President Obama wanted to deliver a rebuttal.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, an award-winning writer at The Atlantic, had blasted the president for his graduation speech in May at Morehouse College, the all-male, historically black school in Atlanta that Martin Luther King Jr. attended. Coates wrote that the speech, which included the president telling the graduates “nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination,” was part of a regular Obama pattern: delivering preachy, sermon-like speeches to African-Americans audiences exhorting them to work harder and take more responsibility for their lives, while downplaying the role of racial discrimination in today’s America.
This rhetoric, according to Coates, fit a “discomfiting pattern of convenient race-talk,” and blacks deserved more than Obama’s “targeted scorn.”
A few weeks after the piece was published, Obama aides invited Coates to a meeting with the president in the Roosevelt Room, along with several other writers. Obama regularly has off-the-record meetings with groups of journalists, particularly liberal columnists he considers influential. According to those who have attended them, the president uses the sessions to explain his views more fully, hoping to help shape the coverage of some of the country’s leading writers. In the sessions, Obama speaks at first, then each writer gets a chance to ask a question.
At one point during the meeting, Obama, according to two people who were familiar with this session, assured Coates he respects his writing. But Obama then bluntly told Coates that he felt the writer’s criticism of the Morehouse speech was off-base. Obama argued he understood the legacy of racism as much as anyone. But the president said that his rhetoric was not designed to attack the Morehouse graduates, but instead to underscore the challenges of life, particularly for African-Americans, once they left campus.
He added, for good measure, the graduates liked the speech just fine. (Coates did not return an e-mail seeking comment.)
What the president did not do was apologize for his remarks, which was a departure from his first term. Early in his presidency, when race came up, backtracking from Obama’s team often followed. No, Obama should not have said in 2009 that police “acted stupidly” in arresting Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates at his house. No, Obama’s attorney general and friend Eric Holder should not have described the U.S. as a “nation of cowards” unwilling to speak directly about race. No, the administration should not have fired Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod over a video that was edited by a conservative website to suggest she made racist comments. No, the president was not trying to attack members of the Congressional Black Caucus when he urged them to press forward and “stop complaining” in a 2011 speech.
While Obama was very skilled as a candidate in appealing to both black and non-black audiences, early in his presidency he and his team at times struggled with how an African-American president should speak and act on controversial issues that involved race.
But over the last few months, Obama’s administration, with little fanfare, has enacted a series of unabashedly liberal policies that the Rev. Al Sharpton and other civil rights leaders have long urged. He is increasingly using his bully pulpit to talk about broader issues of race in America. Obama has elevated the role of Holder, once one of the administration’s most controversial figures, in announcing new policies on drug sentencing and other issues.
Some of these moves are controversial. Coates was not alone among blacks in disliking the Morehouse speech. Some conservatives, on the other hand, say Obama’s rhetoric, such as when he suggested “Trayvon Martin could have been me,” is inappropriate, and his policies are overly race-conscious.
But what’s different in his second term is that Obama is shaping these debates on his terms. He never intended his remarks on Gates to turn into a media firestorm that forced an awkward “beer summit” between the professor, the officer who arrested him, Obama and the vice-president.
But the president very intentionally arrived at the Morehouse’s campus that day to deliver a kind of sermon to the graduates.
“He was a little defensive”
In the early days of his tenure, Obama and other black leaders, both in Congress and those who worked at civil rights groups, had an uneasy relationship. The civil rights leaders, proud of Obama’s accomplishment in getting elected, were wary of criticizing him directly, in public or even in private. At the same time, some were frustrated by his approach.
In private meetings, some of the leaders, such as then-NAACP president Ben Jealous, urged Obama to offer specific plans that while not explicitly racial would direct additional federal funds toward communities with very high jobless rates, an approach that would have benefited blacks. The president would instead point to policies he had already enacted, like the economic stimulus plan, and describe how they helped African-Americans. And Obama rejected calls for him to speak or advocate policies that would specifically address high black unemployment, as opposed to ideas that would benefit jobless Americans of all races.
“The notion that he would be criticized by the civil rights community, he was a little defensive about that,” said one former senior adviser.
