JAN/FEB 2017 ISSUE
My President Was Black
A history of the first African American White House—and of what came next
Photograph by Ian Allen
“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I. “LOVE WILL MAKE YOU DO WRONG”
In the waning days of President Barack Obama’s administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party, the full import of which no one could then grasp. It was late October, Friday the 21st, and the president had spent many of the previous weeks, as he would spend the two subsequent weeks, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. Things were looking up. Polls in the crucial states of Virginia and Pennsylvania showed Clinton with solid advantages. The formidable GOP strongholds of Georgia and Texas were said to be under threat. The moment seemed to buoy Obama. He had been light on his feet in these last few weeks, cracking jokes at the expense of Republican opponents and laughing off hecklers. At a rally in Orlando on October 28, he greeted a student who would be introducing him by dancing toward her and then noting that the song playing over the loudspeakers—the Gap Band’s “Outstanding”—was older than she was. “This is classic!” he said. Then he flashed the smile that had launched America’s first black presidency, and started dancing again. Three months still remained before Inauguration Day, but staffers had already begun to count down the days. They did this with a mix of pride and longing—like college seniors in early May. They had no sense of the world they were graduating into. None of us did.
The farewell party, presented by BET (Black Entertainment Television), was the last in a series of concerts the first couple had hosted at the White House. Guests were asked to arrive at 5:30 p.m. By 6, two long lines stretched behind the Treasury Building, where the Secret Service was checking names. The people in these lines were, in the main, black, and their humor reflected it. The brisker queue was dubbed the “good-hair line” by one guest, and there was laughter at the prospect of the Secret Service subjecting us all to a “brown-paper-bag test.” This did not come to pass, but security was tight. Several guests were told to stand in a makeshift pen and wait to have their backgrounds checked a second time.
Dave Chappelle was there. He coolly explained the peril and promise of comedy in what was then still only a remotely potential Donald Trump presidency: “I mean, we never had a guy have his own pussygate scandal.” Everyone laughed. A few weeks later, he would be roundly criticized for telling a crowd at the Cutting Room, in New York, that he had voted for Clinton but did not feel good about it. “She’s going to be on a coin someday,” Chappelle said. “And her behavior has not been coinworthy.” But on this crisp October night, everything felt inevitable and grand. There was a slight wind. It had been in the 80s for much of that week. Now, as the sun set, the season remembered its name. Women shivered in their cocktail dresses. Gentlemen chivalrously handed over their suit coats. But when Naomi Campbell strolled past the security pen in a sleeveless number, she seemed as invulnerable as ever.
from leaking out. (This effort was unsuccessful. The next day, a
partygoer would tweet a video of the leader of the free world
dancing to Drake’s “Hotline Bling.”) After withstanding the
barrage of security, guests were welcomed into the East Wing
of the White House, and then ushered back out into the night,
where they boarded a succession of orange-and-green trolleys.
The singer and actress Janelle Monáe, her famous and fantastic
pompadour preceding her, stepped on board and joked with a
companion about the historical import of “sitting in the back of
the bus.” She took a seat three rows from the front and hummed
into the night. The trolley dropped the guests on the South Lawn,
in front of a giant tent. The South Lawn’s fountain was lit up with
blue lights. The White House proper loomed like a ghost in the
distance. I heard the band, inside, beginning to play Al Green’s
“Let’s Stay Together.”
“Well, you can tell what type of night this is,” Obama said from the stage, opening the event. “Not the usual ruffles and flourishes!”
The crowd roared.
“This must be a BET event!”
The crowd roared louder still.
Obama placed the concert in the White House’s musical tradition, noting that guests of the Kennedys had once done the twist at the residence—“the twerking of their time,” he said, before adding, “There will be no twerking tonight. At least not by me.”
The Obamas are fervent and eclectic music fans. In the past eight years, they have hosted performances at the White House by everyone from Mavis Staples to Bob Dylan to Tony Bennett to the Blind Boys of Alabama. After the rapper Common was invited to perform in 2011, a small fracas ensued in the right-wing media. He performed anyway—and was invited back again this glorious fall evening and almost stole the show. The crowd sang along to the hook for his hit ballad “The Light.” And when he brought on the gospel singer Yolanda Adams to fill in for John Legend on the Oscar-winning song “Glory,” glee turned to rapture.
De La Soul was there. The hip-hop trio had come of age as boyish B-boys with Gumby-style high-top fades. Now they moved across the stage with a lovely mix of lethargy and grace, like your favorite uncle making his way down the Soul Trainline, wary of throwing out a hip. I felt a sense of victory watching them rock the crowd, all while keeping it in the pocket. The victory belonged to hip-hop—an art form birthed in the burning Bronx and now standing full grown, at the White House, unbroken and unedited. Usher led the crowd in a call-and-response: “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud.” Jill Scott showed off her operatic chops. Bell Biv DeVoe, contemporaries of De La, made history with their performance by surely becoming the first group to suggest to a presidential audience that one should “never trust a big butt and a smile.”
