Barack Obama as Walter Lee Younger, Jr.

Special to NewBlackMan


Barack Obama as Walter Lee Younger, Jr.
by Duchess Harris

I never thought I’d be able to analyze a presidential election through the lens of the actor Sidney Poitier.

Over the course of the past year, commentary from prominent voices including Robert L. Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, and New York Times columnist Frank Rich have compared Barack Obama with Sidney Poitier in the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Sidney Poitier’s screen characters are an apropos way of accessing Obama, but I think Johnson and Rich have the wrong movie.

This presidential election is more like A Raisin in the Sun.

A Raisin in the Sun is a play by Lorraine Hansberry that debuted on Broadway in 1959. The story is based upon her family's experiences growing up in Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood, a neighborhood similar to the one that Michelle Robinson Obama grew up in.

The experiences in this play echo the lawsuit Hansberry v. Lee, to which the Hansberry family was a party when they fought to have their day in court because of a previous action about racially motivated restrictive covenants (Burke v. Kleiman). The Hansberrys won their right to be heard as a matter of due process of law in relation to the Fourteenth Amendment. The Hansberry case was not bound by the Burke decision, because the class of defendants in the respective cases had conflicting goals.

The plaintiff in the first action was Olive Ida Burke, who brought the suit on behalf of the property owner's association to enforce the racial restriction in 1934. Her husband, James Burke, was the person who sold the property to Carl Hansberry (Lorraine's father) when he changed his mind about the validity of the covenant.

Mr. Burke's decision may have been motivated by the changing demographics of the neighborhood, but it was also influenced by the Depression. The demand for houses was so low among White buyers that Mr. Hansberry may have been the only prospective purchaser available

Barrack Obama is like Lorraine Hansberry’s father, and the American people are like James Burke. After two stock market crashes, White Americans were willing to cast their vote for a Black man to move, not just into a White neighborhood, but into the White House.

In the 1961 film adaptation (the year Barack Obama was born), Sidney Poitier plays the protagonist, Walter Lee Younger. Similar to Obama’s “alternative blackness,” Poitier was born in Miami, Florida, of Bahamian parents. In addition to racial discrimination, he was also hampered even among people of color because of his thick Bahamian accent.

After his first audition, Poitier was told by the director to become a dishwasher. His effort to get rid of his accent resulted in a distinctive speech pattern that became one of his trademarks, along with his piercing gaze and magnetic smile.

When Poitier plays Walter Lee Younger in A Raisin in the Sun, his character is more of a race man than Dr. John Wade Prentiss in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. When the residents of all-White Clybourne Park have learned of their new neighbors, they send an emissary to meet with the Youngers to explain the "rules." Mr. Lindner, the representative, carefully disguises his racist attitudes beneath neutral terms ("not rich and fancy people; just hardworking, honest people who don't really have much but those little homes and a dream of the kind of community they want to raise their children in").

These people are like some of the original Hillary supporters who are “hard-working White Americans.” Mr. Linder makes the Youngers a generous offer that Walter Lee refuses. Just like Barack Obama, he decides that his family has a right to a new life, and they will move to Clybourne Park.

Poitier, the Bahamain-American similar to Obama the Kenyan-American, convincingly speaks for the Black American men of the time. Even though Poitier isn’t the descendant of enslaved Africans, he redeems men whose ancestors have been in this country five generations and states that his Black family deserves to move into the White neighborhood because his daddy earned it “brick by brick.”

In real life, Sidney Poitier's most famous quote is, "If you apply reason and logic to this career of mine, you're not going to get very far. The journey has been incredible from its beginning." If that doesn’t explain the Obama presidency, I don’t know what does.

So, guess who’s coming to dinner now?

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Duchess Harris, PhD, is an Associate Professor of American Studies at Macalester College. She is the author of the forthcoming Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton and co-editor with Bruce D. Baum of the forthcoming Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity. She is also a J.D. candidate at William Mitchell College of Law.