Obama and his team weren’t specifically against the ideas of black leaders, other liberal groups and their proposals were also being rejected back then. In much of the first term, the White House, with reelection always on its mind, wanted to focus on the middle class as much as possible. Many of Obama’s policies, such as the health care law, would benefit lower-income people, often disproportionately so. But the emphasis in Obama’s speeches about health care was on young adults being able to stay on their parents’ health care plans, not the vast expansion of Medicaid for poor Americans. When a group of Cabinet secretaries, early in the first term, suggested the administration launch a formal anti-poverty push, the proposal was quickly shot down.
“We tried as hard as we could not to talk about the increases in funding for food stamps and Medicaid,” in the 2009 stimulus bill, said one former senior White House official.
One former White House aide described how the administration was nervous each month in 2012 when the Department of Agriculture would announce how many Americans were on food stamps. The administration was deeply supportive of helping low-income Americans pay for food, but viewed the announcements as opportunity for Republicans to cast Obama as the “food stamp president.”
“More than any other human being I know”
Black leaders strongly backed Obama during the 2012 election. But they wanted to find a way to push the president toward their policy goals in a second term.
A group of 60 African-American leaders met privately in late 2012 in Washington to come up with a coordinated list of proposals that Obama should pursue, which they dubbed the “agenda for African-Americans.” They presented some of the ideas to Obama in a meeting with him last year and later wrote a formal document calling for policies like defending affirmative action, taking steps to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes and reform the “war on drugs,” and fighting controversial voting laws passed in Republican-controlled states.
But the effort may not have been necessary: Obama was already there. He had proposed many of these ideas himself already, in a 2007 speech at Howard University. In meetings on the eve of the 2012 election with his staff, Obama told aides he wanted to work on these kinds of issues if he won a second term. And one of Obama’s advisers was passionate about criminal justice and ready to lead on them: Holder.
Obama met Holder when he was first elected to the Senate in 2004, and the future attorney general and Obama became close friends, as did their wives. (Sharon Malone, Holder’s wife, recently flew to Hawaii to attend one of the celebrations for Michelle Obama’s 50th birthday.)
Holder was in some ways a perfect fit for Obama’s circle. While the president has a diverse group of friends that includes childhood buddies from Hawaii and people he met through Chicago politics, like strategist David Axelrod, many of those personally closest to him are like Obama: African-Americans with prestigious jobs. White House aides say the president’s best friend is Marty Nesbitt, a hoops-loving Chicago black business executive who until recently ran an airport parking company worth millions. Obama spends each August in Martha’s Vineyard hanging out with friends like Holder, adviser Valerie Jarrett, lobbyist and 2012 Obama campaign adviser Broderick Johnson, and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.
“We see things in the same way, we’ve experienced many of the same things as black men in the United States,” Holder said in a recent interview in his office.
But for much of the first term, being personally close with the president didn’t seem like it would be enough for Holder. He was a lightening rod, criticized by both Democrats and Republicans. Inside the administration, top White House aides, other than Jarrett, with whom he is close, considered Holder gaffe prone. And a number of controversial administration policies, from the “Fast and Furious” gun trafficking program to the administration’s unsuccessful attempt to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, were officially in his purview. There was regular buzz around Washington as to when, not if, Holder would step down.
But Holder, with Obama’s support, has never left, even after House Republicans censured him two years ago. Instead, he has been tasked with implementing a series of measures whose impact disproportionately affects blacks.
In August, Holder announced new guidance to federal prosecutors that indictments should omit the amount of drugs possessed by non-violent offenders, a way to avoid triggering mandatory-minimum sentences. Obama, who in 2010 had signed a bill reducing the disparity in sentences between crack and powder cocaine users, in December commuted, with the advice of the Justice Department, the sentences of a group of people who were being detained under lengthy, mandatory-minimum sentences for crack convictions.
Obama has “put into motion a set of criminal justice reforms that will have their greatest effect on communities of color and most notably the African-American community,” said Wade Henderson, president and chief executive of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “I consider that a major, major step forward.”
The sentencing reform push is part of a series of measures from the Obama administration in his second term that, while not promoted as such, illustrate the shrinking gap between the agenda of civil rights leaders and that of the president. Indeed, on some issues it has become non-existent.
The administration is strongly defending race-based affirmative action programs in cases before the Supreme Court, even as a growing number of liberals and Democrats say college admission programs should either stop any kind of preferences or use class, not race.
