Mitch Perry
Although Joy Ann-Reid no longer has her daily show “The Reid Report” on MSNBC, she remains a regular fixture on the cable news network as a national correspondent. She also continues to write stories online at places like the Daily Beast, and you can now call her an author. Her book, “Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the Racial Divide,” was published last month by William Morrow.
Reid now lives in Brooklyn, but South Florida political observers in particular will remember from her popular blog, also called The Reid Report, as well as her biweekly columns that ran in the Miami Herald. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Reid was the Florida deputy communications director for the 527 “America Coming Together” initiative, and was a press aide in the final stretch of President Obama’s Florida campaign in 2008.
In “Fracture,” Reid leads up to Obama’s ascendance on the national stage and his presidency by beginning during the middle of the civil rights movement in 1964.
She also digs deep into the alienation of blacks such Tavis Smiley and Cornel West toward the upstart who first became a presence on the national stage after his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention.
Reid writes that the date that the Obama campaign had circled to begin his candidacy, Feb. 10, 2007, conflicted with a major event among black lawmakers, scholars, authors and civil rights activists to discuss the state of black America. It was coordinated by Smiley, who worked with Obama’s team and ultimately Obama himself to get the Illinois senator to change the date of his announcement.
Obama didn’t budge.
In an interview on WMNF’s MidPoint program in Tampa on Thursday, Reid said that issue was emblematic in more ways than one about how Obama would set himself apart from the black intelligentsia. Here’s an excerpt from that hour-long discussion.
Joy Reid: Initially, Barack Obama was mostly a phenomenon for white political watchers, it was a not a phenomenon for African-Americans. African-Americans really didn’t take notice of this this until he won Iowa, quite frankly, before that he was sort of an unknown who seemed to stack up well and seemed smart, but who most black voters sort of wrote off as being unelectable, because A) he’s black, B) he’s black and C) his name is Barack Hussein Obama, so it’s never going to happen. And he had no track record in the civil rights movement or anything that made him known to black people.
But you had among black intellectuals, a real sense that, if you were going to have the first truly credible African-American candidate for president, that he somehow needed to come thru the crucible of either the civil rights movement or through the black intelligentsia, and because Barack Obama was in a sense was a member of the black intelligentsia, he knew Tavis Smiley, he knew Cornell West, he knew these people, he was in a sense, a part of them in terms of being a black intellectual and being in that tradition, I think there was a real sense that he needed to come to them, come through them and explain to black Americans why that they should support him, that he shouldn’t just assume that because he was a man with black skin and a black man that African-Americans owed him their support, that he should ask for it, and he should specifically ask for that there, and the fact that Obama refused to do that, he had scheduled his event already and wasn’t going to change it for them, I think it showed a couple of things.
It think it showed No. 1: Barack Obama was fundamentally running the black establishment as much as he was running against Hillary Clinton, he ran to to kind of say, ‘I don’t need you, I don’t need the civil rights establishment, I don’t need the black intellectual establishment, I can do this on my own, and still command the support of black people, and he did.
FloridaPolitics.com: Absolutely he did.
Throughout the book, not only Smiley and West, but other black intellectuals who have had issues with Obama. Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic called Obama, “the scold of black America,” and others followed. And this is really one of the big parts of your book is how with our first black president the delicate balancing act that he’s had to do to be the president of all America, which is still a majority white country (although changing). And of course, the highest elected black official in the country’s history and the strains involved with that. If you could talk more about that, since that’s such a big part of your book.
Reid: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I could have talked about this as you describe it. It’s just this fine line that any black politician who rises about let’s say, the congressional level, where you have a majority black district, or the mayoral level, where you’re the mayor of a mostly black city like Atlanta. When you’re talking about being the president of the United States, or even being a statewide candidate, even if you take it back to being a U.S. senator, one of the reasons that I would submit there are so few African-American senators, is that there’s not a lot of black political figures who can be what one intellectual described Barack Obama as, which is “the least angry black man in America,” somebody who literally shows and exhibits no baggage on the subject of race, because that’s the price of entry, that essentially for the majority of the country, the proof that you’re the president of all, or the senator for all, is that you do not wear on your sleeve, any pain of blackness, you’re not talking about the baggage of race, and really bringing to the table something that makes a lot of Americans feel uncomfortable and accused.
And so the fact that Barack Obama could actually emerge on a national stage without that accusatory tone in his discourse, made him really, really palatable. It made him really attractive as a figure and in a lot of ways, it’s what makes Ben Carson attractive as a figure on the right, it’s that he’s someone who can speak past race. But what I do write a lot about in the book is that idea meets reality really quickly, when you actually try to govern, or to live or to be an executive or to be anything as a black person in America, because the actual reality of your life eventually comes to the fore, and it did for the president with the Trayvon Martin case, when he was now confronting an issue that really hit him as a black man, as a father, and when he responded in that way, his poll numbers among white Americans just plunged immediately.
FloridaPolitics.com: And they also actually even before that. The Skip Gates incident back in 2009 I think it was. He said the Cambridge police acted “stupidly” when arresting the Harvard professor at his home. That was again one of the few manifestations of anger. We realized that Obama could tap into and relate to Gates and see how angry Gates was for being arrested in front of his own home, and how outrageous that was. And he (Obama) improved that at a press conference, and oh my God, the pushback was enormous from not only just conservatives but also some elements of the mainstream media. And we saw this at the White House Correspondence Dinner this year when the comedy team of Key and Peele used their “anger translator” thing, and I thought that was hysterical. But the comedy resides in some truth … the fantasy of what Obama would maybe like to be saying, and what he has to say to the mainstream America.
Reid: And in that skit, Luther, the anger translator, is who Black America wants to be heard, to be honest with you, because he’s speaking to their daily lives as African-Americans are saying ‘Why can’t you speak to that truth from the pulpit of the White House and the Obama advisers and even the man himself were saying, you can’t really do that in this job. And so you’re right, the Skip Gates incident, even more in a sense than the Trayvon Martin incident, because Trayvon did not die at the hands of a policeman, in the Skip Gates incident, Barack Obama tied together several threads that are really, really touchy in American life, one of which is policing, one of which is white policing of black bodies even when they are as august, wealthy, well off and accomplished as someone like Skip Gates, you’re still subject to the same kind of disrespect in the minds of many black people as if you were a 17-year-old with a hoodie on and your hands in your pocket, right? So the idea that even professor Gates who’s well known in the Cambridge community could be treated and mishandled in that way, really struck, I think, a lot of African-Americans, including the president as outrageous, but when he said that, which was self evident to black people, yeah, white America did not appreciate it. And I look in the book at his poll numbers after each of these incidents, which, by the way, were rare, he very rarely in the first 18 months, the first six years of his presidency talked about race , every time he did, there was a direct impact: Black approval went up, white approval went down, every single time.
You can hear Reid’s entire interview by going to WMNF’s website and access the noon to 1 p.m. Oct. 22 interview.
“Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons and the Racial Divide” is available online and in bookstores everywhere.
