Dreams from Obama

by Robert A. Burt
Alexander M. Bickel Professor of Law, Yale Law School

Like all political leaders, Barack Obama offers an idealized image through which supporters can see their own hopes, their “best selves,” reflected through an  identification with him. Freud depicted this bond between leader and followers in his wonderful little monograph, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, with his characteristic flair: “A group,” he wrote, is clearly held together by a power of some kind: and to what power could this feat be better ascribed than to Eros, which holds together everything in the world?” (p. 92) It is especially illuminating to view Obama’s hold on the imagination of his followers through Freud’s lens – that is, as essentially erotic.

The speed of his ascent to the presidency is one clue to this characteristic. Obama appeared on the national stage only four years ago when he was a virtually unknown state senator running for his first national office, as United States senator from Illinois. This first appearance – the keynote address to the Democratic National Convention in 2004 – is, I think, a defining starting point for understanding the cultural meaning of his victory. Obama’s keynote speech was not merely good; it was thrilling. From nowhere, he was immediately seen as a potential presidential candidate. 

The sudden way that he captivated public attention resonated throughout his candidacy. It was the basis for the playful designation of him as “the One,” sometimes offered with awe, sometimes with jealousy, sometimes with disdain as in “That One.”  At the Al Smith dinner in New York in mid-October, Obama himself did a riff on this, saying that he wanted to rebut rumors that he had been born in a manger and revealing that he had actually been born on the planet Krypton and sent here by his father, Jor-El, to save the world. Whether he is seen as Superman or Jesus Christ Superstar, there is something quite out of the ordinary about the original impetus for Obama’s candidacy and his rapid rise from nowhere. Beginning with his keynote speech in 2004, Obama’s relationship to his followers was, in the familiar phrase, love at first sight.

Now I must quickly add, this was not everybody’s response – and for many of those who were smitten, this love was not without ambivalence (what love is?) nor has it been easily sustained with the same intensity over the long electoral campaign. But I think it is helpful, in understanding the phenomenon of his candidacy, to see its fundamental erotic charge from its outset – especially because I think this erotic quality is interwoven with and reinforced by the fact of his race, that he is an African-American who, when examined attentively, is also half-White. In his person, Obama both invokes and unites the deepest, most bitter division in our national experience. He both invokes our Civil War and holds out the promise that we can finally, at long last, end that Civil War – or put another way, that we can finally recognize that the War has in fact already been ended.

In this sense, Obama’s candidacy represents the climax of the Civil Rights revolution of the 1950s and 60s – the so-called Second Reconstruction, following the aborted efforts after Emancipation a century earlier. Although Obama has not explicitly claimed this, he has implicitly offered us a return to the ideal that was at the core of whites’ sympathetic identification with black claims at the high point of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. This claim was to be included in a mutually supportive communal relationship from which blacks had been excluded – first through enslavement and then through the forced subordination of racial segregation.  The injustice of this exclusion only became clear to a majority of whites when they themselves felt alienated from an inclusive communal identity; this was whites’ understanding not simply of blacks but of themselves in the 1960s. This empathic identification faded after the racial and social turmoil of the late 1960s; but Obama’s election signifies the possibility of renewed sense of shared membership in a mutually supportive relationship – not only with blacks but more generally. I can illustrate the erotic connection at the core of this communal bond from a moment in my own life when the personal meaning of the Black Civil Rights movement came into focus for me.

Here is my memory. In 1968, I was legislative assistant to U. S. Senator Joseph Tydings, a liberal Democrat from Maryland, and had worked for him to enact the Fair Housing Act, forbidding race discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. During the crucial vote in the Senate in March 1968 to end the Southern filibuster on this measure, I sat in the Senate gallery next to Clarence Mitchell, Jr., the head of the NAACP Washington office. I had seen Mitchell many times before in strategy meetings convened by the Democratic manager of the bill, Senator Philip Hart; but we had never spoken, and I was not sure that he even recognized me. But when cloture was voted and the cheering in the Senate chamber had subsided, I turned to look at Mitchell and saw that he was weeping just as I was weeping. And we hugged one another.