The Justice Department has filed suits to block a redistricting plan and voter ID law in Texas and a series of voting changes in North Carolina, including limits on the number of days of early voting, arguing all would disadvantage minority voters. DOJ has not only opposed the laws, but has argued that Texas and North Carolina should be forced to have all their new voting laws reviewed by the federal government, as was mandated by Section 4 prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Earlier this year, in another move civil rights leaders have urged, the administration, in an announcement by Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, called on school districts across the country to adopt a series of policy ideas written by the administration that Obama aides say will reduce the number of students who are either suspended or kicked out of schools. One of the chief aims of these guidelines, as Duncan said in announcing the policy, is to address the disproportionate number of black students who face expulsions.
The administration has created “promise zones” that target federal support for low-income areas and recently hosted an education event at the White House in which some colleges and states agreed to a series of steps to increase the recruitment and retention of low-income students, while also making it cheaper and easier for these students to apply to colleges. Both these policies, while not explicitly racial in nature, are designed to benefit low-income people from rural areas, who tend to be white, but also poor minorities in urban areas.
Obama’s approach on these issues has left some confusion. It is Holder, not the president, who announces the policy and speaks often on voting rights, drug sentencing and other civil rights issues. Holder has decried some of the Republican-backed voter laws as “poll taxes,” while Hillary Clinton gave a long speech after North Carolina passed its voting laws calling the set of provisions akin to the “greatest hits of voter suppression.”
Obama has avoided that kind of rhetoric. But aides say he is fully behind the lawsuits Holder has filed to get rid of the Republican voting laws and other moves and allows Holder to announce these policies because he is the attorney general.
Obama “cares about this [the lawsuits filed against the voter ID laws] more than any other human being I know,” said Danielle Gray, a senior White House adviser.
Conservatives argue this administration is overly focused on a legal term known as “disparate impact,” meaning Obama and his team attack policies they think might have a negative impact on minority groups even if the laws are not directly discriminatory.
“This is a very liberal administration on civil rights issues and aggressively so,” said Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative group that supports the voter laws and opposes affirmative action.
While not wanting to be quoted publicly, civil rights leaders say they would still like to see the president propose and push hard for some kind of jobs program that would benefit distressed communities and help jobless workers, even if such a proposal is doomed to be blocked by Republicans in Congress. They are still frustrated that early in his tenure Obama opposed “cramdowns,” which would have allowed bankruptcy judges to reduce the terms of home loans and prevent home foreclosures. African-Americans disproportionately lost their homes during the recession.
Further, civil rights groups are prepared to push Obama hard to make history and name a black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court if a vacancy occurs over the next three years.
“Trying to keep a black man down”
Obama, like Bill Cosby and other leading black figures, has been giving “tough love” speeches to African-Americans audiences for years, for example urging black parents to make sure their kids do their homework and don’t watch too much television.
But for six years, during his first campaign and presidency, this rhetoric generated little controversy. It wasn’t clear if Obama was saying these things from the heart or for political reasons, as a kind of Clinton-style triangulation to reassure white voters he could confront blacks. And many African-American activists and leaders were very wary of criticizing Obama publicly anyway, both because they did not want to weaken him politically, as he already faced strong opposition from Republicans, and because black voters did not like such criticism
People who have worked with Obama knew differently: these speeches were very intentional. Aides with whom I spoke, particularly males of all races, said the president was verbalizing to black audiences how he talks and views the world in private. Failures, in Obama’s view, are to be examined and studied very closely, to avoid repeating the same mistakes. A lack of self-discipline, not a lack of opportunity, is often the barrier to reaching one’s goals. Fixating on discrimination or other disadvantages one may face is not particularly useful.
The president does not just talk to aides this way. He urges young people he meets with to think about careers other than being basketball players or musicians, where the odds of success are low. Obama tells civil rights leaders he will push the policy goals they support, but they need to build a coalition outside of the White House without him if they want those policy efforts to be successful.
“While he frequently talks about the need for all of us to help change the structural disadvantages around race and class, he’s also spoken to many African-American audiences — particularly young men — about not using these disadvantages as an excuse for cynicism or inaction. Basically, you can’t choose your lot in life, but you do have the power to choose how you respond,” said Jon Favreau, who served as Obama’s chief speechwriter from 2007 to early last year.
