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Résumé
Résumé
A provocative and lively examination of the meaning of America's first black presidency, by the New York Times -bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop .
Michael Eric Dyson explores the powerful, surprising way the politics of race have shaped Barack Obama's identity and groundbreaking presidency. How has President Obama dealt publicly with race--as the national traumas of Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott have played out during his tenure? What can we learn from Obama's major race speeches about his approach to racial conflict and the black criticism it provokes? Dyson explores whether Obama's use of his own biracialism as a radiant symbol has been driven by the president's desire to avoid a painful moral reckoning on race. And he sheds light on identity issues within the black power structure, telling the fascinating story of how Obama has spurned traditional black power brokers, significantly reducing their leverage.
President Obama's own voice--from an Oval Office interview granted to Dyson for this book--along with those of Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, and Maxine Waters, among others, add unique depth to this profound tour of the nation's first black presidency.
"Dyson proves...that he is without peer when it comes to contextualizing race in twenty-first-century America... A must-read for anyone who wants to better understand America's racial past, present, and future."--Gilbert King, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Devil in the Grove
Critiques (5)
Critique du Publishers Weekly
In insightful fashion, Dyson (Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster) looks at how President Obama has dealt with, in James Baldwin's phrase, "the burden of representation" as an African-American. He begins with the president's strained relationships with political elders such as Marcia Fudge, Emanuel Cleaver, and Maxine Waters. Dyson cites Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as inspirations for the president's "linguistic charisma" and podium skills, which reflect "the beauty and power of black rhetoric." However, Dyson roundly criticizes Obama's typically measured responses to the race-related controversies of his term, from professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest in Massachusetts and the death of teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida to the riots in Ferguson, Mo., and the church murders in Charleston, S.C. At the same time, the author acknowledges that, as America's first black president, Obama faces unusually heightened expectations. He has been in a precarious position, one that Dyson examines diligently and passionately in this timely analysis. Agent: Tanya McKinnon, McKinnon McIntyre. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Critique de Booklist
*Starred Review* Prolific author and public intellectual Dyson refreshes our memories and contextualizes Barack Obama's tumultuous presidency to show how his political ascendancy has changed what it means to be black in America. He couldn't have chosen a better lens through which to view America's race relationships than Obama, whose biracial otherness continues to be problematic for both blacks and whites. Dyson parses defining moments, including the backstory of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the president's former pastor, and First Lady Michelle Obama's Pride-gate statement, to demonstrate the tightrope act necessary for appealing to white voters while seeking to unify the black vote. Also highlighted are acts of overt racism and disrespect no other president has had to face. Dyson contends that during the last quarter of his presidency, Obama's public statements have moved closer to his privately held beliefs and that his voice ranks among other noted black orators. By focusing on social impacts rather than legislative successes and failures, Dyson places Obama's achievements and struggles within the continuum of systematic racial injustice. A perceptive, carefully sourced, and thought-provoking inquiry.--Kaplan, Dan Copyright 2016 Booklist
Critique du New York Review of Books
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN the nation's foremost voice on the race question is also its most confined and restrained? Michael Eric Dyson raises this question about President Obama in his latest book, "The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America." The book inspires one to raise similar questions about Dyson himself. For, while hardly restrained, Dyson appears noticeably boxed in by the limitations placed on celebrity race commentators in the Age of Obama. Readers will recognize Dyson's practiced flair for language and metaphor as he makes an important and layered argument about American political culture and the narrowness of presidential speech. The book argues that Americans live under a black presidency - not so much because the president is black, but because Obama's presidency remains bound by the rules and rituals of black respectability and white supremacy. Even the leader of the free world, we learn in Dyson's book, conforms principally to white expectations. (Dyson maintained in the November issue of The New Republic that Hillary Clinton may well do more for black people than Obama did.) But Obama's presidency is "black" in a more hopeful way, too, providing Americans with an opportunity to better realize the nation's democratic ideals and promises. "Obama's achievement gestures toward what the state had not allowed at the highest level before his emergence," Dyson writes. "Equality of opportunity, fairness in democracy and justice in society." A certain optimism ebbs and flows in "The Black Presidency," but only occasionally does it refer to white Americans' beliefs about race. Far more often, Dyson hangs hope on Obama's impromptu shows of racial solidarity. One such moment was the president's remarks after the 2009 arrest of the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. (who was arrested trying to get into his own home). Another was Obama's public identification with Trayvon Martin. Both acts may have been politically risky, but they also greatly heartened African-Americans. Hope builds, and by book's end, readers find a chapter-long celebration of the president's soaring invocations of "Amazing Grace" during last year's memorial service for the slain parishioners of Emanuel A.M.E. Church. For Dyson, the eulogy at Emanuel seems to serve as a sign of grace that black America may still yet enjoy from the Obama White House. Its cresting invocations of hope aside, the book ably maintains a sharp critical edge. Dyson uncovers a troubling consistency to the president's race speech and shows that in spite of Obama's reliance on black political networks and black votes during his meteoric rise, the president chose to follow a governing and rhetorical template largely hewed by his white predecessors. As both candidate and president, Obama's speeches have tended to allay white guilt. They have scolded African-American masses for cultural pathology and implied that blacks were to blame for lingering white antipathy. Obama's speeches have also often consigned the worst forms of racism and anti-black violence to the past or to the fringes of American political culture. One finds passive-voice constructions everywhere