Barack Obama’s Promised Land: The Empire in Blackface

 This is the last of my end of the year trimmings (in other words pieces that I wrote throughout 2021 but did not publish). It is also the last of a series of commentaries I wrote on Obama's memoirs, A Promised Land. While a lot has been written about the book, I feel that the question of empire has not been centred enough in extant reviews and commentaries. This is what I try to do here.

The Black President, the White House, and the Parable of the Two Butlers

In his reminiscence of the early days of his presidency, Barack Obama recounts the story of two black butlers who showed excess diligence in their service of their first African American “first family.” Against the Obamas’ attempts that their butlers lighten up while serving them, one of the butlers responded “We just want to make sure you’re treated like every other president,” while the other emphatically charged“See, you and the First Lady don’t really know what this means to us, Mr. President. Having you here…You just don’t know.”

The story is undeniably touching. It speaks to the symbolic and emotional weight this moment held for the two butlers, and for African Americans more broadly. The story is also undeniably disturbing. The emotional and symbolic value of Obama’s presidencyoperates in a complacent meta-narrative by a president who did little, if any, to mobilize his symbolic and emotional victory to better race and class relations in his country. At the end of the day, the butlers will remain butlers, the working class exploited, the minorities discriminated against, and the white racists emboldened to act out their racism and hate.  The only difference is that under Obama the proverbial butlers will work harder, mistaking a black man that serves the financial and political interests of the (predominantly white and white supremacist) upper class for their own empowerment. Racism, class exploitation, and imperial domination will be eclipsed by the symbolic gesture of a Black (half White) man in the White House, while the business of the empire will keep going as usual. Short of changing any of the exploitative, racist, and imperialist infrastructure of America, Obama’s presidency—along with his subsequent reminiscence thereof— simply paints a blackface on the American empire.

Obama was aware of this ideological effect; he presciently notes that although he knew there was “no guarantee” he would be able to “to spark a new kind of politics”: “Here’s one thing I know for sure, though. I know that the day I raise my right hand and take the oath to be president of the United States, the world will start looking at America differently. I know that kids all around this country—Black kids, Hispanic kids, kids who don’t fit in—they’ll see themselves differently, too, their horizons lifted, their possibilities expanded. And that alone…that would be worth it.”

Black Skin, Whitewash

The blackface Obama paints on the American empire does more than force the victims of the empire to identify with this visage, it further masks and whitewashes its crimes. “Too young to have known the anguish of Vietnam firsthand,” Obama purports to have “witnessed only the honor and restraint of our service members during the Gulf War.” As for the war on Afghanistan (which Obama described as “both necessary and just”) and the war on Iraq (which Obama rhetorically opposed but practically perpetuated), Obama erroneously claims they “hadn’t involved the indiscriminate bombing or deliberate targeting of civilians that had been a routine part of even ‘good’ wars like World War II; and with glaring exceptions like Abu Ghraib, our troops in theater had displayed a remarkable level of discipline and professionalism."

This false apologia is extended to the American Empire as such: “to a degree unmatched by any superpower in history, America chose to bind itself to a set of international laws, rules, and norms… we exercised a degree of restraint in our dealings with smaller, weaker nations, relying less on threats and coercion to maintain a global pact. Over time, that willingness to act on behalf of a common good—even if imperfectly— strengthened rather than diminished our influence… and if America was not always universally loved, we were at least respected.”

Thus the interest of the empire becomes coded as the “common good.” By contrast, the aspirations of the populations that are disinherited by the empire are depicted as “narrow self-interest,” as Obama describes the efforts of the BRICS block during his first G20 summit. Frustrated by the insistence of the block comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (hence the acronym BRICS) that economic policies should benefit their people, Obama moans: “few nations felt obliged to act beyond narrow self-interest; and those that shared America’s basic commitment to the principles upon which a liberal, market-based system depended… lacked the economic and political heft, not to mention the army of diplomats and policy experts, to promote those principles on a global scale." It is as if Obama wants his readers to feel sympathy, or even pity, towards America and its allies engaged in an altruistic effort to salvage the higher cause of market capitalism (coded as the common good) but faced with an all powerful army of anti-market villains who want to seek the good of their people (coded as “narrow self interest”); it is indeed interesting how American politicians, including eloquent ones like Obama, are not able to view the world beyond the simplistic terms of a Hollywood thriller. It is even more interesting how Obama, like a mainstream Hollywood movie, and like the cultural and psychological apparatus of imperialism as analyzed by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, wants to force the populations subjugated by America to identify with and look up to the American model, and identify the American promise as their ultimate dream—effectively turning America into the main player not only on the stage of the political lives of its victims but also that of their own dreams.

