Martin Luther King and Barack Obama, compare and contrast
Martin Luther King and Barack Obama are probably the two most consequential American blacks of my lifetime, although one could make a case for replacing Obama with Clarence Thomas or Mohammad Ali. David Garrow has written massive biographies of King (800 pages in paperback) and Obama (1,470 pages in hard cover). (I gather from this interview that Garrow has not dismissed the possibility of writing a biography of Justice Thomas.)
Garrow compares and contrasts his two subjects in the aforementioned interview by David Samuels for Tablet. The interview focuses more on Obama than on King, but Garrow has plenty to say about both.
It’s a very long interview and I would have preferred more of Garrow and less of Samuels. However, the entire thing is fascinating and I recommend sticking with it to the end.
Garrow is a man of the left, but no fan of Obama. At one point, he tells Samuels he finds Obama sympathetic in the period before 2000, but not afterwards when Obama became less of an overt leftist and more of a pragmatic politician.
It’s not clear to me whether Garrow’s preference for the earlier Obama is based on ideology or just the sense that the earlier version was more authentic. But at points in the interview, Garrow seems to question whether there ever was an authentic version of Obama.
There have, of course, been other biographies of Obama, but none nearly as thorough as Garrow’s. For example, Garrow appears to the only biographer who tracked down and obtained interviews from Obama’s three white girlfriends. The fruits of this labor take up a good amount of space in the interview.
Here are excerpts from the interview in which Garrow discusses what he considers the fundamental difference between King and Obama:
Doc [King] always 100 percent retained his individual self, even while realizing that there was this press creation. And when he’s wearing that uniform of the black suit, little tie, and he’s being so relentlessly sober whenever he’s in the public eye, that’s not him. That’s him playing the part that he’s been called into.
Doc was very clear about himself and the role. With Barack, there’s an extent of intertwining, there’s an absence of keeping the two selves separate. . . .
I’m entirely certain that I understand Doc. I understand Doc far better than I understand Barack because Doc, even though he was so consistently disciplined in public, was otherwise, to people who knew him well, a completely transparent person—in his strengths, his weaknesses, and his failures. . . .
The thing I wanted to highlight was that Doc, from birth up through college, lives in this loving cocoon of not just a family, but this wider community of Ebenezer and Auburn Avenue. He had the most privileged life a Black person could have in America in those years. . . .So he’s never had a moment’s doubt about who is he, where is he from, who are his parents, who’s his family. It’s a cocoon.
The contrast to Barack could not be greater. He doesn’t know the daddy. He sort of knows the mother. He’s living with these elderly white people, and he’s being shuttled between Indonesia and Honolulu. And both in high school and at Oxy, and those three years in New York, his friendship network is all these guys like Chandoo Hasan, who are fellow international stateless children. . . . .
Doc has no choice to be Black. Barack chooses to be Black. . . .
Michelle’s childhood is a South Side version of Dr. King’s. She knows who she is, she grows up in a close loving family and extended family, and then she ends up marrying a creature from another planet. . . .
Barack has the ability to identify himself as Black, not just for the vast majority of American white folks, but for the vast majority of American Black folks who have roots like Dr. King’s or Michelle’s. But both groups know that this is not a representative American Black person. It’s something else. . . .
Garrow’s assessment of Obama’s presidency is not flattering:
I think Barack in that winter of ‘08, ‘09, realized there was no way that his presidency could actually live up to the expectations. And I think even the fanboy journalists would acknowledge, under a little bit of pressure, that it ended up being an underwhelming, disappointing presidency. It will, in the long run, be seen as a failed presidency because of the international failures.
He cites Iran and Syria as two of these failures.
Garrow offers an interesting take on the question I raised yesterday: Where would King stand on racial preferences?
Samuels poses the question this way:
Do you think that Martin Luther King Jr. would understand the Supreme Court ending affirmative action in higher education as a tragedy?
Garrow answers:
No. Doc did not buy into identity politics.
But Garrow may be projecting his own doubts about racial preferences onto King, for he adds:
I think that as the scale or depth of affirmative action has gotten greater and greater, worse and worse, the beneficiaries are now so aware of being beneficiaries that it leads them to doubt themselves. And that’s doing harm.
Yes it is, but we’ll never know whether Martin Luther King would see it this way. And although the question of whether he would is interesting, it is not important.