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BARACK OBAMA, JAMES BALDWIN AND THE BLACK EXPERIENCE

DANIEL ARIZONA | CANON FODDER | September 10th 2008

English students sweating over Shakespeare or festering over Faulkner often complain: "how is this relevant to our lives at all?" Daniel Arizona has come to the rescue with "Canon Fodder", a new column that uses the classics to help us to understand these post-modern times
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Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

The Democrats' prime-time messaging marathon
two weeks ago culminated in a short film designed to highlight Barack Obama's putative
guy-next-door-ness (read: the white half of his heritage), and lay to rest any
lingering concerns about his "otherness."

We might have all
been spared this latest piece of stagecraft if last March the presidential
primaries weren't engulfed by the controversy of Obama's pastor, the Reverend
Dr Jeremiah Wright, who burst onto the national scene with an incendiary brand
of rhetoric about a racist and fallen America. YouTube clips of Wright, wearing
exotic African garb and declaring that the "chickens had come home to roost"
drew both shrill condemnations and shrugs of weary agreement. For some white people, it was all they needed to tar Wright as an
Elijah Mohammed, and Obama as his charismatic Malcolm X, even though the former
is an evangelical preacher and the latter a mere parishioner.

The unspoken
accusation that Obama was a stalking horse for the spectre of black liberation
theology appeared to underlie the mostly white commentary and analysis of the
political controversy. To understand what Obama was going through here, the
most instructive commentary isn't to be found on MSNBC, but rather in looking
back at James Baldwin's "Go Tell It on the
Mountain" (1953).

Baldwin's autobiographical novel tells
the story of a young, black teenager coming of age in Harlem
under a tyrannical father who preaches a fire-and-brimstone form of
Christianity in answer to the virulent racism in America. The
similarities between Obama's oft-repeated biography and that of Baldwin's are illuminating.

Like Obama,
Baldwin himself was raised by a single mother during his formative years, and
like his adolescent protagonist, Baldwin had to navigate a world
largely unprepared or unwilling to accept his existence, even among his own
race, being both black and homosexual. Obama also straddles two identities,
being half white and half black; he was born in America, but has foreign ties;
he worked as a community organizer in Chicago's South Side, but is
better educated and far wealthier than the majority of American
blacks. Baldwin, too, stood out as a scholar and became a rising star in the
black establishment, only to find himself at odds with it by the end of the 1960s. This rift began with his fallout with Richard Wright, a fellow author, and extended to his life as an
expatriate in Paris.

Obama's unfettered
optimism in the American Dream mirrors that of Baldwin's John Grimes, who
believes he has the strength and the smarts to liberate himself from his broken home and a destiny of serving his Pentecostal church, the Temple
of the Fire Baptized. In the first section of Baldwin's novel, John stands in
Central Park, which lies between Harlem and Fifth Avenue--the way to the
Promised Land--contemplating the disparity between what he sees as a the
glamorous lives of whites, whose acceptance he craves, and what he has been
told by his father:

His father said that all white people were
wicked, and that God was going to bring them low. He said that white people
were never to be trusted, and that they told nothing but lies, and that not one
of them ever loved a nigger. He, John, was a nigger, and he would find out, as
soon as he got a little older, how evil white people could be.

Much has
changed in the past 50 years, but the memory of hate crimes and Jim Crow are
still fresh. In his memorable
"More Perfect Union" speech last March, Obama evoked these memories when he
condemned Wright for viewing history as static, but also warned America of the
anger that blacks still hold toward whites: "The
anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it
without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of
misunderstanding that exists between the races." This misunderstanding between the races was never
more apparent than the recent news that three white would-be assassins were
arrested in Denver
during the convention, one of whom had this nugget to offer: "He [Obama] don't belong in political office. Blacks
don't belong in political office. He ought to be shot."

It would be easy
to dismiss this as your garden variety David Duke bedtime story, but the fact
that Obama's numbers are stalled at a time when they should be skyrocketing--a
bad economy, an unpopular war, and even more unpopular president, a flagging
opposition--speaks volumes about the Silent Majority's even quieter racism. Even Hillary Clinton's warthog strategist,
Mark Penn, grasped this fact about America's stance toward a multicultural
candidate, as evidenced by his prescient memos from 2007: "I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time
of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in
his values...Save it for 2050."

* * *

"Go Tell It on the Mountain"
is not a book about racism, although there are, to be sure, racially charged
moments. There aren't any white characters; they are kept off the page and in
the background, running things in threatening fashion. Baldwin's
story is about change from within a community, about personal change and the
emergence of oneself. It is about a new breed of self-reliance. This may also explain
why Obama comes off as an unknown quantity, and is perceived as an
outsider by America's
black leadership. Obama's refusal to kiss the rings of known black leaders has secured him a reputation as a maverick, but white voters, used to civil
rights-era displays of large-scale black unity, continue to be perplexed by the
very existence of a black independent. Obama's strident reminders of black
responsibility and complicity, especially to black fathers, have put him at
odds with more than just Jesse Jackson's razor blade.

At the heart of "Go Tell It on the Mountain", too, is a
father-son conflict that Baldwin fashioned from his own difficult relationship
with his stepfather, a fiery preacher. This bears some resemblance to Obama's troubled
relationship with Wright and Trinity
Church. In his "More
Perfect Union" speech, Obama, in effect, presents Trinity as a metaphor for
black culture in general:

Trinity's services
are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humour...The church contains in
full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking
ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and
bias that make up the black experience in America.

Obama's unflinching description doesn't pull
any punches, and the last climactic section of "Go Tell It on the Mountain" elucidates this overpowering religious
experience. Baldwin's character undergoes an
all-night spiritual awakening, receiving visions of God amid the shouts and
the singing and the pounding piano and the rattling tambourines of his father's
church. As a teenager, Baldwin became a
preacher himself, but found it stifling. Like Obama, he eventually left his
church, an outcast from the very environment where he had flourished. Both
men are encouraged by what is positive about the church, but remain frightened
by its potential for divisiveness.

Obama's acceptance speech the other week took place on the 45^th
anniversary of Martin Luther King's delivery of his historic "I Have
a Dream" speech to an equally large congregation in Washington, DC.
Among the thousands of marchers, behind George Romney, was James Baldwin, a man
who devoted his life to chronicling the black experience in America. For him it was a relentlessly heartbreaking task.

At the end of "Go Tell It on the Mountain", as the dawn
comes up, Baldwin describes his own
exhilaration in going forth into the world--a world far more complicated than he had
imagined: "He was filled with joy, a joy unspeakable, whose roots...were nourished
by the wellspring of a despair not yet discovered." Over 70 years later, change can be seen,
but it is slower to come than we think, and there is still some despair. Both James Baldwin and Barack Obama know what it means to be misunderstood, by blacks and whites. But it is this way--as enigmas, as riddles--that they both evade simple prejudices, and perhaps point the way forward.

Picture credit: EricaJoy/flickr

(Daniel Arizona is a writer based in New York.)