In addition, while the Obama does not see himself as the “black president,” he acknowledges his role as the country’s leading black figure. He views speeches to black audiences as “in the family,” said one former aide who has spoken with him about racial issues.
And to Obama, uncomfortable truths can and should be articulated to those with whom you are closest.
“He is really just speaking from his life experience as only he can do,” Jarrett said in an interview.
The president saw the Morehouse remarks as an opportunity, not just a routine speech, according to aides. He rarely speaks in front of predominately black audiences, particularly ones like this; the college’s men are high-achievers and are often people who intend to be leaders when they leave campus.
“Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency sometimes to make excuses for me not doing the right thing,” Obama told the Morehouse graduates about his youth. “But one of the things that all of you have learned over the last four years is there’s no longer any room for excuses.”
The graduates applauded the speech. Some of them were in tears. It received positive news coverage at first.
Then, it turned. Coates and other African-American writers, such as the Washington Post’s Vanessa Williams, highlighted some concerns with the speech.
Privately some civil rights leaders expressed a similar thought to what Coates wrote: enough already. Blacks, despite historically high unemployment under the president, had strongly backed Obama in two straight elections.
And, as one civil rights leader who meets occasionally with Obama told me, Obama wasn’t just lecturing African-Americans; he was doing so at the graduation at Morehouse, full of students who were graduating and parents who supported them. The fact of the graduation ceremony was evidence they had already learned the lesson of hard work.
The criticism went beyond the speech. It allowed even some of his supporters to acknowledge that while they generally like Obama, his rhetoric in particular was occasionally disappointing to them.
“I didn’t appreciate it when the president went forward to say look, I’m the president of all America,” said one Obama ally, referring to how the president occasionally emphasizes he is not ‘president of Black America.’ “Who doesn’t know that? I felt that was a little patronizing. I haven’t appreciated that. To me, he was playing to the obvious. But I understand the impetus behind it.”
The timing of the speech also made it impossible to ignore the obvious: Obama wasn’t giving this speech and others like it for political reasons. He had had already been reelected. He actually believed he should say these things.
Obama’s emphasis on the personal efforts of blacks “is wrong factually, it’s also wrong in terms of the lines of authority between political figures and their constituencies,” says Jelani Cobb, associate professor of history and director of the Institute for African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut. “Political figures are held accountable by their constituencies, political figures don’t hold their constituencies accountable.”
That set up the discussion in the Roosevelt Room with Coates. In Obama’s first term, the administration had largely shut out black critics like Tavis Smiley and Jesse Jackson, Sr., who it believed were taking shots at Obama just to raise their profiles or because of personal grievances.
But administration officials acknowledge people like Coates, Cobb, and former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, who has also criticized Obama, are making principled objections. So Obama addressed Coates directly, while White House officials made sure Cobb was invited to attend a speech Obama delivered on inequality in December.
Coates was not swayed by the president’s words that day. When Obama gave a speech at the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington in August that included a few lines about blacks taking more responsibility, Coates wrote that some of the language Obama used was “heart-breaking” to him.
“I need to speak for them”
The Gates controversy in 2009 surprised the White House, according to administration officials. Obama spoke too bluntly, they said, but the controversy and the resulting media firestorm was overkill. As one longtime White House aide noted, it was odd that the police arrested Gates in his own home.
The lesson, administration officials say, was not that Obama should not talk about race, but that he should speak about it in a thoughtful way that served a broader purpose.
Over the last five years, in the midst of the rise of the Tea Party, many Democrats, particularly African-Americans, have forcefully argued the movement’s energy is directed at Obama largely because of his race. Republicans strongly disagree and say the party’s anti-Obama movement is a result of his liberal policies, not skin color.
The president has generally avoided this debate.
Some of his silence is political, as it would not serve much purpose for the president to cast his opponents as racist.
Some of it is practical: in 2012, the Obama campaign urged its surrogates not to focus too much on voter ID laws, because focus groups showed that such discussion didn’t fire up black voters, but made them feel helpless, like voting would be hard and they shouldn’t try. Obama, in a meeting with civil rights leaders last year, urged them not to speak as if the entire Voting Rights Act had been struck down, which might have lead people to believe there was no way to defend their right to vote.
