Transcription
Obama's presidency definitively settles any question of whether a transcendent black American elite has arisen. 2008 was the year the colonial grandfathers almost grew flesh and resurrected from the grave. The country was not originally structured to have someone with brown skin in the highest office.
A small but growing cohort with the kind of power, wealth, and influence that previous generations of African Americans could never have imagined. They climbed their way completely out of the economic and the powerlessness pits. And they climbed so high that a negro from the 1930s would have thought that this small group only existed in the world of imagination. Even the last stubborn skeptics must now admit that the transcendents have arrived.
Come on with it. By skeptics, I refer to the transcendents themselves. And here's why. Their dazzling success hides a mountain of self-doubt that now, post-Obama, may finally be eroding. So they had money and influence, but still had some self-doubt. What self-doubt? We'll see a little bit later.
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. Apparently he had a lot of people from this transcendent group who didn't support him and didn't believe in him. And Mr. Robinson is saying that they were hostile towards his presidential run.
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.
Who was that? 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 6 million and 7 million viewers every day. The treasure chest for Oprah filled up to the brim with tokens. She had all types of people, especially the women with their eyeballs locked onto her show in the '90s and the early 2000s. And therefore, she deemed out of this world. So, while most of the other black transcendents were in opposition of Obama's candidacy, Mr. Robinson says that she supported him.
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. She came through for Obama.
Entertainers, like politicians, succeed wildly when they can see or feel where the culture is headed before anyone else. While many other black politicians were skeptical, Oprah put her tokens on the table, and she made a bet that the culture was heading toward a brown-skinned man becoming president. Right? Now, let's move on.
There have been transcendent black Americans since before black Americans were free. Until quite recently, however, there were never more than a handful at a time.
Like who? Frederick Douglass, born a slave, was one of the nation's best-known and most influential abolitionists, a statesman whose counsel was valued by President Lincoln. Mr. Frederick Douglass. The goat. The godfather of pit climbing. He started way down in the bottomless pit of slavery. The basement. The dungeon. The black hole. In there, he figured out how to read when it illegal for slaves to do so. And he didn't just hoard the knowledge. He taught other slaves how to read and think, too. And with these mental skills, he eventually out-strategized his master. And he out-strategized the system. And he escaped from slavery. Right? He climbed cleanly out of the pit. And he didn't just stop there. He became one of the most influential abolitionists whose counsel was valued by President Lincoln.
During Reconstruction, the first African Americans were elected to Congress. Around the turn of the century, Booker T. Washington was known across the country as a leader of and spokesman for black Americans. His fame, at least in the South, due in no small part to his prescription of slow, don't rock-the-boat progress that did not involve a demand for integration. Mr. Washington was also another legendary pit climber. He was born in the bottom of the black hole, in slavery, too. And later, he became educated, and he built the Tuskegee Institution for his people. So, his approach was slow building without a primary focus on integration.
W. E. B. Du Bois, during this same period, was recognized as a towering intellectual and a fiery activist. Uh-oh, Mr. Talented Tenth himself. One of his earlier approaches was to invest heavily into the most talented of the Negroes. The ones he believed could be highly educated, developed, and prepared to help the race climb out of the pit. So, Mr. Du Bois, or Dr. Du Bois, was bringing the intellectual fire. While uh Mr. Washington was more focused on the slow building through economic preparation.
Joe Louis ruled as heavyweight champion of the world, the first of a succession of African-American boxers whose skill elevated them to the transcendent realm. He put paws on a lot of boxers. His fists were explosive like dynamite. That's why he was known as the Brown Bomber. So, he punched his way into the transcendent realm.
Toward mid-century, African-Americans like Ralph Bunche, the diplomat who served as principal secretary of the United Nations and received the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize, and the most prominent musicians and athletes, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Jackie Robinson, Jim Brown, had transcendent status, as did Roy Wilkins when he headed the NAACP, and of course, the young Dr. King in his prime. But these luminaries of the past were isolated individuals, and their wealth, power, and influence were relative. Relative to what the average Negroes had, it was a lot. But relative to the larger white power players, it was still limited. The new transcendent, on the other hand, is in a different league.
An example would be John H. Johnson, the grandson of slaves, who created a publishing empire in Chicago. This is the same John H. Johnson we dealt with in the book Desegregating the Dollar by Dr. Robert Weems Jr. He was the lock master. He was the man who helped white corporations find the right keys to unlock the black treasure chests. Right? Let's get some more.
Johnson's magazines, Ebony and Jet, were enormously important to African-Americans and thoroughly saturated their marketplace. When I was young, it was rare to go into a black household and not see at least one of the two magazines lying around somewhere. Johnson's publications were brave and authoritative in covering civil rights, and in an important way they helped knit pre-disintegration black America together. But Johnson had no peer group of black media barons. There was no black William Randolph Hearst or Joseph Pulitzer to complement his version of Henry Luce. And while Johnson was virtually a monopolist, the market he owned consisted exclusively of African-Americans. He was a huge tall wooden gate. So corporations had to pay him if they wanted direct access to black people's eyes.
