Basketball matters to Barack Obama. He played for his state champion high school team, and as a teenager testing himself against older and tougher street-ball players, he learned some important lessons: “That respect came from what you did not who your daddy was,” Obama writes in his best-selling memoir, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. “That you could talk stuff to rattle an opponent, but that you should shut the hell up if you couldn’t back it up.” After one high school game, an assistant coach muttered within earshot that their team “shouldn’t have lost to a bunch of niggers.” When Obama took exception, the coach tried to explain lamely that “there are black people and there are niggers.” Before he walked off the court, Obama replied, “There are white folks, and then there are ignorant motherfuckers like you.”
These days, Obama only gets to play every so often, his language is cleaner, and he writes that his angry retort showed “how easy it is to fall into the same sloppy thinking” as his coach. But he still knows how it feels to be the new guy in a faster, rougher game. At 44, the first-term Illinois senator has become perhaps the most powerful young black political leader in the United States. And one thing he says he’s determined to avoid is the kind of ugly, one-sided, scorched-earth vituperation that often passes for public debate in our time.
During a late Friday afternoon interview in his 39th-floor Senate office in Chicago, the 6-foot-3 Obama, in a perfectly pressed Canali suit, still has the lean, graceful look of a player. Stepping into a conference room with a sweeping view of Lake Michigan — gray in the distance, brightening to aquamarine near the shore — he shakes hands briskly, apologizes for running late, and says, “Fire away.”
Over the next few days, in different places, he’ll touch on everything from hip hop and bebop to the importance of reaching out to a new generation of voters in an intelligent way. “Young people are just not going to buy into the whole rhetoric,” he’ll say. Unlike many a public figure today, Obama seems almost allergic to clichés, slogans, and easy formulas that divide the world into us and them. And when he talks about his own public service — and the marriage of principled advocacy and street-smart pragmatism he sees as necessary to achieve change — you sense that Obama is one of those lucky souls who has truly found his calling. “He’s the genuine article,” says social critic and author Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who has known Obama for 15 years. “He truly cares about making a better life for not only his constituency and those who are vulnerable and poor, but for all Americans who struggle.”
When Dr. King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he didn’t say, It’s a black thing, you can’t understand it. He said, It’s a human thing, and you can understand. - Barack Obama
The unspoken mantra: Keep your head down, do your homework, acknowledge that you’re only 99th out of 100 in seniority, and always remember the bread-and-butter issues voters sent you to Washington to deal with. “What folks are talking about,” he says, “is how they can get a decent job, how they can get health care for their family, how young people can go to college.” Obama’s first Senate bill, introduced in early April, called for a nearly 26 percent increase in Pell Grants, a federal college-aid program that primarily helps families with incomes less than $40,000.
A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama has also focused on things like how the U.S. can start bringing troops home from the Iraq War, which he opposed from the start; ending the genocide in Darfur, in the Sudan; and fighting nuclear proliferation and terrorism, a threat he brings home by asking simply, “How do we make sure that Manhattan doesn’t get targeted with a dirty bomb?”
Still, no amount of modesty can calm the expectations that have sprung up around this former community activist, Harvard Law School graduate, and two-term state senator from Chicago’s South Side.
It was only seven years ago that Nobel laureate Toni Morrison ironically dubbed Bill Clinton America’s “first black president,” adding that the humbly born, saxophone-playing, junk food-addicted Arkansas boy — then being hounded for his Oval Office sexual indiscretions — was “blacker than any actual person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.”
But ever since Obama electrified the political world with his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and landslide election as only the third black U.S. senator since Reconstruction, the question has been persistent: When will Barack go for it? If not in 2008 (when he insists he’s a not a presidential candidate), then maybe four, eight, or even 12 years after that, when he would be only 59, or the same age George W. Bush is today. Call it 2020 vision.
Out in public, Obama gets superstar treatment: people shriek, beg for autographs, reach high for a snapshot on their camera phones. Bus drivers honk hello when they recognize him on a Chicago sidewalk. And the fever runs just as high in Obama’s ancestral Kenya. The East African hip hop star MajiMaji, who comes from the same rural province as the Obama family, reports that parents there have started naming their children after their new American idol. People have even nicknamed a popular local brew in his honor: Instead of ordering a cold bottle of “Senator” beer, Kenyans now ask for an “Obama” — that is, “if you want to be served with a smiling face,” MajiMaji says. “The African community is very proud of his achievements.”