But some in Obama’s circle, perhaps befitting people who serve under the first black president, are quite optimistic about race in America and do not believe most of the animus toward Obama is about him being black.
“Most people see him as simply the president, agree with him, disagree with him, he’s opposed because of the positions he’s taken, as opposed to who he is, by most,” said Holder.
He added, “The Republican Party opposes him because of his policies, the notion of big government, Obamacare, all that stuff. That’s the driver for them, for the vast majority of those who are opposed to him.”
In an interview in his New York office, Sharpton said of Obama, “He understands there’s still bigotry. I may think there is more than he does.”
But after George Zimmerman’s trial ended last year, Obama saw a moment where he did want to interject on race. He had spoken about Trayvon Martin and what he meant to the country, particularly African-Americans, in a number of private settings, with Holder, Jarrett, and others.
A few days after the verdict, Obama told his staffers in an Oval Office meeting that he wanted to give a formal address on the controversy.
“Do you feel like they need to hear from you,” one of the aides in the meeting asked the president, referring to African-Americans.
“I need to speak for them,” the president responded, according to one of the officials who attended the session.
But his remarks were telling. Obama acknowledged that the case had started a national dialogue on race, used his appearance in the White House briefing room to give his views and simultaneously said he would be exiting this discussion immediately after he left the podium that day.
“You know, there have been talk about should we convene a conversation on race. I haven’t seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have,” he said.
Obama, according to people who have spoken to him, was not being subtle: Obama thinks the series of formal conversations on America’s racial challenges President Clinton conducted in 1998 and 1999 under his “initiative on race” were not particularly useful.
But Obama does want to have a public conversation about race and policy with the ideas of intellectuals at the forefront. And he is already starting it.
Robert Putnam, a Harvard public policy professor who became famous in the 1990’s for a book called “Bowling Alone” that described how institutions that brought Americans together, like bowling, were in decline, has over the last several years turned to a new subject: inequality.
Putnam, in his research and writings, argues, as other academics have, that class, not race, is increasingly the dividing line that separates Americans. And he argues that social mobility, not poverty is the way to talk about inequality. Speaking in terms of class and mobility, according to Putnam, can unify Americans, many of whom view poverty solely as a problem of minorities in inner cities.
Obama, to be clear, is not a post-racial thinker in this kind of way, according to people who have talked to him about racial issues. He, for example, is strongly in favor of affirmative action based on race as well as programs that target class.
But the Putnam ideas dovetailed nicely with where the president wanted to go: a way to talk about the challenges of poverty and race with a unifying message. Last year, Putnam presented his ideas and framework in a session at the White House that included the president, as well as others who work on inequality, like Geoffrey Canada, the founder of the Harlem’s Children Zone. Obama started publicly referring to Putnam’s work.
So in December, Obama gave a speech on inequality that referred to Putnam’s research. But he asked his aides to make sure the remarks directly addressed race as well. Poverty and inequality, Obama emphasized, are still problems for African-Americans and other minorities. But they are also increasingly problems for white Americans.
“Now, it’s true that the painful legacy of discrimination means that African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans are far more likely to suffer from a lack of opportunity — higher unemployment, higher poverty rates,” he said at a non-profit center in Anacostia, a heavily African-American part of Washington, D.C. He added, “But here’s an important point. The decades-long shifts in the economy have hurt all groups: poor and middle class; inner city and rural folks; men and women; and Americans of all races.”
It was a kind of unifying moment for Obama’s agenda on racial issues: the crowd at the speech included both his occasional critics, such as Cobb, as well his friends and allies Johnson, Holder and Jarrett.
But it also illustrated that the debate between Obama and other African-Americans on these issues is unlikely to end. The White House invited Rep. Keith Ellison, a black congressman from Minnesota, to attend the speech that day and also to speak briefly to Obama before the president went on stage.
With Republicans in Congress likely to block a broad minimum wage increase, Ellison used his time with Obama to urge the president to use his executive power and unilaterally require federal contractors to pay their workers above $7.25 per year, the federal minimum wage.
“His speech was awesome,” Ellison told MSNBC the next day. He added, “But now we can really do something.”