Clinton's Black "I": a note on public property

It was at once deeply impressed upon my mind, that, if MR DOUGLASS could be persuaded to consecrate his time and talents to the promotion of the anti-slavery enterprise, a powerful impetus would be given to it, and a stunning blow at the same time inflicted on northern prejudice against a colored complexion.

William Lloyd Garrison, May 1845 Preface to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass[1]

It doesn’t work. I’ve polled every unwitting stranger and friend, and the answer is always the same. “It doesn’t work to call Clinton our first black President.” George Shulman agrees. After the first wave of laughs died down, I decided that it didn’t work either, and settled into a straight shot essay punctuated by a few race-y curves to prove that Morrison’s intervention missed the mark, albeit for very different reasons. Then, in mid-conclusion, I wondered if we had all missed the point, or rather, missed the event of Morrison’s article and the subsequent ‘writer’s rally’ that is faithfully documented in Shulman’s piece on “Narrating Clinton’s Impeachment.” If she was merely, or importantly, making a scene in the ‘Talk of the Town’ section of the New Yorker, and staging a continuation of her hypothesis at the New York University rally, her laughable proposition should be read as carefully worded lines in a longer script with a series of improvisational performances spinning off of her lead, these articles included. In this sense, I am more concerned with the possibilities Morrison opens up, rather than closes down, not as an attempt to iterate some hidden or hoped-for meaning, but as an honest effort to trace the surprising story that I found tucked in the pockets of her article and in the transcripts of her public appearance.

While it is clear that Shulman perceives a two-tier motive for the statement, the first of which might be the joke that associates Clinton’s impeachable sex with the most vilified tropes of black manhood, he takes issue with the second and more serious suggestion that Morrison is attempting to realize democratic ideals through a two-way identification of black men understanding the President, and the President becoming a black man. In this capacity, the President is both head-of-state and persecuted individual, a reflection of the national body and the personal or private body, in every citizen. He is the most general white male subject and the most particular black male suspect, in blackface, a formula that Shulman finds distasteful as parts stand in for wholes, producing a false sense of redeemed (and redeemable) democracy. If Morrison weren’t already fond of redemption narratives, this argument appears to seal the case. But, given the self-avowed “delight”[2] she takes in constructing and following the rules of redemption, especially in the midst of national crises, one has to fold the story back on itself in a kind of collective-self-irony to discover what she already knows at the outset: It doesn’t work. In fiction, it is a set-up, and yet in ‘real-life’ we call it an unfortunate dependence upon the redemptive promise lodged in the call to action. I have another suggestion, one that finds its foothold in the New Yorker article that Shulman gives short shrift as it bears the consistent marks of her other non-fiction essays.

I propose, that instead of this reversible role that allows Clinton to be blacked-up or cleaned up, Morrison is writing around a mangled knot of identifications that is neither a privileged foray into darkness, nor an obsessive relation to whiteness, but at final call, a matter of manumission. If I were to reach for an argument, this certainly would not be my choice, but after reviewing the New Yorker article several times and re-reading the unexpected scene of Odetta, Jessye Norman and Toni Morrison, singing — of all things — God Bless America as a finale to the Clinton/Save Democracy rally, the spaces and odd juxtapositions in Morrison’s argument tell another story that...