At my house, we subscribed to Luce's iconic titles, Time and Life, as well as Johnson's. But are there any white Americans my age who grew up with Ebony or Jet on the coffee table? Now, for the first time, there is a large enough cohort of transcendent black Americans to form a critical mass. This group is wealthy, powerful, and influential not just in comparison to other African-Americans, but in absolute terms. Earlier he mentioned how the transcendents before were only wealthy, powerful, and influential in relative terms. But now he's saying these new transcendents have a treasure chest that is comparable to major power players. They're not just big in the black world anymore. They're big in the larger power game.
The critical mass that makes transcendent black America real and important is a direct consequence of the successes of the 1960s: civil rights, desegregation, affirmative action, black political empowerment. When the doors opened. These achievements pushed open long sealed doors just a crack, and exceptional individuals bulled their way through. They burst through like shoppers camped outside on Black Friday. The doors had been locked for generations. And once they cracked open, the strongest climbers rushed through before anyone could lock them out again.
It was a natural process. First, a few individuals managed to poke their heads above the mainstream, and then a few more, and eventually there were enough to have real impact. Not just on black America, but on the nation and the world. Oh, snaps.
Johnson was born in Mississippi in 1946, the ninth of 10 children, and grew up mostly in Illinois, graduating from the University of Illinois and later earning a master's degree from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Now, this isn't the Lock Master Johnson that we covered earlier. This is a different Johnson. This is Bob Johnson. And what he created will likely be familiar to most of you when we get to that part, so pay attention.
While Rains bounced back and forth between money and politics, Johnson went straight for the intersection of the two, lobbying. Franklin Rains was another transcendent. He went for the money and politics, but Johnson went for lobbying. More specifically, he worked for the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, where he gained the knowledge and contacts that he would eventually put to spectacularly lucrative use. We'll see what for in just a bit.
Like all great salesmen, he is unnaturally persistent and persuasive. And like few human beings I've ever met, he has an amazing ability to quickly and effortlessly manipulate numbers in his head. When I first met him in 1980, Johnson was a smart young entrepreneur hanging around the mayor's office and the press room trying to land a contract that would make his company Washington's first cable television provider. He had no chance. Other groups bidding on the lucrative contract had better connections and more juice, but somehow he prevailed. Straight rugged effort. Pay attention.
He told anyone who would listen that the cable franchise would be just a start, that he intended to use it as a launching pad for a national cable network aimed at African-American viewers. Watch this. A colleague of mine in the City Hall press corps pulled him aside with genuine concern and soberly advised him to forget the Don Quixote routine and get a real job. Take the safe route and do what everyone else does.
Fortunately, Johnson ignored him. He and his wife, Sheila, built District Cablevision into BET and BET into an empire, ultimately selling it to Viacom in 2001 for a reported $3 billion. BET is what he and his wife created from the dust of the ground and breathed into it the breath of life, and it became a living entity. Then they sold it for 3 billion tokens. And that's the kind of reward that high-risk takers chase. Right? To create something on that level, you have to sacrifice comfort and assurance for risk and uncertainty. So, he continued with his own plan, and he eventually sold BET for billions. But then this happened.
Johnson lost his billionaire status when he and Sheila divorced in 2002, splitting the fortune into roughly half billion-dollar chunks. The ups and downs of life. The separation had the effect of making Sheila Johnson a transcendent figure in her own right. And it was thanks to her that I saw for the first time what transcendent status looks like in the social world. A few years later, Sheila Johnson was an early believer in the proposition that we had reached the day when a black man could be elected president. Going back to Obama.
But many of her fellow transcendents vehemently disagreed. Like who? Bob Johnson, as we've seen, scoffed at the early rumors of an Obama candidacy and told friends he didn't think the country was ready for a black president. Why? Johnson was an old friend of the Clintons, and perhaps that friendship meant there was never any real question of which camp he would join. But I believe there was more to it than that. Ever since I met Johnson all those years ago at the district building, his business model had always been explicitly race conscious. He didn't just start a television network, he started a black television network. As a CEO, he always kept a sharp eye on the bottom line. One reason BET became so valuable was that it resisted the temptation to produce lots of expensive original programming that the potential audience, limited by the African-American focus, might not be able to support. So, what was BET programming then?
