The Obamas embrace history with enthusiasm for ’42’
OPINION - When President Barack Obama embraced Rachel Robinson, the 90-year-old widow of baseball Hall of Fame legend Jackie Robinson on Tuesday, he did so as a man in a unique position to relate to her late husband's story...
As the man who broke the country’s ultimate color barrier, Obama is often compared to Robinson, whose #42 jersey is the only number permanently retired in baseball. And while he hasn’t had to endure the outright racial humiliation that Robinson was forced to endure, he has had to mirror Robinson’s calm and stoic response in the face of unprecedented disrespect, from being called a liar by Rep. Joe Wilson during a September 2009 healthcare address to congress; to being prodded to produce his birth certificate to quiet conspiracy theorists, including some elected officials; to having tea party protesters march against him while conspicuously carrying firearms.
“Obama, ironically enough, carries a kind of pressure that not even Robinson confronted,” says Dyson. “In Robinson’s era, race [representation] was not only expected, but deemed as inevitable, and Robinson understood and embraced his role as race representative. Like Joe Louis, Robinson understood that his athletic prowess bore great meaning: his cleats dug into the dirt for the advance of the race, his swing at the plate a substitute argument for black folk swinging against brutal apartheid.”
“Obama is in that sense a reverse Robinson,” Dyson continues. “He believes that in order for his success to signify for black folk, his actions must be devoid of race to qualify as momentous and meaningful. He believes he must shun race to advance the race — he must disavow its pitiless persistence and largely refuse to draw attention to its ugly ubiquity in order to defeat its hold on the American imagination.”
It’s why, some would say, you have to look harder, and read more tea leaves, in order to view Barack Obama’s sense of his own importance to black Americans: the designation of monuments, or the screening of a film.
“I think their choices, from the display of the Norman Rockwell painting of Ruby Bridges all the way to the showing of 42 reflects a certain humility,” says historian Blair L.M. Kelley, of North Carolina State University. “Without the path-breaking efforts of those ‘firsts’ that came before them, they would not have had the opportunity to serve as the first African-American first family. Their choices reflect a thoughtful awareness of that history and a respect for their place in the African American journey towards full citizenship and inclusion.”
Dyson says the president has had to navigate that journey thoughtfully.
“In Obama’s era, rhetoric about the nation’s progress is a proxy for black uplift, which, by virtue of not singling itself out, qualifies, finally, as an American story,” Dyson says. “Robinson was free to speak of race to destroy its evident transgressions. Obama is far less free to engage race, whose very mention reinforces bitter racial memories of what is thought to be a bygone era. Thus he faces a paradox: he must be race neutral to ultimately be race affirming.”
Still, for visitors to the White House on Tuesday, a simple screening, and the embrace of a legend’s widow, was affirmation enough.
Follow Joy Reid on Twitter at @TheReidReport.
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