January 3, 2011
THE CLOTHES HAVE NO EMPEROR:
Black Like Me: A review of The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, by David Remnick. (Christopher Caldwell, December 8, 2010, Claremont Review of Books)
The Bridge, by New Yorker editor David Remnick, is not so much about how a black became president as about how a president became black. It opens at a 2007 commemoration in Selma, Alabama—the site of a clash between police and civil rights marchers 42 years earlier—where Barack Obama was able to present himself as a worthier inheritor than Hillary Clinton of the struggles for which the old men and women in the audience had risked so much. "Don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama," he said. "Don't tell me I'm not coming home when I come to Selma, Alabama."That the segregation-era Deep South, or even the memory thereof, might be in any way "home" to Obama did not go without saying. Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, was an impressionable, idealistic white woman raised in Kansas and then Hawaii, a sort of wind-chime socialist who believed she had "Cherokee blood" (the wish possibly being father to the thought), and who wound up in Indonesia, studying village blacksmithing and writing reports for the Ford Foundation. Obama would later describe her, with a mixture of love and condescension, as "that girl with the movie of beautiful black people in her head." Obama's father was a brainy, ambitious Kenyan Muslim who arrived in Hawaii as part of a foundation-funded program for training a post-imperial African ruling class. "Ann's parents found Obama smooth, smart, even charming," Remnick writes, "but not entirely familiar or trustworthy." He was a drunk, the more so as the years passed, and, not to put too fine a point on it, a polygamist, who already had a wife at the time he married Ann, and would acquire another after he abandoned the Dunham family to attend graduate school. He subsequently returned to Africa, and the future president met him only once.
The story of Barack Obama's rise is familiar enough not to warrant repeating. What is unusual about Remnick's version is that he tells it through the lens of race. As an American boy growing up in Indonesia and Hawaii in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, Obama was in a confusing position. He looked black, but he didn't know any blacks. He was descended from slave owners but not from slaves. Most disorientingly, Hawaii—where he was brought up by his white grandparents—lacked even those lingering remnants of racism, the exposure and expunging of which was, by the 1970s, the main preoccupation of the burgeoning establishment that had grown out of the civil rights movement.
In a way that strikes Remnick as both "touching" and "awkward," Obama began "giving himself instruction on how to be black." He wrote letters to his father that went unanswered. He sought out military servicemen to play basketball with, in hopes of learning their slang. In college, Obama read deeply in black literature and history. He gravitated towards community organizing in poor black neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. At law school he took a lot of classes in civil rights law, and then spurned a lucrative career track to take up civil rights work at Davis, Miner, which Remnick calls "a classic liberal ‘good-guy' firm." As a lecturer at the University of Chicago, he taught a course (by all accounts superb) called Current Issues in Racism and the Law. He sought out as a mentor the fiery advocate of "black-liberation theology," Jeremiah Wright.
One of the book's highlights is Remnick's interview with the former Black Panther leader (now Congressman) Bobby Rush, who demolished Obama in his first race for Congress in 2000, largely by raising doubts among inner-city voters about Obama's "authenticity." Rush, who still seems to carry considerable resentment from the campaign, alleges that Obama even taught himself to walk like a black person, with a kind of "sashay," as Remnick calls it, that Rush gleefully imitates for him.
There's a certain break at the knees as you walk and you get a certain roll going. Watch. You see? And he's the first President of the United States to walk like that, I can guarantee you that! But, lemme tell you, I never noticed that he walked like that back then!
Obama is, racially speaking, a self-made man. If there were a citizenship examination for blackness, he'd have passed it. Remnick hints that Ann Dunham's idealization of black people may have rubbed off on Obama, and that it may be responsible for the immodesty that is his besetting flaw. Remnick sees that blackness can, in some circumstances, be deployed to great effect on the political stage—and that the 2008 presidential election was one of those circumstances. A Chicago Tribune journalist describes Obama to Remnick as "radiating the sense that ‘You're the kind of guy who can accept a black guy as a senator.'"
More than anything else, Mr. Obama radiates a sense that there is nothing behind the facade he's adopted. Given this self-conscious adoption of a fake persona, maybe there isn't.
