The Public Professor

During the 1990s, having a black president seemed so impossilbe that some people, including many African Americans, jokingly referred to President Bill Clinton as the first “black president.”  The threshold Clinton had passed to achieve this honorary moniker? He seemed comfortable around black people.  That’s all it took. Because an actual black president was so inconceivable that a white president finally treating African Americans as regular people seemed as close as America would get any time soon. In 1998, Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison brought Clinton’s unofficial title to national attention with a New Yorker essay aimed at discrediting the impeachment proceedings against him.  One of Morrison’s rhetorical devices was to check off all the boxes in which Clinton displayed “almost every trope of blackness,” including being raised in a working class, single-parent household, and loving fast food. By 2003, the idea of a black president was still outlandish enough that it served as common comedic fodder.  Chris Rock starred in the film Head of State, a fantasy comedy in which Chicago Alderman Mays Gilliam becomes a fluke president.  And Dave Chappelle portrayed an over the top African American version of President George Bush in a Chapelle Show sketch.  The skit’s running joke was how outrageous and “unpresidential” it would be to have a black chief executive. This was a recurring theme for Chapelle.  Years earlier in his stand up routine he had joked about how the first black president would probably be murdered in office.  But Chapelle was willing to be that first black president because he had a plan to minimize the threat.  He would have a Mexican vice president for “insurance.” “You could shoot me if you want, but you’re just gonna open the border up.” But then came Barack Obama in 2008.  And 2012.  And very likely again in 2016 if not for the constitutional two-term limit.  And just last week it was announced that California Senator Kamala Harris will be Joe Biden’s running mate.  Biden is currently favored to defeat Donald Trump, so Harris is likely to become the first black vice president, and eventually a Democratic presidential front runner in either 2024 or 2028. 2020 feels very far removed from the days when the idea of a black president seemed ludicrously funny, and when one could see shades of blackness in a white president because he was a saxophone-playing Southerner, and was enduring public attacks for sexual indiscretions (the real point of Morrison’s essay). Yet are we really so far away from those turn-of-the-twenty-first century ideas about race in America? Or are white Americans now recognizing that Obama’s election signaled no fundamental change in race relations aside from their own self-congratulatory refusal to still consider race important?

My doctoral mentor, the magnificent John Wunder at at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has not only a Ph.D. in history, but also a J.D. in law.  And so even though my own research under him centered on Native political history, you can bet I was given a reasonable dose of Indian legal history along the way. That being said, I graduated 20 years ago, I have not done much legal history research since then,  and there are many people out there much better qualified than myself to explain the ins and outs of today’s historic United States Supreme Court decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma.  Rather,  just hours after the decision I would like to offer some context. The Supreme Court is no stranger of Indian law cases.  It hears them regularly.  However, McGirt  is probably the most important federal case since Cobell v. Salazar, which was filed in 1996, never reached he Supreme Court, and was settled with the Obama administration in 2009.  And McGirt is probably the most important Native lands case in at least half a century. But first things first.  The real importance of this case has nothing to do with the plaintiff Jimcy McGirt, who was sentenced to 1000 (yes, a thousand) years for raping a four year old. 

Two months ago, a college student in my Native American history class was perturbed. How it could be that during her K-12 education she never learned about the 1890 massacre of nearly 200 Native people at Wounded Knee? She was incensed and incredulous, and understandably so. It’s an important question, a frustrating question, and a depressing question. In other words, it’s the kind of question anyone who teaches Native American history is all too used to. My students typically begin the semester with a vague sense of “we screwed over the Indians,” and are quickly stunned to discover the glaring depths of their own ignorance about the atrocities that Native peoples have endured: from enslavement, to massacres, to violent ethnic cleansings, to fraudulent U.S. government actions, to child theft and the forced sterilization of women, to a vast, far-reaching campaign of cultural genocide that continued unabated well into the 20th century. I started slowly, explaining to her that one problem is the impossibility of covering everything in a high school history class. Even in a college survey, which moves much faster, you just can’t get to everything. There’s way too much. A high school curriculum has no chance. But, I said, that begs the question, both for college and K-12: What gets in and what gets left out?