President Obama onstage at BET’s “Love & Happiness” event in October 2016, the last in a series of concerts the first couple hosted at the White House (Lawrence Jackson / White House)
community are genuine. The Obamas are social with Beyoncé
and Jay-Z. They hosted Chance the Rapper and Frank Ocean
at a state dinner, and last year invited Swizz Beatz, Busta
Rhymes, and Ludacris, among others, to discuss criminal-
justice reform and other initiatives. Obama once stood in the
Rose Garden passing large flash cards to the Hamilton
creator and rapper Lin-Manuel Miranda, who then freestyled
using each word on the cards. “Drop the beat,” Obama said,
inaugurating the session. At 55, Obama is younger than
pioneering hip-hop artists like Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Kool
Herc, and Kurtis Blow. If Obama’s enormous symbolic
power draws primarily from being the country’s first black
president, it also draws from his membership in hip-hop’s
foundational generation.
That night, the men were sharp in their gray or black suits and optional ties. Those who were not in suits had chosen to make a statement, like the dark-skinned young man who strolled in, sockless, with blue jeans cuffed so as to accentuate his gorgeous black-suede loafers. Everything in his ensemble seemed to say, “My fellow Americans, do not try this at home.” There were women in fur jackets and high heels; others with sculpted naturals, the sides shaved close, the tops blooming into curls; others still in gold bamboo earrings and long blond dreads. When the actor Jesse Williams took the stage, seemingly awed before such black excellence, before such black opulence, assembled just feet from where slaves had once toiled, he simply said, “Look where we are. Look where we are right now.”
This would not happen again, and everyone knew it. It was not just that there might never be another African American president of the United States. It was the feeling that this particular black family, the Obamas, represented the best of black people, the ultimate credit to the race, incomparable in elegance and bearing. “There are no more,” the comedian Sinbad joked back in 2010. “There are no black men raised in Kansas and Hawaii. That’s the last one. Y’all better treat this one right. The next one gonna be from Cleveland. He gonna wear a perm. Then you gonna see what it’s really like.” Throughout their residency, the Obamas had refrained from showing America “what it’s really like,” and had instead followed the first lady’s motto, “When they go low, we go high.” This was the ideal—black and graceful under fire—saluted that evening. The president was lionized as “our crown jewel.” The first lady was praised as the woman “who put the O in Obama.”
some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans.
But there is nothing “mere” about symbols. The power
embedded in the word nigger is also symbolic. Burning crosses
do not literally raise the black poverty rate, and the Confederate
flag does not directly expand the wealth gap.
communicated that the highest office of government in the
country—indeed, the most powerful political offices in the
world—was off-limits to black individuals, the election of
Barack Obama communicated that the prohibition had been
lifted. It communicated much more. Before Obama
triumphed in 2008, the most-famous depictions of black
success tended to be entertainers or athletes. But Obama
had shown that it was “possible to be smart and cool at
the same damn time,” as Jesse Williams put it at the BET
party. Moreover, he had not embarrassed his people with
a string of scandals. Against the specter of black pathology,
against the narrow images of welfare moms and deadbeat
dads, his time in the White House had been an eight-year
showcase of a healthy and successful black family spanning
three generations, with two dogs to boot. In short, he
became a symbol of black people’s everyday, extraordinary
Americanness.
Whiteness in America is a different symbol—a badge of advantage. In a country of professed meritocratic competition, this badge has long ensured an unerring privilege, represented in a 220-year monopoly on the highest office in the land. For some not-insubstantial sector of the country, the elevation of Barack Obama communicated that the power of the badge had diminished. For eight long years, the badge-holders watched him. They saw footage of the president throwing bounce passes and shooting jumpers. They saw him enter a locker room, give a businesslike handshake to a white staffer, and then greet Kevin Durant with something more soulful. They saw his wife dancing with Jimmy Fallon and posing, resplendent, on the covers of magazines that had, only a decade earlier, been almost exclusively, if unofficially, reserved for ladies imbued with the great power of the badge.
concocted to denigrate the first black White House. Obama
gave free cellphones to disheveled welfare recipients. Obama
went to Europe and complained that “ordinary men and
women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs.”
Obama had inscribed an Arabic saying on his wedding ring,
then stopped wearing the ring, in observance of Ramadan.
He canceled the National Day of Prayer; refused to sign
certificates for Eagle Scouts; faked his attendance at
Columbia University; and used a teleprompter to address
a group of elementary-school students. The badge-holders
fumed. They wanted their country back. And, though no
one at the farewell party knew it, in a couple of weeks they
would have it.
America. At the end of the party, Obama looked out into the
crowd, searching for Dave Chappelle. “Where’s Dave?” he
cried. And then, finding him, the president referenced
Chappelle’s legendary Brooklyn concert. “You got your block
party. I got my block party.” Then the band struck up Al
Green’s “Love and Happiness”—the evening’s theme. The
president danced in a line next to Ronnie DeVoe. Together
they mouthed the lyrics: “Make you do right. Love will
make you do wrong.”
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>via: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/