Disintegration (17 page)

“It wasn’t until I was at Sundance and this Chinese lady in her 60s started crying in my arms … did I realize this was a universal story. That was an epiphany,” director Daniels said in a published interview.
¹⁴

Universal? Really? The thing is, this tale of unimaginable horror, cruelty, ignorance, and dysfunction was not imagined to have taken place in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the barrios of East Los Angeles, the WASPish Connecticut suburbs, the hills and hollows of Appalachia, the ranchlands of Texas, or any of a million other possible “universal” settings. These desperate creatures were poor and black, and to many people that seemed a striking coincidence. For there were remarkable echoes of a similar tale of incest, abuse, and depravity:
The Color Purple
, another critically acclaimed chronicle of woe set in the black underclass. In the case of Alice Walker’s novel, it was the black underclass of the 1930s. Apparently, some things never change.

Interestingly, Winfrey was another thread connecting the two projects: She gave an Oscar-nominated performance in
The Color Purple
and later bankrolled a grand-scale adaptation of the work for the Broadway stage, years before she loaned her name—and brought much of her vast audience—to
Precious
. When asked what drew her to Daniels’s film, Winfrey told an interviewer that the protagonist reminded her of anonymous girls she would see on city streets through the window of her limousine—girls whose lives were “invisible” to her.

Winfrey has the standing to make such an observation (to my ear, terribly off-key), having bootstrapped her way from
poverty and abuse to unimaginable heights—all the way from Abandoned to Transcendent. But still: What is it with the idea that black plus poor equals not just privation, not just dysfunction, but a pattern of behavior that can only be described as subhuman? What is it that audiences find so compelling about Grand Guignol depictions of African American poverty? Is some urge being satisfied, some itch being scratched? Is some preconceived notion being confirmed?

Or is guilt being assuaged? Is society saying, in effect: Yes, we have turned our backs. Yes, we have left you adrift, knowing that many of you will drown. But look how you behave. Look how you really are.
You deserve it
.

I
n July 2009, President Barack Obama made the short trip to New York City to address the one-hundredth annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The centennial of the NAACP, the nation’s largest and most important civil rights organization, was an obvious occasion for our first African American president to talk about race. Aware of my interest in the theme and the occasion, the White House press office arranged for me to interview the president at the Hilton in midtown right before he delivered his speech. I was on the train heading to New York when I got word that the interview had to be rescheduled—my fifteen-minute window had been slammed shut by more pressing obligations. Instead, I would be able to see the president the following afternoon at the White House.

I reported to the White House at the appointed hour, was buzzed through to the West Wing, and settled in to chat with my handlers; the president was running a few minutes late, dealing with one of the many cliff’s-edge crises that his health-care reform initiative had to survive. Finally I was led through
a maze of offices and antechambers to the inner sanctum. Obama greeted me at the door to the Oval Office. I sat down on one of the couches, looked around the most famous workspace in the world, and had to take a couple of deep breaths before I could ask my first question. My profession requires cultivating a certain seen-it-all air, but I was pretty overwhelmed.

I got what I needed from the interview, and there were only two other moments when I had to pause for oxygen. The first was when I noticed a bust of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. on a sideboard and realized that when Obama sat at his desk, making decisions that would touch all our lives, the bust would be in his direct line of sight. The second was when I noticed who else was in the room: top presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett; her chief of staff, Michael Strautmanis; a press-office liaison, Corey Ealons; and the president of the United States. Everyone in the Oval Office at that moment, including the most powerful man in the world, was African American.

Obama’s presidency definitively settles any question of whether a Transcendent black American elite has arisen—a small but growing cohort with the kind of power, wealth, and influence that previous generations of African Americans could never have imagined. Even the last stubborn skeptics must now admit that the Transcendents have arrived.

By skeptics, I refer to the Transcendents themselves. Their dazzling success hides a mountain of self-doubt that now, post-Obama, may finally be eroding.

The president was already Transcendent long before he moved his family into the White House. Being one of just three African Americans ever elected to the Senate is more than enough to qualify. What I found fascinating was how many of his fellow Transcendents were not just unsupportive of his
“premature” or even “presumptuous” run for the presidency but actively hostile to it. The first black president began his campaign over the opposition of most of the black political and economic establishment.

The most Transcendent black American of all—pre-Obama, that is—was a notable exception. Oprah Winfrey, whose fortune
Forbes
has estimated at more than $2 billion, presides over a vast entertainment and lifestyle empire whose centerpiece had long been her eponymous syndicated talk show, watched by between six million and seven million viewers every day. With her show, her magazine, and her other ventures, she had earned political capital over the years and kept it like a hoarder, holding tight to every little scrap and shred. Now she decided to spend it on Obama, a fellow Chicagoan whom she knew well. Entertainers, like politicians, succeed wildly when they can see or feel where the culture is headed before anyone else. That doesn’t mean that Hollywood is an unerring guide to where the country is headed. But Winfrey had already accomplished the improbable feat that Obama would have to pull off, which was to convince white Americans that she understood their lives and had their interests and well-being not just in her mind but in her heart. It might have been a long shot for an African American to win America’s position of highest trust, but she knew it wasn’t impossible.

In December 2007, her Oprahpalooza campaign events in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina gave Obama a big, timely boost in those early-primary states. Even for a taste-maker who routinely plucks unheralded books—and their uncelebrated authors—out of obscurity and vaults them to the top of the best-seller lists, convincing an audience to support a presidential candidate is a challenge of a different order. But
my reading of the way the primary campaign played out is that Winfrey not only conveyed to Obama her maximum-wattage star power but also effectively gave some wavering voters permission to take a leap of faith.