This embrace might seem unremarkable today, when so many whites and blacks have comfortable social relations, even intimate relations, with one another and when two men of whatever race routinely hug one another in public settings. But in March 1968, our public embrace was unusual on both scores, race and gender. I was deeply moved by it, in ways that I could hardly understand.

Mitchell and I left the Senate gallery together. It turned out that his office and my home were close by one another on Capitol Hill. As we walked together, he told me about his grandfather who had been born a slave, how grateful he had been to this country for his freedom, how proud he would be now that America was redeeming its promise by this extraordinary public law, and how proud he would be that his grandson had played some part in bringing this about. I in turn told Mitchell about my grandfathers who had been Jews in Tsarist Russia and had fled to America in order to avoid pogroms and forced conscription, how thankful they were for the freedoms they had found here, and how proud they would be that their grandson had played some small role in helping toward the enactment of this law.

This momentary coming together – our weeping, our embrace, the similar passage of our grandfathers from enslavement to freedom, our shared love for our country – was about more than enactment of this new law. Our joining together felt to me like a liberation from some oppressive struggle, in which racial differences, gender identities and age differentials (Mitchell was old enough to be my father) were transcended by a sense of shared possibilities.

I don’t think I was unique among whites in feeling that my own sense of personal liberation was somehow linked to the cause of Black people’s liberation from racial subordination. This linkage was widely felt at the time. It was given especially powerful acknowledgment in Lyndon Johnson’s speech – many would say his greatest speech – to a joint session of Congress in March 1965, urging enactment of the Voting Rights Act in immediately response to the Selma, Alabama march. In that speech, Johnson stated, “What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

Johnson thus appropriated the rallying cry of the Black civil rights movement – “we shall overcome.”  But this was not plagiarism, it was not an act of theft. It was an assertion of identification between blacks and whites – “their cause is our cause” and our sense of freedom depended on theirs. But why should this be? How could it be when the country had been so deeply divided, so racially polarized for so many years as whites systematically degraded and suppressed blacks, as whites built their own sense of social identify on a perceived difference – a rigidly enforced difference – between themselves and blacks?

I don’t have a complete answer to this question. But I do believe that something happened in American culture in the years immediately following the Second World War that eroded the dominant sense of an unbridgeable difference between blacks and whites and that put in its place a growing conviction that blacks and whites were brothers and sisters under the skin, so to speak – not simply that blacks and whites were fundamentally alike but even more powerfully that blacks’ historic oppression had become mirrored in whites’ growing sense of their own vulnerabilities.

This sense of commonality – not simply recognition of the injustices imposed on blacks but a sense of shared oppression among blacks and whites – was rarely acknowledged in explicit terms. I don’t have enough time in this lecture to do anything more than suggestively sketch the underlying bases for this shared sense, the parallels with the social circumstances of blacks that whites came to sense in the aftermath of Second World War and the Great Depression that had immediately preceded it. The brief evidence I offer is literary but to my eyes quite revealing. 
First, regarding the social condition of blacks as they saw themselves, consider the title of Ralph Ellison’s classic novel Invisible Man. This self-depiction of invisibility poignantly expressed blacks’ sense of exclusion, of living in America but not belonging here or anywhere else. Ellison published his novel in 1952 but the sense of isolation, of aloneness, to which he testified was deeply embedded in the Black experience from their original entry into this country, as captives torn from their homes and transported to an alien and enslaving land.

Ellison’s depiction was not new. But the new element in his portrayal was an underlying belief that a white audience now existed, an audience that was prepared to listen, even to extend understanding, to his plight. In 1952, Ellison sensed, as many black leaders sensed, that whites were prepared to see them clearly, as if for the first time since Emancipation. Ellison’s public complaint of “invisibility” was somehow belied by the very fact that he and other black leaders were ready to make a visible, public presentation of that complaint. And 1952, of course, was the year when Thurgood Marshall, on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, argued Brown v. Board of Education before the United States Supreme Court.

