“It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp… with… a Whole Lot of Bitches Jumpin’ Ship”: Navigating Black Politics in the Wake of Katrina
Honey just jumped ship and left the captain, I guess that’s the repercussions of my actions.
— Jadakiss in Ryan Leslie’s How It Was Supposed to Be (2009 remix)
This ain’t for the faint of heart. When you are trying to take a moment, and build some momentum, and turn it into a movement . . . this ain’t for the faint of heart. This ain’t for the weak.
— Tavis Smiley, 2006 State of the Black Union symposium
Writer, activist, and radio personality Tavis Smiley was vexed when Barack Obama declined his invitation to attend the 2008 State of the Black Union (SOBU) symposium. Obama had missed the event in 2007 as well and had, in that instance, drawn the ire of Cornel West and Al Sharpton, among others. But he was even busier this time. In a published letter to Smiley, Obama explained that he would be on the campaign trail “every day in states like Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin talking directly with voters about the causes that are at the heart of [this] campaign and the State of the Black Union forum such as affordable healthcare, housing, economic opportunity, civil rights and foreign policy” ( Martin 2008). Two and a half years after the tragic events of Hurricane Katrina, Obama commended Smiley for hosting the symposium in New Orleans:
On the eve of the Louisiana primary, I visited this great city for the fifth time since declaring my candidacy to share policy proposals for rebuilding the Gulf Coast so that we never experience another Hurricane Katrina. On February 9th, I was deeply humbled to win the Louisiana primary with 86 percent of the African American vote and a 14 point lead among all voters who said they were adversely affected by Hurricane Katrina.
In closing, Obama reiterated a request, which Smiley had apparently rejected, that his wife, Michelle, be permitted to represent him at the SOBU symposium: “Michelle is a powerful voice for the type of real change America is hungry for. No one knows my record or my passion for leading America in a new direction more than Michelle Obama.”
Smiley refused to budge.
Meanwhile, the campaign was heating up as Obama and his team held fast against Hillary Clinton’s repeated requests for additional debates. In a campaign ad televised in select regions, Clinton suggested that Obama was concerned that extensive debate would reveal serious flaws in his platform. Obama responded with an ad of his own that spliced footage from eighteen debates and drew the viewer’s attention to two more that had been planned, implying that he was focused — as his letter to Smiley insisted — on trying to expand his voter base. Political pundits shared the rare consensus that if Obama won Texas — an alleged Clinton stronghold — he was likely to secure the Democratic nomination. Why, then, was Smiley indignant that Obama refused to abandon the campaign trail?
Prospective Democratic nominees for the 2008 U.S. presidential election had first gathered en masse on June 28, 2007, as part of the “All-American Presidential Forums,” which Smiley had planned and organized. The Public Broadcasting Service ( PBS; n.d.), which airs Smiley’s syndicated talk show, heralded this event as “the first time that a panel exclusively comprised of journalists of color has been represented in primetime.” Tavis and “journalists Michel Martin of NPR [National Public Radio], nationally syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrette, Jr. and USA Today and Gannett News Service columnist DeWayne Wickham” would “pos[e] questions to the candidates.”
For a forum apparently unprecedented in the way that it privileged the political perspectives of people of color, the Democratic hopefuls were asked questions relevant to health care, housing, the economy, the environment, and — notably — Katrina relief. Though the Web site insists that this event was “inspired by the book . . . The Covenant with Black America,” the prospective nominees made only passing reference to this 2006 “plan to make black America better,” if they mentioned it at all.
Bill Clinton (2007: 131) praised The Covenant as a “remarkable book” in his manifesto for philanthropy, Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World. Hillary Clinton mentioned The Covenant during several televised debates between Democratic presidential candidates between late 2007 and early 2008. Perhaps not coincidentally, she maintained an impressive hold over black elected officials, counting among her fiercest supporters Representatives Maxine Waters, Charles Rangel, and John Lewis and such civil rights pioneers as the former mayor of Atlanta and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young.1 Lewis is an especially compelling figure in this connection because of the gusto his cherished legacy lent each of the final two candidates for the Democratic nomination at different moments in the campaign season. Just as his declared intent to support Clinton had initially sparked controversy, Lewis’s official endorsement of Obama some months later prompted public conversation about whether the U.S. senator from Illinois had finally earned the trust of African Americans even as Obama downplayed the role that race would play in the political calculus that people would use to select their preferred candidate.
If Obama initially found it difficult to secure the support of the country’s most established politicos, his message of “change” helped grow the overall pool of voters, turning out scores of people who had never participated in formal elections, so that he was neck and neck with Clinton through the first few caucuses and primaries, largely because he inspired young people to believe that many lingering and seemingly intractable partisan stalemates could be overcome on the path to a unified social and political agenda for the entire nation. His quest for “change” enabled him to snatch the endorsement of longtime Clinton friend and ally Ted Kennedy. True to the generational charge of Obama’s message, John F. Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline, penned a New York Times op-ed shortly after Obama’s victory in the South Carolina primary titled “A President like My Father,” in which she compared his ability to inspire a new cadre of voters to her father’s uncanny knack for encouraging political participation among people who previously had no such inclinations but who supported his mission.