All the Word’s a Stage for the American Empire: Obama’s Playground and the Dreams of the Egyptian Revolution

The substitution of imperial interest for the common good is clearest in Obama’s recounting of his administration’s intervention in the course of the Egyptian uprising of 2011. Obama may strive to convince us that in dealing with Egypt his administration moved beyond the weaponization of democracy by previous US administrations. The truth, however, is that the steps taken by Obama’s administration in response to the events in Egypt were directly pulled out of the playbook of CIA-sponsored soft interventions.

Fearing the escalation of the uprising to a wholesale revolution that would replace the regime with one that is not committed to US imperial interests (most notably to collaborating with the state of Israel, in other words the commitment to maintaining the siege on Gaza and to the overall repression of the Palestinian people), Obama proceeded to encourage/strong-arm Mubarak to initiate cosmetic changes that would thwart public anger but leave the regime itself, and its client relationship with the US intact. Ultimately, Obama deferred to the US military and intelligence establishment, which, Obama admits, “probably had more impact on the final outcome in Egypt than any high-minded statements coming from the White House.” The US military and intelligence establishment proceeded thus to closely coordinate with high ranking officers in the Egyptian army, conveying to the Egyptian generals the “plain” message that “U.S-Egyptian cooperation, and the aid that came with it, wasn’t dependent on Mubarak’s staying in power, so Egypt’s generals and intelligence chiefs might want to carefully consider which actions best preserved their institutional interest.” A few days later, Egypt’s Vice President, the former chief of Egyptian intelligence appeared on television declaring Mubarak’s abdication.

Staging a preemptive coup to circumvent the rise of a hostile regime is what we expect from an imperialist superpower. What we are presented with in Obama’s memories, however, is a hypocritical attempt to substitute these imperialist calculations, and the imperialist preemption and circumvention of the popular will, for the dreams and aspirations of the Egyptian people (while at the same time stealing their revolution, both practically by manipulating and curtailing its course, and symbolically by claiming credit for its limited achievements): “In the White House,” Obama recalls“we watched CNN broadcast footage of the crowd in Tahrir Square erupting  in celebration. Many staffers were jubilant. Samantha [Power, whose response to any reports of human rights violations worldwide is more imperial mass murder] sent me a message saying how proud she was to be a part of the administration.”

Not only will the US interfere with the fate of Egypt, but it will also dictate to the Egyptian people and the world to recognize the outcome of this interference as the realization of their dreams, and acknowledge the ceiling set by imperialist calculations as the limit and horizon of their aspirations. Once again we are in the territory covered by Frantz Fanon’s analysis, where the colonized are forced to dream of themselves in the image of their colonizer.

The Coloniality of Identification and the Many Masks of Empire

The centring of the imperial subject, dramatized on a personal level, prefaced Obama’s narrative: When recounting his young and idealistic years, Obama shows a narcissistic attachment to the notion of American exceptionalism; he “chaffed against books that dismissed the notion”;  he further exhibits the signs of narcissistic injury as “some smug bastard dropped a newspaper in front of me, its headlines trumpeting the U.S. invasion of Grenada.” The plight of the American ivy league student having to face the questioning and critique of his jingoism and of the supremacy of his empire occupies the centre of this drama (which presents the opening scene of Obama’s
narrative), to the effect of decentring (if not completely erasing) the plight of the people of Grenada along with the other victims of American imperialism and American military interventions.

Obama, a Black American and the son of an African immigrant, over-identifies with the image of an empire that thrives on white supremacy, dramatizing the white mask the non-white subject of colonization is forced to don and to mistake for his or her own identity in Fanon’s analysis. By doing so, however, Obama uses his own face as a diversifying, multicultural, and progressive face to cover the white(-supremacist) face of  the American Empire.