With America’s economy on the brink of collapse and mounting fears about global terrorism, many African Americans are becoming increasingly convinced that Barack Obama will actually win this election. But that just makes some of them more — not less — cynical about how race operates in contemporary America.
As an anthropologist who spends a lot of time listening to people talk about their hopes and dreams, their complicated pasts, and uncharted futures, I have noticed an interesting and growing pattern lately: Some black folks are describing the potential inauguration of this country’s first black president (no offense, Bill) as the epitome of America’s traditional version of racial prejudice and scapegoating, not its ultimate repudiation. In other words, they see it as another reason to be skeptical of America’s newfound capacity to elect a person of color to the highest office in the land. To understand why, think about contemporary pop-cultural representations of black presidencies. At least three immediately come to mind for me.
In the 2005 film adaptation of the third installment in the Left Behind series (those massively successful novels on the rapture and its immediate aftermath), we first meet the president, played by Oscar-winner Louis Gossett Jr., as he’s sitting in the Oval Office, which is completely engulfed in flames. We see the fire. We notice that iconic interior design. And we identify the solemn black face behind the presidential desk.
More famously, during Morgan Freeman’s heroic portrayal of a sitting American president in 1998’s Deep Impact, he delivers his most powerful speech in front of a State Capital building that is being reconstructed from scratch right behind him (after a meteor attack). He offers inspiring rhetoric (gives good speech), but it is an almost pathetic post-lapsarian pep talk after the biggest tragedy in American history.
And Fox’s wildly popular counter-terrorism-themed television show, 24, finds America’s first Black president, calm and cerebral in ways that uncannily anticipated current characterizations of Obama, occupying the executive office when a major American city experiences its first nuclear attack. Or was that during the tenure of his younger brother, America’s second black president?
In each of these instances, African-American presidents serve their country during threats to the very possibility of an American future, during what looks like something close to the end of America itself.
It is hard to read urgent headlines about the potential fallout from Wall Street’s recent meltdown and its hemorrhaging stock market without hearing Cassandra’s pessimistic voice in our collective heads. Things certainly look bleak. And we don’t need economists to tell us that.
Although any sustained discussion of the economy seems to benefit the Democrats no matter what, the logic of race-based skepticism and racial paranoia in contemporary society greases the wheel for more conspiratorial interpretations of Obama’s rising poll numbers. The scarier things get, the larger Obama’s lead seems to get.
Racial skepticisms might seem far-fetched and irrational, especially to those who want to believe that America has already left its racist past behind, but that doesn’t mean that those skepticisms won’t seem like plausible glosses on Obama’s newest poll numbers.
As people follow roller-coastering stock prices and feeble attempts at an adequate governmental response, it seems ironic, at least to some, that America appears most likely to pass the executive baton to its first black presidential candidate just as the country teeters on the edge of economic collapse, which (the argument goes) will allow many Americans to blame “the black guy” for all of it, especially if things continue to get worse in 2009. “See what happens when you give a black person a country to run. They turn it into a version of Africa and its failed states.”
Even if some of these skeptical readings of America’s support for Barack Obama are tongue-in-cheek, which is often the case, a sincere skepticism still informs more humorously pitched suspicions about America’s real commitments to full racial equality. Racism in the 21st century doesn’t look anything like what it has looked like for most of American history. And that’s an undeniably good thing. No more “whites only” placards above water fountains or dingy lines separating white riders from black ones on public buses. But demonizing explicitly racist laws and cleaning up politically correct public discourse shouldn’t be mistaken for a collective transcendence of race. If anything, we have lodged ourselves into a newfangled corner where racism mostly happens without any explicitly self-identified or publicly unabashed racists in the room.
In such a racial landscape, subtle and unprecedented, when few Americans want to be called ‘racist’ anymore, people have to spy racism differently, and just about anything might ostensibly serve as a euphemized continuation of racisms past—even the potential election of America’s first African-American president (and especially if some folks think that he’s being handed the Titanic’s shiny steering wheel).