Obama had stressed correctly, from the moment that his “improbable” campaign began, that African Americans were a complex and sophisticated constituency, that their support was by no means guaranteed. So it is intriguing that Smiley, Young, and even Lewis seemed convinced that the endorsement of civil rights pioneers was a prerequisite for a black candidate — or, for that matter, for any candidate deserving of the black vote. Part of Lewis’s motivation for shifting his endorsement from Clinton was the sense that he did not want to be on the “wrong side” of history, since his constituency backed a different candidate. But why hadn’t these civil rights pioneers canvassed their constituencies before deciding whom to support? The fact that so many of the civil rights movement’s and Congressional Black Caucus’s most seasoned vets supported Hillary Clinton only intensified the racial angst that loomed around clumsy articulations of race that some people considered deliberate and malicious, as when Bill Clinton dismissively compared Obama’s South Carolina primary victory to Jesse Jackson’s success in the same state more than a decade earlier (the message seemed to be “Jackson ultimately lost, so why get excited?”).2 Around that same time black voters started to support Obama in droves.
The effort to derail Obama’s momentum was riddled with ironies. Toni Morrison’s notion that Bill Clinton was America’s “first black president” because of his unusually humble beginnings and because he was mercilessly attacked, in her view, by wealthy conservatives during his time as the nation’s chief executive is but one example of the way that his affinity for black people became the stuff of legend — and the bedrock of a devoted constituency. Convinced of Bill Clinton’s devotion to the causes they championed, many black Americans likely believed that Hillary Clinton’s tenure at the nation’s helm would offer more of the same. It is also possible that black elected officials believed that a black president would inevitably have every cabinet selection carefully scrutinized and would therefore not be in a position to match a candidate like Hillary Clinton in the number of executive appointments available to African Americans.
But political strategy only partly explains what happened. Despite disproportionately adverse “welfare reform, the growth of black imprisonment, and the public abandonment of progressive African-Americans like Lani Guinier,” which rank, for many African Americans, as “some of the most memorable racial disappointments of those years” ( Harris-Lacewell 2008a), Melissa Harris-Lacewell and Bethany Albertson (2005) revealed that more than a third of black Americans mistakenly believed that, by the time Bill Clinton had left office, blacks were doing better than whites economically. The curious element of this misperception of Clintonian politics is that black citizens and politicians remained devoted to Clinton despite his dubious track record. This is not to suggest that black Americans should have supported Obama — or any other candidate in particular. Or even that there is something inherently suspicious about an affinity for the Clintons. Rather, I would like to offer a potential explanation of a paradigm of black politics that encourages African Americans to vote as a bloc but that also contributes to the notion that they think as a unit and leaves them vulnerable to the kind of condescension and disparagement that some adherents to Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination routinely demonstrated. These events would have conjured related themes only if the events of February 2008 had not drawn Smiley’s paradigm of black politics and Clinton’s campaign into such strict alignment.
In this regard, references to The Covenant are instructive. The idea that this document indubitably reflects the priorities and concerns of African Americans — the sense that by honoring The Covenant, the future Democratic presidential candidate would have fulfilled an obligation to this constituency — deserves to be interrogated. Doing so requires revisiting the book’s formal televised debut in 2006 and the social calamity, from 2005, that figured prominently in this media event.
C-SPAN televised Smiley’s 2006 SOBU symposium, held at St. Agnes Church in Houston: that year’s version of an annual event he organizes featuring prominent African American public intellectuals and leaders (though Hillary Clinton attended the forum that Obama missed in 2008). SOBU 2006 was timed to coincide with the release of The Covenant, the Smiley Group’s Third World Press book outlining “a national plan of action to address the primary concerns of African Americans today”: a “blueprint” evidently consulted so earnestly it spent several weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List.3 More than a year before potential presidential nominees even began to campaign, Smiley declared that The Covenant would “serve as an anchor for those political leaders who think they [can] sail to victory without addressing the issues at stake for black folks.”
