Signifying without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama

Introduction

1 Introduction When then Senator Barack Obama announced to a crowd of thousands in February 2008, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” few knew that the line referred to a poem by African American poet June Jordan.1 Instead commentators either thrilled with the power of his commanding oratory or puzzled over the nuances of this peculiar proclamation. It was at once an empowering reiteration of the hope and change vested in Obama’s historic campaign and a strange indictment. Why have we been passively waiting when the country is in shambles—fighting two seemingly endless wars, our international reputation in collapse, the stock market teetering toward recession? However, even if we had only been waiting, allowing other powers to wreck havoc on the economy, the environment, and society at large, Obama seemed to promise that this wait was over, not because he had arrived, but because we had finally recognized our own power to change. With its strange syntax, the phrase, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” glosses over the constitution of its own subject. Who is this “we”? There is an additional silence embedded in Obama’s borrowed line, an assumption that change has occurred without an explanation of what that change is or how it transpired. But spoken from the man who would become our country’s first black president, the change was obvious as was the implicitly multiracial “we.” Demonstrating a rhetorical move characteristic of his campaign, Obama gestured toward race without speaking race. The junior senator, whose intellectualism has been nearly as energizing as his race, echoed a type of coded racial discourse emblematic of twenty-first-century literary texts. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama proclaimed, not the more easily conceived, if less rousing, “I am the one you’ve been waiting for.” Instead the conflation between the glowing politician and the nation that would elect him nine months later anticipated the widespread selfcongratulatory calls of his victory. Obama’s win was not his alone, but evidence of how far the country had come in its evolution on racial matters. Journalists reporting the news of election day 2008 could not hide their joy. Many Republicans conceded that despite their loss, Obama’s victory signaled a new day in American race relations: the country was at last postracial . It was a term attached not simply to our new president, but, like his inspiring campaign “we,” it encompassed all of the United States. As Richard Cohen wrote in the Washington Post, “It is not just that he is postracial ; so is the nation that he is primed to lead . . . we have overcome.”2 What have we overcome to become post-racial? What brave new world has arrived to end our long wait? The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal declared on the morning following Obama’s win that post-racial connotes the promise of a vision made true, the end of racism: “One promise of his victory is that perhaps we can put to rest the myth of racism as a barrier to achievement in this splendid country.”3 Here, as in many subsequent descriptions of Obama, race is an inconvenient myth, an obstacle that we have at last surmounted because the highest office in the land is open to a member of a historically maligned community.4 But as the very term “post-racial” indicates, race and racism are oddly conflated here such that the demise of the latter heralds the irrelevance of race-specific discourse.5 No one suggested that Obama’s victory signaled the arrival of a post-racism age. Persistent disparities in housing, health care, education, and other opportunities among racial groups make such a claim absurd. Instead, post-racial implies a more disturbing conclusion: racism can be ended only through the destruction of race as a meaningful category of identity. If Obama is proof that America is at last post-racial, then, at the moment in which he became president, his blackness ceased to be a site of dynamic change and possibility; instead, his race settled into a static mark of transcendent identity. Fred Moten, distinguishing between the SIGNIFYING WITHOUT SPECIFYING 2 “lived experience of the black and the fact of blackness,” notes that life exists in “the unstable zone” between these poles, a “zone, made available to us by the broken bridge of mistranslation.”6 The fact...