black and brown America with suspicion, fear, and contempt, suggests the fluid and shape-shifting nature “I Know What’s in His Heart” 39 of racism. It indicates that far from vanishing, racism has become more sophisticated and that Obama’s rise could, at least in part, stem from the triumph of racism, albeit of a more seeming ecumenical type than that to which we have grown accustomed. (23) Whites who espouse this viewpoint feel “enlightened,” then, because they experience this pattern of distinguishing exceptional blacks from the “herd” as an antiracist gesture. Wise argues this phenomenon explains how whites who harbor stigmas toward African Americans could wholeheartedly support a black candidate for...