“Hey, I’m the flavor of the month,” Obama tells people, waving off the fuss. “I’m so overexposed I make Paris Hilton look like a recluse,” he famously quipped at a Washington dinner. White House ambitions? “That’s silly talk,” he told Wolf Blitzer on CNN. “Talk to my wife. She’ll tell me I need to learn to just put socks in the hamper.”
On this icy March Chicago morning, Columbus Drive is ground zero for one of the greatest outpourings of ethnic energy in America: the annual Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. Not only has the Chicago River been dyed a color halfway between Kelly green and Firestone antifreeze, but it appears that most of the quarter-million people of all hues converging on the parade route are festooned in green plastic leprechaun hats, green scarves, or green feather boas — with green hair, green sparkle, green anything to get in the spirit.
Finding Obama in the eye of this hurricane just minutes before the parade moves out seems like a daunting task. But then you notice a battery of cameras surrounding someone — and who else could it be? With his green beads and a sash inscribed “Sons & Daughters of St. Patrick,” the hatless senator is clearly enjoying some old-school urban politicking. “I’m from an old Irish family,” he says with smiling eyes. “The O’Bamas.”
The political project of black nationalism was never as successful as the cultural project, because politics is about coalition building. It’s about addition and not subtraction - Barack Obama
With his white family and his elite Ivy League education, he might have been tempted to distance himself from black life. Instead, Obama has been unequivocal about his identity as an African-American, even as he honors his mother’s legacy and influence. It was she, in fact, who fed him a steady diet of black pride as a child, playing Mahalia Jackson records and the speeches of Dr. King, and inculcating a strong sense of heritage.
That Obama chose to marry the former Michelle Robinson, a working-class black woman from Chicago (who also happens to be a Harvard Law School grad) has also proved telling, especially to African-American women. “I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that it has profound significance,” says Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, executive director of the African American Policy Forum and a law professor at both UCLA and Columbia. “The bane of many black women’s romantic hopes is that the more successful and accomplished black men are, the more likely they are to not choose African-American women.”
Michelle Obama, 41, now vice president for community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals, confirms that women frequently tell her how symbolically important her marriage is to them. Not just because they’re a black couple, but because she’s a success in her own right, and because their family life represents the values of “folks who are raising their kids and working hard,” she says. “People feel vindicated when that image gets portrayed in the media, as opposed to what we usually see.”
Community and family — especially their daughters Malia 7, and Sasha, 4 — definitely help keep Obama’s feet on the ground, his wife says. He still takes them to ballet class Saturday mornings, and attends every parent-teacher conference. “When he’s home,” Michelle says, “he usually tries to spend bath time with them, and they’ll read a bedtime story, and then the ritual ‘up-up’ — you know, carry them to bed, tuck them in.” Whenever possible, the family still attends services together at the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street. Obama still gets his weekly haircut from the same neighborhood barbershop, and if he’s craving a down-home meal, he knows nothing can top the fried chicken over at MacArthur’s cafeteria. Without any hesitation, Obama says, “They have the best soul food in Chicago.”
He may be firmly grounded in the South Side and respectful of groundbreaking black leaders like Harold Washington and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, but Obama often insists that one can be committed to the black community without being limited to it. In fact, his views on race, power, and the limitations of identity politics are quite nuanced, as he makes clear in discussing the legacy of the black power struggles of the 1960s.
Some of the creativity and power of hip hop comes from the assertion that we’re still here - Barack Obama
“I think the movement was important in purging, or at least counteracting, some of the self-hate that had been communicated to African-Americans in this society in all sorts of ways, from cartoons to minstrel shows to Jim Crow,” he says. “But the political project of black nationalism was never as successful as the cultural project, because politics is about coalition building. It’s about addition and not subtraction.
