Obama and the “Angry Black Man” Factor

Here’s one thing I didn’t mention in my earlier post about Obama’s fiery showing last night. For years now, there has been a popular theory, albeit one recited more often over dinner tables than in op-ed columns, that the reason Obama plays it so cool is that he fears alienating white voters by coming across as an angry African-American male. Back in the summer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic, broke with the reticence about discussing this subject publicly. In a widely discussed essay entitled “Fear of a Black President,” Coates wrote,

Part of Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites. Any black person who’s worked in the professional world is well acquainted with this trick. But never has it been practiced at such a high level, and never have its limits been so obviously exposed. This need to talk in dulcet tones, to never be angry regardless of the offense, bespeaks a strange and compromised integration indeed, revealing a country so infantile that it can countenance white acceptance of blacks only when they meet an Al Roker standard.

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