Stamped from the Beginning: Chapter 37: The Extraordinary Negro Summary & Analysis

In 2004, Obama publishes Dreams from My Father, a memoir in which he laments the desire that so many other biracial people feel to be treated as a special, exceptional “individual” (which means distancing themselves from Blackness). It is therefore ironic that when Obama becomes the only Black American in the Senate in 2005, people all over the country frame him as an “extraordinary Negro.” That same year, Hurricane Katrina has a devastating impact on the poor Black communities of southern Louisiana. The destruction wrought by the hurricane becomes a convenient excuse to stimulate gentrification, generating profits for the wealthy, while President Bush delays the response of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in a gesture widely understood to be racist.

However, the looting that follows Katrina provokes a racist media frenzy of its own; an outrageous lie even circulates that Black Louisianans are shooting the rescue workers coming to help them. Speaking on NBC in 2005, Kanye West famously pronounces: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Yet in a stubbornly “color-blind” environment, many white people refuse to read Bush’s neglect as racist. In 2006, a Black single mother and college student named Crystal Mangum accuses white members of the Duke University lacrosse team of gang raping her at a party. The accusation turns out to be fake; some choose to interpret the incident as evidence that both the antiracism and anti-rape movements have spiraled into a baseless frenzy.   

In 2006, Angela Davis gives a talk at Syracuse University’s “Feminism and War” conference in the midst of widespread protests against the war in Iraq. Davis rebukes the use of feminism as an excuse for invading other countries (as the U.S. had done in promising to “liberate” Afghani and Iraqi women). When Barack Obama announces his run for president in 2007, Delaware Senator (and another candidate for the Democratic nomination) Joe Biden calls him “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Although Biden later retracts this statement, there are soon countless others like it circulating within American media. Barack and his wife, Michelle, are subject to a torrent of racist fascination and degradation.   

During Obama’s campaign, he manages to appeal to what’s known as the “ambivalent majority”: assimilationists who acknowledge that Black people continue to be harmed by discrimination yet also use this as a “crutch.” Obama himself expresses assimilationist sentiments when he argues that Black people have been profoundly damaged by the legacy of slavery and discrimination. He labels antiracist anger as unhelpful and draws a false equivalence between them and angry segregationists. He refuses to condemn white bigots and reactionaries, declining to even acknowledge them as racist. This message, which is expressed in the “More Perfect Union” speech Obama gives in Philadelphia in 2008, is praised by elected officials, scholars, and commentators from across the political spectrum. 

Republican segregationists remain steadfast in their opposition to Obama, investing in a conspiracy surrounding his birth certificate and the false rumor that he was not born in the U.S. Meanwhile, Obama recites racist myths about absent Black fathers. At the election, Angela Davis—now 64 and retired from academia—votes for Obama, who wins the presidency. She recalls the jubilation pouring out of the streets of Oakland upon the announcement of his victory. Most people see Obama’s election as a triumph of antiracism, but racist ideas do not stop there. Instead, they adapt to a new nation—one that is for the first time led by a Black president.