“It is important that we recognize universal truths and frame our arguments in ways that allow other people to participate,” Obama says. “When Dr. King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he didn’t say, It’s a black thing, you can’t understand it. He said, It’s a human thing, and you can understand. That didn’t mean he wasn’t talking very specifically about the oppression of black people. What he suggested to white America was that you have a stake in this, and your ideals are violated in this process, and if you want to live in an America that makes sense for you and your children, then this is something that has to be fixed.”
All politics is local, though, as the saying goes. And the people who have the most hope invested in Obama will be watching carefully to see if his heart remains with his core constituencies. “It comes down to the old Tennessee expression,” Dyson says. “Dance with the ones that brung you.”
So far, Obama has been conspicuously heeding that advice. For example, although hundreds of schools asked him to speak at commencement this year (and he would surely have been welcomed ecstatically by his own alma maters — Harvard, Columbia, and the Punahou School in Honolulu), Obama addressed only three ceremonies, all in-state: Knox College in Galesburg (a one-time anti-slavery hotbed that also awarded an honorary degree to an earlier Illinois politician named Lincoln in 1860); the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine (he taught law at the university until recently); and, finally, John Hope College Preparatory High School, a magnet school on the South Side with a 100 percent minority enrollment. “Eighty percent of them will be going on to college,” says Dr. Mahalia A. Hines, the school’s principal.
As proud as she is of her students and their guest speaker, Dr. Hines may be even prouder of her son, Lonnie Rashid Lynn — better known as the rapper Common — whose latest album, Be, is running neck-and-neck with Obama for Chi-town love. Common has become one of the senator’s leading supporters in the hip hop community. “I love his intelligence, his charisma, his message, and his effort — man, this is what we need in the world,” he says. He’s one person who can move the crowd. Hip hop cats respect him.”
Obama returns the compliment, praising Common as a “very conscious, thoughtful” artist; he also admires Spearhead and Arrested Development. But Obama’s own musical tastes run more to classic R&B and neo-soul (Stevie Wonder, Jill Scott). Friends even tease him about some of the CDs in his trunk. “West Javanese flute music, old blues, Taj Mahal, Dionne Warwick, Gil Scott-Heron,” he says, ticking off some of his favorites. “And I’m a big jazz fan. I love Coltrane and Miles.”
Obama uses an old jazz term to describe what rankles him about a lot of commercial hip hop. “The underlying values are so square,” he says. “It’s about bling. It’s entirely cynical, entirely materialistic.” He also has little patience for those who glorify guns and drugs, and rejects misogyny, gay bashing, and what he sees as contempt for the weak. “A lot of hip hop doesn’t challenge the social order at all,” he says. “It’s not saying that your measure as a man is how you respect people and help people, but rather how you put them down.”
Still, Obama admires the music’s spirit of defiance and survival. “Some of the creativity and power of hip hop comes from the assertion that we’re still here,” he says. “Don’t forget us. We may have been born into circumstances that are impossible, and yet we’re here, we’re still possible. That’s a powerful statement in and of itself.”
When Obama declared in his keynote speech, “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America,” he flat-out thrilled many Americans who want to put the nightmare of racism behind them, and for whom Obama embodies that dream. But how does that statement jibe with the painful realities of racial inequality he also speaks about with eloquence and passion? Back in his Chicago office, Obama considers the question. “My view of America is that it’s always a work in progress,” he says. “What I was speaking to was the aspiration of America, the ideal. I’m not talking about us ignoring racism, poverty, or the disparities in opportunity in our society, but rather saying that we are bound together, and to the extent that we recognize that, there’s the possibility of closing the gap between the ideal and the reality.”
Late at night in Washington, D.C., Obama confides, he’ll sometimes wander over to the Lincoln Memorial by himself and just take it all in. Though he’s the nation’s highest-ranking black elected official, for a few minutes, he might as well be a high school kid feeling the power of history for the first time, reading the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural chiseled into the marble walls, commemorating a struggle that cost more than a half-million American lives. Looking out toward the National Mall, he can see the new World War II Memorial. From those steps, the view toward the Capitol building two miles away is essentially the same one Dr. King commanded in 1963, when he challenged the nation to redeem its own promise and achieve justice for all — to “transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”
Standing in that place makes him think about all the people who sacrificed for freedom — from Lincoln to D-Day to Dr. King. “It moves me deeply,” Obama says. “It still gives me the chills.”
home
