By Jon Jon Moore

On November 15th, former U.S. President Barack Obama warned a crowd of donors to The Democracy Alliance, a club of neoliberals whose roster includes billionaires George Soros and Tom Steyer, that the average American “doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.” He continued: “They just don’t want to see crazy stuff. They want to see things a little more fair, they want to see things a little more just. And how we approach that I think will be important.”

Clearly jabbing reformist capitalist Sen. Elizabeth Warren and “demoractic socialist” Sen. Bernie Sanders, Obama pleaded for the donors to practice restraint, as if they would, or could, be persuaded (or intimidated) to invest in their own end. He encouraged  the donors, who have collectively invested over $500 million in non-profits since 2005, “to be rooted in reality and the fact that voters, including the Democratic voters and certainly persuadable independents or even moderate Republicans, are not driven by the same views that are reflected on certain, you know, left-leaning Twitter feeds.” 

For Obama, appealing to those who can afford to settle for “a little more” is both more politically expedient and profitable than empowering those for whom moderation is the quotidian tragedy of their lives and the lives of those who came before them. The official position of the Black president is to discipline the imagination of voters enough to induce loyalty and sustain fear but not so much as to haphazardly uproot them from the imperial fantasy that masquerades as “reality,” otherwise, one might desire, or desire to imagine, an end to the insidious brutalities of impoverishment, sickness, and state violence, let alone the suffering the United States is responsible for abroad. While far from unexpected, the callous quips of Obama confirm that the enduring myths of his clandestine fealty and deep-seated love of Black people that continue to circulate in Black cultural discourse are—as one must become accustomed to realizing—a bunch of malarkey.

Recall last month at the annual Obama Foundation Summit, when Obama remanded those of us who theorize and practice a refusal to negotiate with economic and governmental terrorists. “This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re politically woke, and all that stuff—you should get over that quickly,” he said. “The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws.” 

According to Pew Research Center, 40% of Black internet users ages 18-29 use Twitter and much of the site’s cultural currency can be traced back to content created by Black users. Obama’s recommendation of the mega-rich (who are required to donate at least $200,000 a year to recommended groups) to remember that these “left-leaning Twitter feeds” should not dissuade them from maintaining the focus necessary to win elections and cultivate the financial support of profiteers articulates what I believe to be the foundation of Obama’s post-presidency rhetoric thus far: the best way for the bourgeoisie to hedge their bets is to distrust the premise that the Black political imagination is anything more than immature web discourse at best and at worst, tactically unrefined and psychically incapable of threatening their coffers or corporealities.

While it might appear that the function of Obama’s renunciation of radical visions of deworlding the United States (abolishing the police, addressing climate change, and expanding healthcare to all) is simple—to bolster centrist candidates and discipline wayward thinking—considering the symbolic weight of his presidency presents ulterior motives far more insidious.

Obama’s pleas for moderation and restraint rely on discrediting and outright condemning the political imagination of younger Black people in the U.S., those largely responsible for his election. His plea to DA donors was but his most recent attempt to denigrate Black political maneuver, belittle struggles against anti-blackness in the United States, and use his tropological status as the nations’ first Black Planter to reassert the morality and utility of failed reformist tendencies among Black Americans.

But what if Obama’s disparagement of young Black “Twitter activists” signals a sincere fear of refusal being operationalized by those failed by the bailouts, the die-ins, the protests, the sit-ins, the body-cams, the tax credits, charter schools, anesthetics, and the Black President who championed them all? What if underneath the paternalistic regard and flagrant mockery lies a deep knowing that even the Harvard-bred, tan-suited, dapper negro President could not conceal the threat of Black insurrection, nor deter those for whom the fantasy of American democracy is a living nightmare?

When the United States elected Barack Obama in 2008, The Guardian reported that Americans were, in effect, “turning their backs on a past of slavery and segregation and electing the first African-American to the US presidency.” Alternatively, the present of slavery and segregation, prosperity and suffering, was now so diffused in the unconscious and political spheres of life as to allow one Black man to be helmsman. Rather than wax poetic about how Obama’s presidency would deftly fail the grandiose wishes for concern and compassion many Black people verbalized that teary-eyed November night, I’d like to return us to one memorable moment of the Obama presidency that encapsulates as well as any other the entanglement of affective and political power wielded by the first Black President.

