If you’re only going to read one long-form piece of political journalism before summer ends, allow me to suggest you make it Ta-Nihisi Coates’ “Fear Of A Black President”, the cover story in September’s issue of The Atlantic.
Taking the measure of America’s first black president and presidency, evaluating Barack Obama and our reaction to him, Coates ranges across politics, comedy, biography, music, history, media studies, sociology, sports and popular culture in a way I’d call sprawling…if it weren’t for the fact that nothing Coates writes is “sprawling”.
Some folks may remember Tina Turner saying “we never ever do nothing nice…and easy“. Well, Ta-Nihisi Coates never writes anything “sprawling”. It’s always tight, gripping, resonant.
After recounting how Richard Pryor, Cedric the Entertainer and Dave Chappelle wrought comedic gold out of the bitter truth that white racism rendered a black presidency impossible, Coates writes:
“Thus, in hard jest, the paradoxes and problems of a theoretical black presidency were given voice. Racism would not allow a black president. Nor would a blackness, forged by America’s democratic double-talk, that was too ghetto and raw for the refinement of the Oval Office. Just beneath the humor lurked a resonant pain, the scars of history, an aching doubt rooted in the belief that “they” would never accept us. And so in our Harlems and Paradise Valleys, we invoked a black presidency the way a legion of 5-foot point guards might invoke the dunk–as evidence of some great cosmic injustice, weighty in its import, out of reach.
As does—to the surprise even of many who voted for him in 2008—President Barack Obama. And not just as a president who happens to be a black man. A black man who chose to root himself in the South Side of Chicago, to marry a black woman, to identify as African-American on his census returns. A black man who plays pickup basketball, who sings Al Green and Aretha Franklin and Dionne Warwick, who brushes “Dirt Off (His) Shoulders“.
And yet.
Also a black man who, because of the enduring power of what Coates identifies as “not some new racism–it’s the dying embers of the same old racism”, has spoken less about race than any Democratic president in the past 50 years.
On the eve of the Republican and Democratic national conventions, before the post-Labor Day campaign begins in earnest, there’s no better article for taking the measure of our politics and our society—how far we’ve come, and how far we have to go.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/