in Obama's race talk, as black folk are found suffering under pressures and at the hands of parties that go largely unnamed. "Obama is forced to exaggerate black responsibility," Dyson advances, "because he must always underplay white responsibility." Critically, Dyson contends that the president's tepid anti-racism comes from political pragmatism rather than a set of deeper ideological concerns. "Obama is anti-ideological," Dyson maintains, and that is "the very reason he was electable." That characterization, however, overlooks how liberal pragmatism functions as ideology. What's more, it ignores the marginalization and violence that black and brown people often suffer - at home and abroad - whenever moderates resolve to "get things done." If the Obama era proved anything about liberalism, it's that there remains little room for an explicit policy approach to racial justice - even, or perhaps especially, under a black president. As Obama himself explains to Dyson: "I have to appropriate dollars for any program which has to go through ways and means committees, or appropriations committees, that are not dominated by folks who read Cornel West or listen to Michael Eric Dyson." Upon a careful reading of Dyson's book, loss seems always to arrive on the heels of hope. As we might expect, the author explores Obama's estrangement from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in 2008. He also attends to his own very public and more recent split from Cornel West. But even beyond these signal episodes, "The Black Presidency" is suffused with a bittersweet tone about relationships strained. President Obama seems to leave a host of people and political commitments at the White House door as he conforms to the racial demands of a historically white office. Even Dyson seems unaware of all the ways in which "The Black Presidency," as a book, both explicates and illustrates how the Obama administration leaves black folk behind. All but the last two of the book's eight chapters begin with the author placing himself in close and often luxurious proximity to Obama. The repetition has the literary effect of a Facebook feed. Here is Michael at Oprah's sumptuous California mansion during a 2007 fund-raiser, sharing a joke with Barack and Chris Rock. Here is Michael on the private plane and in the S.U.V., giving the candidate tips on how to use a "'blacker' rhetorical style" during his debate performances against a surging Hillary Clinton. Here he is in the V.I.P. section of the 50th-anniversary ceremony for the March on Washington and, yet again, at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner. Through these and similar moments, Dyson projects his status and, in ways less clear, his authority. Dyson knows Obama, the reader is assured, because he has kept his company. He has swapped playful taunts and bro-hugs with the president; he has been intimate, one might say, with history. MOMENTS LIKE THESE have a secondary effect. They illuminate a tension cutting through and profoundly limiting "The Black Presidency" as a work of political commentary. Regardless of who Michael Eric Dyson may have been to Obama the candidate, Dyson now has barely any access to Obama the president. Time and circumstance have rendered Dyson, the man and the thinker, increasingly irrelevant to Obama's presidency. He can be at the party, but not at the table. Perhaps worse in relation to the book's stated aim to be the first full measure of Obama and America's race problem, Dyson, the author, has none but only the smallest role to play in assessing and narrating Obama's legacy. When Bill Clinton decided to chronicle his own historic turn in the White House, he called on Taylor Branch and recorded with the historian some 150 hours of interviews over 79 separate sessions. Dyson, in 2015, gets far shabbier treatment. Chapter 5, "The Scold of Black Folk," opens: "I was waiting outside the Oval Office to speak to President Obama. I had a tough time getting on his schedule." In response to Dyson's request for a presidential audience, the White House offered the author 10 whole minutes. By his own telling, Dyson "politely declined" and pressed Obama's confidante, Valerie Jarrett, to remember his long history with and support of the president. "I eventually negotiated a 20-minute interview that turned into half an hour." It appears to be the only interview Dyson conducted for the book. In the end, "The Black Presidency" possesses a loaves-and-fishes quality. Drawing mostly on the news cycle, close readings of carefully crafted speeches and a handful of glittering encounters, Dyson has managed to do a lot with a little. The book might well be considered an interpretive miracle, one performed in fealty and hope for a future show of presidential grace, either from this president or, should she get elected, the next one. Dyson knows Obama, the reader is assured, because he has kept his company. N.D.B. CONNOLLY is the author of "A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida."
Critique de Kirkus
An early assessment of America's first black presidency. In this rich and nuanced book, Dyson (Sociology/Georgetown Univ.; Can You Hear Me Now?: The Inspiration, Wisdom, and Insight of Michael Eric Dyson, 2009, etc.) writes with passion and understanding about Barack Obama's "sad and disappointing" performance regarding race and black concerns in his two terms in office. While race has defined his tenure, Obama has been "reluctant to take charge" and speak out candidly about the nation's racial woes, determined to remain "not a black leader but a leader who is black." Ironically, as the first black president, Obama was expected by many to offer racial insight to the country, but instead, constrained by a "toxic environment" (criticism by birthers, etc.), he has sought to "keep racial peace, often at the expense of black interests." Too often he "ignores race, denies white responsibility, or criticizes black culture." Dyson cogently examines Obama's speeches and statements on race, from his first presidential campaign through recent eventse.g., the Ferguson riots and the eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney in Charlestonnoting that the president is careful not to raise the ire of whites and often chastises blacks for their moral failings. At his best, he spoke with "special urgency for black Americans" during the Ferguson crisis and was "at his blackest," breaking free of constraints, in his "Amazing Grace" Charleston eulogy. Criticized in the past by the radical Cornel West for being an Obama cheerleader, Dyson writes here as a realistic, sometimes-angry supporter of the president. He notes that adoration of Obama has prevented many blacks from holding him accountable. His discussions of key issues and controversiesfrom Obama's biracial identity to his relationships with older civil rights leadersare insightful and absorbing. Dyson succeeds admirably in creating a base line for future interpretations of this historic presidency. His well-written book thoroughly illuminates the challenges facing a black man elected to govern a society that is far from post-racial. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Critique du Library Journal
Lauded public intellectual Dyson asks how race shapes the country's understanding of President Barack Obama's tenure. Obama was interviewed for the book. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