To open his SOBU address, Smiley summoned Hurricane Katrina survivors Rochelle Smith and Alvin Seymour to the stage to tell their stories. In using their testimonies to frame the symposium, Smiley confirmed a dominant theme of the event: that the hurricane had produced “floodwaters” powerful enough to reshape the black social and political landscape. Gesturing to the Gulf Coast residents sacrificed in the storm, Smiley insisted that this “new tragedy” reopened “ancient wounds” as it provoked public conversation about the state of black leadership. “The storm came. The floodwaters rose. Tragedies befell us: new tragedies and old tragedies. Lives were washed away. Ancient pains resurfaced.” For that reason, from Smiley’s perspective, it was now “time for a sea of change.”4
Black leaders and spokespersons have insisted that unprecedented governmental neglect contributed to the devastation that Hurricane Katrina left in its wake ( Marable 2006), as many used the disaster to gauge their own efficacy. The flooding that Katrina caused has been taken as proof that, “come hell or high water” ( Dyson 2006), the times call for “a sea change” in social, political, and religious arenas. In a nation once depicted as a “burning house” that African Americans were trying to integrate, black people in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans now clung desperately to the rooftops of partly submerged edifices.5 The aftermath of the hurricane, the flood, suggested to survivors and witnesses of the catastrophe that black aspirations for democracy were in danger of slipping forever beyond their grasp (making these the last days of social justice) as African Americans — especially those affiliated with the SOBU symposium — represented Katrina as a millennial event with explicit biblical overtones ( Reed 2005a).6
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Notes
Thanks to the members of the editorial board of Public Culture for their intimate engagement with my ideas, and to Plaegian Alexander for her exquisite editorial insights. I am indebted to Erica Edwards, Laurence Ralph, Christopher Freeburg, Norell Giancana, Khary Jones, Tristan Burno, Zenia Kish, Candice Jenkins, Mei Campanella, Ebony Coletu, and Jerusalem Melke for helping enrich my argument through the scholarship they have produced and the critiques they were kind enough to share.
- On Waters’s endorsement of Clinton, see CBS News 2008. On Lewis’s support for her, see Washington Post 2007. On February 15, 2008, the New York Times reported that Lewis would soon shift his endorsement from Clinton to Obama ( Zeleny and Healy 2008), although CNN (2008a) later quoted a representative from Lewis’s office as saying that “The Times misrepresented his intentions” and that Lewis “had not decided to switch his support to Obama.” Finally, BBC News (2008) reported that Lewis had officially shifted his support from Clinton to Obama “to be on the side of the people”: “The people are pressing for a new day in American politics and I think they see Senator Barack Obama as a symbol of that change.”
- Despite Clinton’s proximity to esteemed black leadership, her supporters produced a series of offensive statements that frequently played up clandestine forms of racism and religious and ethnic chauvinism. For example, her erstwhile New Hampshire primary cochair Billy Shaheen intimated erroneously that Obama had once trafficked in drugs, and former U.S. senator Bob Kerrey falsely reported that Obama was once educated in an Islamic school or madrassa. Black Entertainment Television founder Bob Johnson not only hinted at Obama’s brief experimentation with cocaine as a youth but also compared him to Sidney Poitier, perhaps implying that the prospect of his presidency relied exclusively on some kind of racial exceptionalism. Bill Clinton, meanwhile, made a series of inflammatory remarks so acerbic that “both Ted Kennedy and Rahm Emanuel . . . pleaded with him privately to tone it down” for fear that his comments would “divide the party, depressing turnout in the fall, especially among black voters, if Hillary [were] the nominee” ( Heilemann 2008). Bill had in fact suggested that people should vote for Obama only if they were willing to “roll the dice”; that Obama’s antiwar record was “the biggest fairy tale” he had ever witnessed; and that Obama believed that “Republicans had better ideas than the Democrats the last ten to fifteen years” ( Thomas and Smalley 2008: 26 – 27). The last of these remarks was almost certainly a deliberate distortion of Obama’s praise of Ronald Reagan’s uncanny ability to convince people to support him against their own interests.
- The Covenant with Black America ( Smiley 2006) was the first book published by an African American – owned press to top the New York Times Best Sellers list of nonfiction.
- “That is why I am so delighted to be with you here in Houston today. This idea of change, this virtual sea of change, has us energized as we have never, as a people, been energized before — certainly not in recent memory. We are here today because we want a sea of change.”
- Harry Belafonte, a SOBU panelist, pointed out that Martin Luther King Jr.’s last words to him communicated a suspicion of civil rights aims: “I sit here deeply concerned that . . . we’re leading our nation on . . . [a] trip that has us integrating . . . a burning house.”
- When interviewed for Spike Lee’s (2006) epic documentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, New Orleans native Fred Johnson, an activist associated with the social organization Black Men of Labor, recounted a close friend’s belief that God, tired of seeing African Americans suffer in the United States so long after the official end of enslavement, had sent the storm to destroy one of the country’s most beautiful cities. While Katrina retained a millennial quality that is of particular resonance for African American political and religious ideations, analogous conceptions of the catastrophe resounded elsewhere. George H. W. Bush referred to Katrina as an event of “biblical proportions” during his 2006 commencement address at Tulane University, then, as now, still being rehabilitated.