Minstrel politics or "he speaks too well:" rhetoric, race, and resistance in the 2008 presidential campaign.

• Author: Sparks, Anthony
• Position: Critical essay

Old Zip Coon is a very larned scholar Sings posum up a gum tree an coony in a holler ...

--"Old Zip Coon" (traditional lyrics) (1)

... the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature ... Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.

--James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Barack Obama's historic election as the 44th President of the United States prompted some to ponder and others to argue that we were finally witnessing the dawn of a new "post-racial America."(2) Obama's eloquent rhetoric, on whose inspirational wings the goal of this post-racial state depended, was frequently discussed in the media as well as within academic discourse (Frank & McPhail, 2005). Since bursting onto the national political scene as a keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic Party Convention, Barack Obama's oratorical skills have been a staple of national political discussion. Political pundits in print, on radio and television, and on the Internet have scrutinized his rhetorical style and his content, often praising it as "soaring," "lofty," "inspirational," and "operatic." But his rhetoric has not been beyond criticism either. Some have described it and Obama himself as occasionally "wonkish," "professorial," "superficial," "repetitive," "disconnected" or "workman-like." Since the campaign and now months into his presidency, Barack Obama's political adversaries have even more harshly attempted to diminish or negatively frame his gift of communication and rhetorical skill as evidence that he possesses an excess of style but a shortage of substance (Connolly, 2009; Frederick & Malcolm, 2008; Zeleney & Healy, 2008).

Thomas Hollihan (in press) analyzed Obama's rhetoric during the 2008 campaign, and argued that he used terms such as "journey" and "march" to invoke the struggle for civil rights and discuss the issue of race without actually talking directly about race. (3) Hollihan's argument is that this campaign to elect an African-American man to the presidency was embedded in and burdened by more than two centuries of public memories of American slavery and the struggle for civil rights. Thus, 'given this troubled history, in order to succeed Obama and his opponents used seemingly benign yet coded discourse. My essay builds upon that analysis to focus less on the language used by Barack Obama than on the language about Barack Obama. My central questions are what have the messages about Obama during the campaign and in the first few months of his presidency taught us about current attitudes toward race in America? What, if anything, does the rhetoric about Barack Obama tell us about the hopes often attached to him? A critical examination of the rhetoric that has shaped the public discussion about Obama will help us better understand and recognize the social and political constructions of racial narratives that lie embedded within the cultural fabric of America.

The narratives about race that surfaced during the 2008 campaign were often only thinly concealed in the discourse. Consider, for example, the McCain campaign's sarcastic reference to Barack Obama as "The One." David Gergen (2008), a media analyst and an advisor to both Republican and Democratic administrations argued on ABC News' This Week with George Stephanopoulos that such rhetorical phrases were purposefully used as a racial code to cast Obama as an "uppity" Black man who "ought to know his place." Gergen's swift and blunt explication of this term and what it aims to communicate provides a perspective into the way in which racial narratives may be activated through public discourse. As political psychologist and neuroscientist Drew Westen (2007) states:

Coded racial appeals present one message consciously and another unconsciously. They provide plausible deniability while simultaneously activating unconscious networks that usually work in tandem with the conscious message to ratchet up its emotional power. If you simultaneously activate a network about scary black men while focusing people's attention on a furlough program for dangerous criminals, you'll get a very different effect than if you had run the furlough appeal without the unconscious prime. (p. 226)

George Lakoff (2004), the prominent cognitive scientist who has written extensively on politics and argues for the importance of popular and political rhetoric on the brains and thinking of the American electorate, locates and summarizes the thrust of this argument most succinctly when he writes: "What's in a word? Plenty ..." (p. 46). This essay undertakes a close reading of the recurring rhetoric about Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign in order to highlight the coded ways that language and the political moments attached to it worked, consciously and unconsciously, to activate racialized narratives and images. The media and the McCain campaign used terms such as "elite/elitism," "finicky" and "fancy" to refer to Obama. This essay will argue that such words and phrases invoke discussions and understandings about race and illustrate the subtle patterns of transformation and reinvention by which a society deals with its past and argues about its future. In this case, language was appropriated, primed to communicate racially loaded ideas, and then recast as acceptable public discourse (Valentino, Hutchings, & White, 2002). This essay asks the question, how did race "get into" these words? (4) Although this rhetoric failed to defeat Obama, this discourse still provides important lessons on how the country's election of a Black man to the presidency has demonstrated the degree to which race remains the unfinished business of American politics and culture. It would be then both misleading and counter-productive to claim that we have entered into a "post-racial" era. (5) Therefore, instead of viewing the results of the 2008 election solely as a barometer of racial progress, this essay argues for that an interrogation of the rhetoric about Obama reveals that we must reach back in order to truly see how much further our society has to go in reaching racial equanimity.

This essay employs rhetorical, literary, and cultural analyses to consider politics as a performance with a genealogy. The essay will argue that media commentaries, reacting to prompts by Obama's adversaries, called upon images and embedded notions of blackness and Black people that were rooted in antiquated racial and gendered ideologies that were in turn, informed by the antebellum and postbellum history of American blackface minstrelsy. While these rhetorical moves were no doubt sometimes conscious and at other times not, I do not claim that most contemporary audiences will be familiar with the details of the minstrel show. But I do argue that the characters and plotlines of minstrelsy have so deeply penetrated our cultural psyche that they have influenced our repertoire of stock racial narratives and characters.

MINSTRELSY

Minstrel shows became a profoundly popular form of American entertainment during the nineteenth century both before Emancipation--as African-Americans came to populate the North--and after, as the enslaved were finally freed in the South (Cockrell, 1997; Lhamon, 1998; Lott, 1995; Mahar, 1999). The minstrel show was primarily, tellingly, and surprisingly a northern state phenomenon that began to take hold in performance culture around the same time that the anti-slavery abolitionist movement gained new momentum. (6) Clearly the North was not monolithic in its support for ending slavery. The minstrel show was born, in part, out of an effort to constrain the social freedoms of the formerly enslaved by culturally resubordinating African-Americans, and especially Black men, as a lesser people (Forbes, 2008, p. 22). The humor of the minstrel show came from the way African-Americans were diminished for the amusement of whites who were themselves trying to navigate the changes that the nation was undergoing. The shows characterized Black people as stupid, lazy, music oriented, sexual, and almost inexplicably joyous about their material and psychic captivity and as such, minstrelsy was also a gathering place for anti-abolitionist sentiments. These sentiments were produced and staged to lampoon, with severity, the idea of a racially integrated and equal society.

Minstrelsy therefore commanded my attention as a cultural and political reaction to the literal emergence of the free black body into the body politic. Audiences throughout America were amused and fascinated by white actors with burnt cork blackened faces who mocked and parodied African-Americans. In response to antebellum abolitionism and post-bellum Reconstructionist political movements that sought to empower Black men, the minstrel show developed quickly recognizable blackface characters, including that of the plantation brute and the northern dandy. Together these two categories of characters encompassed, facilitated, and disseminated grossly distorted images of African-Americans in the South and Black men, in particular, in the North.

The character of the brute, of course, has come to dominate mediated portrayals of Black men. American plays, films, and television programs are replete with representations of animalistic, brutish, overly sexualized, pathologically criminalized, irresponsible, and altogether suspicious Black males (Entmen & Roecki, 2000). Such discourse, abundant in our popular culture, has also proved portable and powerful in the political and legislative arenas. (7) The infamous "Willie" Horton ad (his real name was William, but the nickname helped to racialize his character) represents a salient example. (8) This...