Sermon in Praise of Vulnerability

I'm not going to gloat here.  And I don't want to talk politics from even this flimsy pulpit. 

But I do want to talk about the aftermath of last week's presidential election.  In particular I want to talk about a video released on Obama's website of him thanking his staffers after winning.  He looks understandably war-weary--his shirt sleeves rolled up, his tie removed, his back slightly more curved forward than usual.  He tells  paid staff members and volunteers alike that they remind him of himself as a young person organizing in Chicago.  He tells them they are already so much better than he was.  He tells them he has faith they will all go on to accomplish amazing things in the private sector, not-for-profit sector, and in public schools.  He tells them that whether or not he won the election, their work brought his full circle--that their work means that his work matters.  Here, he begins to choke up: I'm proud of that, he says.  I'm proud of you.

The video shows a rare crack in the man's customary composure.   The moniker "No Drama Obama" didn't spring up from nowhere.  And perhaps the fact of his calm exterior provides the reason why the video has had over a million hits on YouTube, more popular than Obama's actual re-election speech.  

Of course, Hannity over at Fox News jumped all over it, using it to justify the nickname he'd already been using for months, "Cry-Baby Obama."

Here are a few comments from right-leaning viewers of the video that I pulled from hundreds of similar comments on various sites:

I want a man as a president not a frickin' cry baby. 

I only cry at Cubs games, he's a pushover.

He's crying because his boyfriend left him for a Gerbil.

I'm not surprised by the backlash--liberal media jumped all over Speaker of the House, John Boehner's tears last year too.  But something about the quality of the more recent remarks pull at me, reminds me of a reality that's mostly gone unspoken (except by people like Ta-Nehisi Coates) for a long time about the conservative media's response to Obama, and about the right in general.  

Let's tell the truth: Obama has to more composed than any white politician.  He has to be more upstanding.  Obama would never survive an extra-marital affair, like any Clinton, nor can he afford to appear too aggressive or too emotional or too fired up.   People are just waiting for him to live up to their stereotypes about black men.

And where do our stereotypes of black men come from?  In large part from our stereotypes about women.  The oldest seeds of racism have a dysfunctional logic that looks something like this:

Women are emotional.  Women are weak.  Women are irrational.  
Black men are like women.  
Therefore, black men are not men.  

That logic contains a questionable assumption: that emotionality is a bad thing.

Obama seems acutely aware of the logic's fallaciousness, but also understands its power.  He seems to balk when he's expected to behave with aggression or emotion: witness the first presidential debate.  After the election, the New York Times printed an article in which it described Obama's real disdain for Mitt Romney and his unwillingness to prepare much for the first debate.  He underestimated his opponent's own strength, felt above his tactics, and also underestimated  what voters  expect from him: that he pander to their idea of "manhood."  In the wake of that debate Obama was quoted as saying, "If I give up a couple of points of likability and come across as snarky, so be it."  Snark isn't his natural go-to in acts of rhetoric, but the political arena thrives on it.  

I can't help but think of the first chapter of Ralph Ellison's masterpiece, Invisible Man, in which the narrator is forced to box against white men before giving a speech.  But he doesn't want to fight. He doesn't want to "give in" as his black peers have done.  He writes:

I suspected that fighting a battle royal might detract from the dignity of my speech.  In those pre-visible days I visualized myself as a potential Booker T. Washington...I felt superior to them in my way, and I didn't like the manner in which we were all crowded together into the servants' elevator.

But our narrator fights.  As does Obama.   Obama wins.  And then in the wake of that win, says thank you to staffers and reveals himself as human again.  

The "grandfathers' of the Republican party live and breath from an outdated mode of manhood, one that considers vulnerability the territory of women.  And because they read vulnerability as weakness, they cannot see women as autonomous, intelligent adults.  And, in adherence to the old logic, because they can't see women clearly, they can't see African-Americans clearly either.   But more and more, Americans do see clearly.

Expert on vulnerability and shame, Brene Brown, writes that "Vulnerability is not weakness; it is our most accurate measurement of courage. "

But we needn't have an expert on such things if we looked closely at our own mythologies.  Our Greek heroes have their heels.  In Jesus, we have a savior who extols the virtues of gentleness and humility, a savior who wears his wounds for the world to see.  In perhaps the shortest verse of the Bible, John 11:35, "Jesus wept."  John Reston of the New York Times wrote about the "I Have a Dream" speech that "it will be a long time before anyone forgets the melodious and melancholy voice of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. crying out his dream to the multitudes."  And, I'm sorry, but Ronald Reagan cried all the time.  

Wake up guys.  Big boys do cry.  The biggest boys.

When I watched Obama's thank you video, I didn't see a man at his weakest.  I saw a man step out from behind a veil in an act of honesty and courage that our country's ugly history does not want to grant him.  No more mask.  No more bad logic.  He made himself vulnerable, and therefore, visible.  Not a president, not a black man, not a man even.  A human being.