After Dylan Roof murdered six Black women and three Black men at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015, once the church of Denmark Vessey, President Obama flew to Charleston and delivered what York University Professor Christina Sharpe refuses to call a eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney: “it wasn’t a eulogy, it was a political speech.” In an interview with Tulane University Professor Selamawit Terrefe, Sharpe expressed her disappointment at the speech, though she was far from surprised:

I really wanted him not to deliver that speech. I wanted him, if he was going to be there, to stay in the audience to greet the family, to comfort the family, and to sit in the audience and listen, but of course he didn’t. When he took the stage he gave the same one note performance that I think he always gives when it comes to Black people. It’s the sort of note that sutures Black suffering to romance and redemption. The note of a more perfect union, the note of unhearable Black suffering. The note of romance of empire. 

Sharpe presents the terrifying duality of Obama’s performance: basking in Black suffering in order to model “a more perfect union,” to boldly perfect what legal scholar Anthony Farley has called the secret function of the slave:

The production of dreams is the slave’s true and secret function. The slave produces all of the equations that stabilize the system of death-over-life through its prayers for equal rights. The slave’s prayer resolves all present contradictions into white over-black, for white-over-black is all that equal rights or law can ever be or become. The slave’s prayers for equal rights produce a home for the future good will of its master.

A funeral, a prayer. The ultimate romance, the perfect slave. Obama ends his prayer by singing Amazing Grace. “If we can tap that grace,” he said, “everything can change.” What is to be done when mourning the dead cannot be conceived of outside of this resignation that produces “a home for the future good will of its master”? What is to be done when, as Calvin Warren suggests, the political hope advertised by President Obama “delimit[s] the field of action to include only activity recognized and legitimated by the Political,” so that President Obama’s refrains in the face of White terror carry a dense weight that threatens to eclipse the possibility of refusing hope and refusing the current terms of the politically legible? What happens when Black people dispose of grace?

These are some of the questions that face Black people living in the United States in the wake of Obama’s presidency, especially those of us who came of age during his tenure. I want to suggest that it is for exactly this reason that Obama’s recent public critiques have not been levergaged at whites who jumped ship for Trump, or the Black men who voted for Trump, or leaders of the Democratic party who insured the nomination of one of the least popular Presidential nominees in modern history. Unsurprisingly, Obama is concerned with those of us who he hoped he’d succeeded in keeping distracted and dumb and dead and isolated and away and bombed.

In “Shadowgrams,” Moor Mother—a Black electronic/noise/dark rap/artist, poet, and half of the Philadelphia’s Black Quantum Futurism Collective—decrees over saxophonic riffs, phantasmic whispers and vibrating bass: “They hacked art, they hacked creativity.” The implicit they, President Obama and his administration and his surrogates determined to continue setting the terms of the conceivable future, have hacked our artistic and political imaginations. The image of Obama ascending to the mantle of empire is memorialized as the slave’s perfect embodiment.

So, what now? Might the knowledge that one has been forward a reconsideration of the possible? Perhaps dethroning Barack Obama from the pedestal we built for him is one small and needful step towards dislodging the hold that the anti-black, imperial world he represents hopes to maintain over Black life and making more imaginable an end to the world as we know it.

Reading Suggestions:

“Hacking the Subject: Black Feminism and Refusal beyond the Limits of Critique,” Denise Ferreira da Silva” (2018)

“Moor Mother: ‘We have yet to truly understand what enslavement means’,” Ben Baumont Thomas (2017)

“Perfecting Slavery,” Anthony P. Farley (2005)

---

Jon Jon Moore is a Detroit-born writer and PhD Student in African-American Studies at UC Berkeley. He is Managing Editor of Qui Parle and the host of the Black culture and politics podcast AbolitionISH. Learn more about his work at abolitionish.com. 

Comments