I spent most of the week between Christmas and New Year’s in Iowa, crisscrossing the frozen state to get a look at the Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards campaigns in person. I got the clear impression that Winfrey’s blessing had soothed the angst that some women I met at Obama rallies felt about forsaking Clinton, the first woman with a realistic chance of becoming president. I don’t want to overstate the Oprah effect; a whole host of stars had to align, and in precisely the right order, for an African American freshman senator, with a name that could have come from the Guantánamo inmate rolls, to defeat the most experienced and powerful political machine in the Democratic Party. We’ll never know what would have happened if Winfrey had come out as strongly for Clinton as she did for Obama—but it’s hard for me to imagine that history would have played out exactly the same.

Other Transcendents in the entertainment world, perhaps blessed with some of Winfrey’s foresight or her willingness to embrace the new, also flocked to the charismatic young senator. Among them were Will Smith, who reigned as Hollywood’s undisputed king—the most bankable star in town, with an unsurpassed ability to “open” a big-budget movie with huge first-weekend box-office revenue—and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, a star in her own right. But in realms such as sports, business, and especially politics, many Transcendent black Americans were surprisingly cool, if not just plain cold, to the first black presidential candidate who was running not to make a point or gain a measure of influence but to win.

Earvin “Magic” Johnson, whose fortune has been estimated at $500 million, recorded a radio ad for the South Carolina primary in which he said he was supporting Clinton because she was the more “prepared and experienced” candidate. He suggested that Obama should heed the advice that a Lakers veteran gave Johnson during his first year as a pro: “Take it easy rookie, it’s a long season, it’s a long road to the championship.”
¹
Even by the standards of modern political advertising, this was just dumb. Anyone who had followed Johnson’s stellar career knew that in his rookie season,
he led the Lakers to the NBA championship
. It is hard to think of anyone, and I mean anyone in the world, with less standing to tell Obama the “rookie” to be mindful of his place.

Tycoon Robert L. Johnson, who had founded Black Entertainment Television and sold it to Viacom for a reported $3 billion, also had an eruption in the days before the South Carolina primary—the first contest in which substantial numbers of African Americans would vote. Campaigning in Columbia with Clinton, Johnson said that “to me, as an African-American, I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues since Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood—and I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in the book—when they have been involved.” Referring to Obama’s campaign tactics, he added, “That kind of campaign behavior does not resonate with me, for a guy who says, ‘I want to be a reasonable, likable, Sidney Poitier
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.’
And I’m thinking, I’m thinking to myself, this ain’t a movie, Sidney. This is real life.”
²

When you untangle the gnarled syntax, Johnson was extolling
the Clintons’ advocacy on behalf of African American interests over the decades; taking a gratuitous swipe at Obama for the youthful experimentation with illegal drugs that he described in his memoir; and declaring that Obama’s candidacy was nothing but a feel-good Hollywood movie with no relationship to “real life.” (Bill Clinton sounded the same theme, calling Obama’s presidential bid a “fairy tale.”)

Andrew Young, an icon of the civil rights movement, joked that Bill Clinton “is every bit as black as Barack” and added that “he’s probably gone with more black women than Barack.”
³
Other aging luminaries had the good sense not to try stand-up comedy, but the position of the African American political establishment was decidedly pro-Clinton and anti-Obama. Congressman John Lewis of Georgia, who still bears the scars from being savagely beaten on one of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, supported Clinton, as did a majority of his colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus. Uberlawyer Vernon Jordan, of course, was solidly in the Clintons’ corner; he told friends that African Americans had urgent work to do and didn’t have time to waste on “fantasies.”

This was the most common theme struck by Transcendent black Americans who did not believe in Obama’s candidacy. Some cynics chalked up this attitude to pure calculation: deals made with the Clintons, repayment for old favors, perhaps the fear of losing influence if Clinton didn’t win. But I never thought it was that simple. The complaint from Transcendent African Americans was that the whole Obama thing was a beautiful dream, a wonderful fantasy, an inspirational wish—but nothing more. For these Transcendents, it came down to a single question that answered itself:
Do you really think this black man is going to be president? Let’s be real
.

This Transcendent skepticism was different from the fatalism I often heard during the campaign from other African Americans—Mainstream and Abandoned—who believed that in the final analysis “they” would never let a black man into the White House, “they” being the white power structure, or the unreformed racists who operate beneath society’s radar, or the corporate interests that always seem to get their way. The Transcendents were neither naïve nor paranoid. Those who doubted not just the likelihood but even the possibility of Obama knew that barriers could be broken because they had broken them. Perhaps they knew better than anyone how difficult those breakthroughs had been, and simply could not imagine that this final, ultimate barrier would fall so easily, without a long and bitter siege.

In part, what we saw and heard reflected a generational divide. The elders—those who had lived through the civil rights struggle, like Lewis and Jordan—had an especially difficult time getting their minds around the Obama phenomenon. They knew from experience that the way African Americans got attention and redress at the highest levels of American politics and government was by working with and through sympathetic white politicians. The Clintons were the gold standard in this regard, as evidenced by Toni Morrison’s famous quip about Bill Clinton being the first black president. The Republican Party, at the moment, wasn’t even making an effort to speak to African Americans. This meant that the Democrats were the only game in town, and with the popularity of the Republican incumbent, George W. Bush, having plunged to subterranean levels, the presidency and increased majorities in both houses of Congress were all but in the bag. In Hillary Clinton, African Americans would have a sympathetic
ear and an effective advocate. To veterans of a lifetime of struggle, risking so much on a proposition that could charitably be described as iffy—that white Americans would actually elect a black man president—seemed insane.