MY trainer, a 31-year-old black man, doesn’t vote. It doesn’t make any difference which party wins, he says. He doesn’t believe that President Obama is really in charge.
I respect my trainer. An injury last year ended his professional boxing career. He sometimes works 12-hour days, exhorting client after client. He and his girlfriend have a 3-year-old daughter; he is supporting his girlfriend while she earns a master’s degree. He himself did not go to college, but he got off the Harlem streets. He says that he saved himself from the player’s life of his father, who is younger than I am.
His ambition, his sheer work ethic, make it disheartening for me to hear him say that the Illuminati, or the Trilateral Commission, or some secret council of white men straight out of Ishmael Reed’s early satires, control our destinies. This is the kind of thing black nationalists used to say in the 1970s, when they argued that to join the system was to fall for the white man’s con. To hear my young trainer give voice to such fatalism tells me how easily black people can lose faith in the democratic process, become disaffected, alienated, in spite of the amazing fact that there is a black man in the White House.
Nearly 50 years before Mr. Obama was first elected, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that racist whites were not the only obstacles to the black vote. Black people had to overcome the intimidation and fear they had internalized after centuries of slavery and decades of Jim Crow. The black vote increased significantly after passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Civil rights organizations took an active role in the education of black voters, teaching them how to be comfortable with the exercise of the franchise. Black candidates won mayoral and congressional elections in the early 1970s, when the black population was concentrated in major cities. In the 1980s, black voters in the Democratic primaries made Jesse L. Jackson Sr.’s presidential bids more than symbolic. In the days of the Reagan and Bush backlashes, black candidates needed to have broad appeal, but the coalitions that elected Carol Moseley Braun a senator from Illinois, in 1992, Deval L. Patrick the governor of Massachusetts, in 2006, and Mr. Obama a senator, also from Illinois, in 2004, and then president, in 2008, had the black vote at their cores.
Black turnout outstripped white turnout in 2012, when Mr. Obama won every major demographic group — except white men. As the political scientist Martin L. Kilson notes in his recent book, “Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1880-2012,” Mr. Obama stands at the apex of an African-American political class comprising 10,000 elected black officeholders in cities, counties and state legislatures, 43 members of the United States Congress, a black attorney general, a black national security adviser, black secretaries of homeland security and transportation, a black deputy White House chief of staff for policy, and other black policy makers and administrators. Yet — as Mr. Obama’s critics on the left point out — conditions for black people over all have sunk back to what they had been around the time of Dr. King’s assassination: more than a third of black children are born into poverty; there are more black men in the criminal justice system than there are black men in college; the median income of blacks has fallen; unemployment among blacks remains higher than the national average. As the former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert said, “We know all this, but no one seems to know how to turn things around.”
An Okinawan-Japanese high school classmate of the president’s explained to me after the first inaugural that in Hawaii everyone is a mongrel, and where you come from doesn’t matter. But once the young Mr. Obama went to Los Angeles for college, and was treated as a black youth by the police, he understood what his brave white mother had made him learn during all those mornings of reading black history before school in Indonesia.
Some people want to say that Mr. Obama somehow isn’t with blacks, because he does not descend from people who were enslaved. He is the son of an immigrant — a Kenyan graduate student who was just passing through. Those who say that that somehow makes him different, or less black, don’t know enough about the violence and oppression of colonialism. Class doesn’t determine how black people feel about Mr. Obama. Who supports him in black America and who doesn’t is largely a generational question. Just as my father was jealous of and ambivalent about Mr. Obama, because Mr. Obama had achieved something that blacks of the G.I. Bill generation had not thought possible, so young black people like my trainer miss in the president the performance and tone that historical footage of the civil rights era has subtly led them to expect of black leaders — an impassioned challenger of the system, someone coming from the outside.
I am 60 years old — how did that happen? — and to me, what Mr. Obama has accomplished is far from insignificant: He saved us from economic meltdown, he got us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and he signed the Affordable Care Act. He would perhaps be the first to admit we still have far to go. Because I am an old head now, I can accept incremental change, even value it. I voted for him, though I know he is more of a capitalist than I am. I voted for him twice, though in my heart I cannot forgive him for turning to economics advisers like Lawrence H. Summers (whom I despise). And I am dismayed by those who are obsessed by the mysteries of Mr. Obama’s personality, by his distance, his opacity. Nobody can make him lose his cool, just as nobody can move him from the center. So long as he occupies the middle ground as president, the Republicans are forced to stay on the right. Most of the world is relieved that the president of the United States is a man of integrity and intelligence. But here he is described as a flawed politician, a man not cut out for trench warfare, not the man for our historical moment. His early notion that the country could reconcile in him because of his personal story is dismissed as naïve.
Mr. Obama is criticized for not having done more for black people — not because they are black people, but because they are among his party’s most loyal supporters. Yet many whites resent or are afraid of those moments when the president seems to be taking the black side, speaking from the black point of view. Black people in turn can be frustrated that the black point of view is always ghettoized, never allowed to be, simply, the American point of view — especially when the issue at hand is about social justice. Historically, blacks have looked to the federal government for protection against the doctrine of states’ rights, a euphemism for the reactionary in American politics. But Mr. Obama’s experience in office has shown blacks the limits of executive power.
All my adult life, the argument in black America concerning electoral politics has been about trusting the system, wondering if trying to be a part of the mainstream was possible or worth it. To join the larger society involves a loss, the sacrifice of authentic blackness, some black people would say. Throughout black American history, white people have demanded that black people prove their readiness to become full citizens, which is why I really don’t like it when President Obama or Bill Cosby chastises blacks for their behavior. As James Baldwin so often said: He wasn’t the problem, white people were the problem. There are white Americans who cannot forgive him for having won. They can’t handle the fact that a black man is in charge of the money, of so much patronage and power. Black people didn’t shut down the government; white people did. To such whites, it’s a matter of ownership, not partnership.
If who wins doesn’t matter, then Republicans on the right would not be trying to suppress the black vote. They, too, have heard what the demographics promise. Single mothers now account for a third of eligible voters; most newborns are members of a “minority” group. Republicans have gerrymandered districts so that they can win the House without the Latino vote, and districts have also been redrawn so as to reduce the impact of the black vote either by spreading it around or confining it. Conservative opposition to inclusive democracy has not changed in substance since the immigrant vote was routinely suppressed, along with the black vote, in the late 19th century, back when voter registration days in New York could just so happen to fall on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur (as I learned from the historian Alexander Keyssar). The vote, power elites contended, was a privilege, not a right. Distrust of direct democracy is as much an American tradition as the quest for freedom.
The shooting in Ferguson, Mo., did not leave the news, because demonstrators stayed in the streets, just as Occupy Wall Street movement brought up the urgent matter of wage and wealth inequality and has not let the subject go. Maybe we are at the beginning of another age of activism on the part of youth. In Europe, disaffection from the major political parties has benefited far-right politicians. In America, the rabid Tea Party is the beneficiary. Mr. Obama said somewhere that troublemakers were catalysts for positive change, while others were caretakers of that change. History will remember him as the calm president who steered the nation through dangerous waters.