The Politics of Race and the Photo That Might Have Derailed Obama

It’s useful, almost ten years after his election to the Presidency, to recall how much of the opposition to Barack Obama during his first run for that office was conducted via image, and the promise—or, really, the threat—of images to come. The way he looked was inextricable from the rest of his appeal as a potential leader, and so, perhaps, a game of subliminal, symbolic tit for tat was to be expected. The latter months of Hillary Clinton’s losing 2008 primary campaign were characterized by a Pyrrhically effective, subtly racialized populist appeal to the people she referred to, at one point, as “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” in states such as Michigan and Ohio. As Clinton chugged beers and downed shots of whiskey at every notch along the Rust Belt, her campaign disseminated photos of Obama looking especially black or exotic, or standing next to figures of questionable repute. There was the image of Obama dressed in traditional Somali robes and a turban, released in mysterious synch with the ongoing rumors that he was a crypto-Muslim and that, as a kid living in Indonesia, he had been educated at a madrassa. (The Clinton campaign denied spreading that one.) Then, after the controversy over Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and his more bombastic political utterances from behind the pulpit, pictures of Wright and Obama together, in better times, flooded the Internet and the airwaves.

When I saw a recently released photo, by Askia Muhammad, of Obama and a beaming Louis Farrakhan, I immediately thought of the Clinton campaign. What fun they could’ve had with this one! Muhammad took the picture, in 2005, at a gathering hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus, after Obama’s star-making turn at the 2004 Democratic National Convention but before it was clear that the Senator would offer himself as a candidate for President—when, in other words, the man was pure potential, unsullied in the eyes of hopeful Democrats. After some pressure from one of the caucus’s staffers, Muhammad agreed to bury it. Now he plans to include the picture in an upcoming self-published book; Talking Points Memo asked to run the photo after learning of it from a newsletter written by the journalist Richard Prince.

For me, the star of the picture is Farrakhan, who understands—better, maybe, than anyone else in American political and cultural life—just how much power he can wield without uttering a word. He seems to relish backing black liberals into a corner, most recently Representative Keith Ellison, whose campaign for D.N.C. chairman, last year, devolved into a referendum on his past friendliness with the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan is the author of vile, uncountable, unreconstructed, cause-derailing anti-Semitic slurs, but his Million Man March made him and the Nation a stubborn, unignorable feature of the political landscape for black would-be public servants who came of age in the nineteen-nineties. Obama’s early career in Chicago was, in part, an exercise in performing an “authentic” blackness that opponents like the former Black Panther and current congressman Bobby Rush, who dealt Obama his first and only electoral defeat, in 2000, insisted he lacked. So he’s no exception to Farrakhan-induced headaches: Obama attended the March, and spent time during the 2008 campaign playing down an unwanted and wildly unhelpful endorsement from Farrakhan.

Indeed, it’s a sign of Farrakhan’s oddly lasting hold on popular influence that he was even invited to clink drinks with the members of the C.B.C. He has by far the widest and most genuine smile in Muhammad’s photo—the folds under both of his reddish cheeks ripple. His irises shine, and his hair is slicked into a boyish, innocent part. A garish tie, blue on blue, disappears into his black vest. One can discern two unspoken comments in his expression: “Got him!,” and, also, “Who, me?”

Obama, in his usual dark-on-dark, smiles more neutrally, and might be on the brink of recognizing the gravity of the mistake-in-progress that the exposure represents. This past week, the response, both to the picture itself and to the fact of its years-long suppression, was predictable, if not totally unwarranted: Fox News latched on, and the lawyer and lifelong Democrat Alan Dershowitz—who, last January, had threatened to leave the Party if Ellison won the prize at the D.N.C.—declared that he never would have campaigned for Obama had he seen him standing near Farrakhan back when. I’m sure he’s not the only one. Muhammad, that anonymous C.B.C. functionary, and Farrakhan, with that faux-harmless smile, all knew it: if that picture spreads in 2007 or 2008, a whole different history ensues.

Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author  Vinson Cunningham