Yet on the frequent occasions when Johnson was criticized by African-Americans for the dearth of news and public affairs on BET schedule and the lavish overabundance of booty shaking hip-hop videos, he seemed genuinely hurt. We grew up watching a lot of BET. Cheap entertainment that opens up the portals of the mind and allows all types of entities to emerge in the inner world. Right? We weren't studying. We were up watching 106 & Park, a Comic View, Rap City the Basement, and even sneaking at the BET Uncut. Right? This stuff is wild, isn't it? This was like regular life. But, this is what he chose to sell because that's what the viewers would watch. You see? And TV shows make money largely from commercial advertisements. It's similar to YouTube. There's a reason why there's so many gossip and trendy channels in the black YouTube space. It's because that's where a whole bunch of eyeballs and attention are. So, it becomes more tempting for a creator to serve the digital drug because there's a lot of people feening for it. You see? And the more they fiend, the more content creators make, which brings them more money. Then the fiends want more, so the creators make more, and they make more money. And this keeps happening over and over again, and the coil gets stronger. And the next thing you know, you're stuck on the merry-go-round consuming the digital drug, going round and round. So Bob Johnson was criticized for doing the same exact thing with BET.
After he sold the network, as his second act, he established a conglomerate, RLJ Companies, that invested in banking, finance, hotels, an oddly diverse assortment of businesses. I once asked him how he decided where to invest his money, and he answered with a maxim, "I like to look for business sectors where African-Americans are not represented, and I go there." In short, he is what used to be called a race man. Ever mindful of being African-American, of serving African-American interests, and of making breakthroughs on behalf of African-Americans. It was striking, and on the surface somewhat puzzling, that such a race-conscious man would so ardently oppose the first serious attempt by an African-American to win the presidency. You wouldn't think that he would have an issue, but apparently he did.
But in a way, that was the point. I dwell on Obama's candidacy because it was such a Rorschach test for the transcending class. Bob Johnson's mindset was broadly representative of those who stuck with the Clintons, in my view, and it was characterized above all by a certain rock-hard weariness. The elder transcendents were used to surviving in terra incognita. Meaning unknown territory, and this is specifically talking about being the only person identified as black in a white room. They got where they are by being the first black this and the first black that, by taking on responsibilities that no African-American had ever shouldered before and by enduring the intense and unrelenting scrutiny that first black status always entails. They knew the experience of being the only black person around a boardroom table and always assuming, always knowing they would say, that all eyes were on the one person who wasn't like the others, who didn't belong. They saw in Obama a man who gave no outward sign of harboring within him that hard nugget of suspicion. Who seemed as if he were not artfully concealing the chip on his shoulder, but in fact did not have one. They saw a man who seemed to glide through life on a cushion of good fortune. Never mind that this wasn't true as evidenced by Obama's well corroborated account of his hardly privileged childhood. Never mind that despite Obama's not having had a typical African American upbringing, he had come to fully embrace his identity as African American. Witness his marriage to Michelle, his work in Chicago's black community, his membership in Jeremiah Wright's church. Never mind that his tastes and mannerisms were indisputably African American, down to the way he walked. To some transcendents, he wasn't black enough. Meaning not black American enough. And I wonder if that had anything to do with his father's people not being from America. Or maybe because he wasn't raised in the city, in the south, the suburbs, or or the country around blacks. He lived in Hawaii until he was six. And then Indonesia until he was 10. And then he moved back to Hawaii until he was 18. And he didn't get into Chicago until around 23. You see? So there were no real deep roots around black Americans. So I suspect that the walk, the talk, and the mannerisms likely came later. Probably through immersion. But some of the transcendents had their eyes on him. And to them he wasn't black American enough.
When I asked Obama about generational succession and its impact on African-Americans, this is what he said. "I think now young people growing up realize, you know what? Being African-American can mean a whole range of things. There's a whole bunch of possibilities out there for how you want to live your life. What values you want to express. Who you choose to interact with. I would say that the downside of this is you don't have the same unifying experience, even though it was a negative experience of discrimination that let people, at least in the early 60s, all to be on the same page. Or to be largely on the same page in terms of how to make progress as a group. And I do think it is important for the African-American community, in its diversity, to stay true to one core aspect of the African-American experience, which is we know what it's like to be on the outside. We know what it's like to be discriminated against, or at least to have family members who have been discriminated against. And if we ever lose that, then I think we're in trouble. Then I think we've lost our way."
Now, does that make any sense to want to keep that as the core identity of a people? I understand it's one thing to remember discrimination, but to keep it as the core identity, that sounds like a trap. Right? This stuff is wild.
Coming from almost anyone else, that would make perfect sense. But it rings somewhat false to hear the president of the United States, the ultimate insider, talk about staying true to the feeling of being on the outside. Obama lays out the essential contradiction that transcendent black Americans struggle constantly to resolve. Not being outside anymore. They're all the way in there.
For the younger transcendents, this means holding on to experiences they never actually had. Not an act of remembering, but of imagining. Which is exactly what a lot of them do. If you let some tell it, you would think that America was still in the pre-civil rights era. The 1940s or something like that. Think about that. So, this here concludes the third of the fourth group inside black America. We will commence with the fourth in the next commentary. I thank you for your time and attention. My name is Brooklyn St. Michael. And I'll see you in the free world.