What was the common chord of feeling with whites that emboldened blacks to go public with their complaints of wrongful oppression? Again I offer you suggestive literary evidence to support the proposition that, notwithstanding the considerable differences between the social experiences of whites and blacks, blacks’ fear of “invisibility” – of  “not belonging” anywhere – was also felt by whites on their own behalf around 1952.  This fear among whites was captured by the phrase “the lonely crowd,” the title of David Reisman’s 1950 study of American character, which became the best-selling sociological text in American publishing history.  It was similarly expressed in William Whyte’s 1956 best-seller, The Organization Man – a portrait of the soulless conformity, a kind of personal inauthenticity and consequent “invisibility,” in American corporate life.

For most whites, this was a new fear.  Their sense of “belonging” had been buttressed by the apparent dominance of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Establishment in this country. In fact, the WASP sense of their unassailable ownership of America had been eroded by successive waves of immigration into this country and almost entirely undone by the experience of the Great Depression. By 1952, the fragility of the reparative efforts toward restoring WASP hegemony was increasingly apparent. The claims of blacks for admission into “mainstream America” reflected, and at the same time appeased, many whites’ growing sense of the fragility of their own sense of belonging (as if blacks’ petition for admission in the previously all-white club demonstrated that the club still existed and was prized even more by those excluded than by their increasingly uneasy charter members).

The vocabulary to describe this fear for whites did not immediately translate into claims for justice and equality as it did for blacks.  But by the mid-1960s, this sense of “loneliness” – of social isolation and disrespect, of belonging nowhere – became articulated as claims for justice and equality of other groups newly united in their sense of grievance. Thus came the campaigns, propelled by the example of the black civil rights movement, for the equal rights of women, of disabled people, of gays and lesbians.

In this proliferation of grievances by various groups, however justified in their own terms, something became lost from the underlying ethos of the original black civil rights movement.
The claims for inclusive equality became transmuted into mutually exclusive demands – as if including one group necessarily meant excluding some other, as if honoring the equality of one meant diminishing another. This combative premise came to characterize the polarized public debates over affirmative action quotas for blacks (at the expense of excluded whites), of women’s free choice for abortions (at the expense of fetal life), of marriage for same-sex couples (at the expense of traditionalists for whom marriage is inextricably tied to their own sense of gender identity).

Obama, however, signifies an effort to return the country to the original impetus of the black civil rights movement. He does not say this explicitly; he may not even clearly grasp this connection himself. But the sense of himself that he offers to the public takes us back to this root fear of loneliness, of exclusion, of not belonging anywhere. In his eloquently unpretentious book, Dreams from My Father, Obama testified to the persistent fear that had driven him for much of his life: “the constant, crippling fear,” he said, “that I didn’t belong somehow, that unless I dodged and hid and pretended to be something I wasn’t I would forever remain an outsider, with the rest of the world, black and white, always standing in judgment.” (p. 111). This fear, as he presents it, arose from his biographical experience that is not typical in American life, either for blacks or whites – that is, his mixed racial identity as the child of a black father and white mother, his father’s virtual absence from his life, his visual appearance as a black man simply because of his skin tone but his experience of being raised entirely by a white mother and white grandparents.

In Dreams from My Father, Obama describes the path that took him toward a self-definition as an African-American. He relates discussions with his black friends about their own color consciousness: “good hair, bad hair; thick lips or thin; if you’re light, you’re all right, if you’re black, get back.” But he observes that these conversations “rarely took place in large groups, and never in front of whites.”  To admit our “doubts and confusions” to white people, he said, “seemed ludicrous, itself an expression of self-hatred – for there seemed no reason to expect that whites would look at our private struggles as a mirror into their own souls, rather than yet more evidence of black pathology.” (p. 193)  But this is precisely what Obama offers in his book and in his candidacy: not that whites should ignore black experience and treat him as if he had no racial identity, but that whites and blacks alike should see his “private struggles” – as a mixed-race child who had not known his father – “as a mirror into their own souls.”

Obama’s electoral victory indicates that a substantial number of whites have responded to this offer. This response, I believe, was propelled by social forces at work in our society today that lay the ground for whites to see themselves in the mirror that Obama holds up for them, to identify with him rather than reject him as irredeemably different and threatening. For the past thirty years or so, we have been gripped by an ideology that takes our social isolation as a fact and tries to elevate it as a positive good – as rugged individualism – rather than as a vulnerability. I think we have come to an end-point in this celebratory myth-making – not, I emphasize, a permanent end but a moment of at least temporary exhaustion. The sudden collapse of our financial system and its imminent spread to our entire economic life is only the most visible expression of this exhaustion – though this current crisis gives vivid validation to the sense of vulnerability that has spread throughout our population with the vast expansion of economic inequality and the decline of economic opportunity.

Will we now self-consciously turn to one another for mutual support? Will a majority of the country follow Obama’s leadership to create a new identity with one another as this fatherless misfit appears to have forged a strong identity for himself? We will find a partial answer to this question in concrete programmatic terms during the next four years of Obama’s presidency: whether enough Americans are prepared to trust one another by pooling their resources through universal health insurance, through new investments in public facilities (infrastructure, educational institutions, and new sources of clean energy). The challenge in all of these policy matters is to overcome the ethos that has dominated our public life since the 1980s: that is, mutual mistrust and the consequent response of leaving everyone to fend for himself – a response which depicts government as “the enemy” rather than as the organized expression of our common culture, which encourages us to hoard personal assets for fear that they will be “redistributed” without any benefit to us rather than pooling our resources through taxation to accomplish common goals that we cannot reach on our own. Overcoming this intensely individualistic, mistrustful self-portrait means returning to the predominately shared sense of ourselves at the high point of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

Will this possibility actually be fulfilled? Will this promise have more staying power than the relatively brief reign of the civil rights ethos in the 1960s? The answer is, of course, not yet clear. But I have seen a hopeful harbinger in the response of African-American students at Yale Law School to Obama’s election – of their readiness to see in his victory an offer of a supportive communal relationship that had not previously been available to them. Last spring, when Obama’s nomination for the presidency had been assured, I had long conversations with some African-American students about Obama’s impact on their lives and each described a sense of excitement, almost of disbelief, about the unexpected possibilities that Obama had opened for them. To an outside observer, their status as students at this elite law school might have seemed confirmation that they had joined the American “establishment.” But nagging doubts still accompanied this status for them. In common with all Yale Law students – regardless of race, gender or ethnicity – each of them suspected that there had been an administrative mistake and they would, sooner or later, be unmasked and their admission would be revoked. But beyond this typical misgiving, some further suspicion persisted that their race remained a special demerit, a specific reason that they were not fully accepted, not full-fledged members of the Yale community.

Obama’s success in obtaining the Democratic nomination in itself has already altered these students’ visions of themselves. Possibilities that had seemed remote for them suddenly seemed to be within their grasp – not so much for professional or economic success but for their sense of belonging at Yale specifically and in America more generally.

One student in particular told me about an experience with his father, a humanities professor at a mid-Western university. The two of them had been browsing in a clothing store and the father called his son’s attention to a white clerk who seemed to be following them while ignoring a white shopper in another part of the store.  The father said, “She’s following us because she thinks we’re going to steal something.” My student told me that he had dismissed this thought, and after the clerk approached directly and asked if she could assist them, he said to his father, “You see, she only wanted to help us.”  The father, however, repeated his insistence that the clerk was motivated by racial animosity. This disagreement between father and son was, my student told me, a recurrent theme in their relationship. But just after Obama won the Iowa primary (with overwhelming white support), his father called and told him that he didn’t recognize this country, that in the America where he had grown up it was inconceivable that a black man could be a major party nominee for president. My student said, “My father told me that it was my country now, not his, and that he was glad for that, and happy for me.”

In the America where I grew up, we started on this path toward a shared communal identity. The social turmoil of the late 1960s appeared to derail this effort.  Barak Obama’s election as president may now signify that this long national estrangement was not permanent, that we are further on our way to the “more perfect Union” that our Constitution has always promised.