I had seen those people too. If black men were overrepresented among drug dealers and absentee dads of the world, it was directly related to their being underrepresented among the Bernie Madoffs and Kenneth Lays of the world. Power was what mattered, and what characterized the differences between black and white America was not a difference in work ethic, but a system engineered to place one on top of the other. For instance, the unemployment rate among black college graduates 4.
But that college degree is generally purchased at a higher price by blacks than by whites. This is both the result and the perpetuator of a sprawling wealth gap between the races. Obama had been on the record as opposing reparations. But now, late in his presidency, he seemed more open to the idea—in theory, at least, if not in practice.
The political problems with turning the argument for reparations into reality are manifold, Obama said. But the progress toward nondiscrimination did not appear overnight. It was achieved by people willing to make an unpopular argument and live on the frontier of public opinion. Obama is unfailingly optimistic about the empathy and capabilities of the American people.
But Obama is almost constitutionally skeptical of those who seek to achieve change outside that consensus. Early in , Obama invited a group of African American leaders to meet with him at the White House. When some of the activists affiliated with Black Lives Matter refused to attend, Obama began calling them out in speeches.
You then have a responsibility to prepare an agenda that is achievable—that can institutionalize the changes you seek—and to engage the other side. Opal Tometi, a Nigerian American community activist who is one of the three founders of Black Lives Matter, explained to me that the group has a more diffuse structure than most civil-rights organizations.
One reason for this is to avoid the cult of personality that has plagued black organizations in the past. Tometi noted that some other activists allied with Black Lives Matter had been planning to attend the meeting, so they felt their views would be represented. When I asked Obama about this perspective, he fluctuated between understanding where the activists were coming from and being hurt by such brush-offs.
And that sort of lack of awareness on the part of an activist about the constraints of our political system and the constraints on this office, I think, sometimes would leave me to mutter under my breath. Very rarely did I lose it publicly. I get that. And I think it is important. Obama himself was an activist and a community organizer, albeit for only two years—but he is not, by temperament, a protester.
He is a consensus-builder; consensus, he believes, ultimately drives what gets done. He understands the emotional power of protest, the need to vent before authority—but that kind of approach does not come naturally to him.
Obama saw—at least at that moment, before the election of Donald Trump—a straight path to that world. Now, are we going to have suddenly the same number of CEOs, billionaires, etc. In 10 years? Probably not, maybe not even in 20 years. I feel pretty good about our odds in that situation. The programs Obama favored would advance white America too—and without a specific commitment to equality, there is no guarantee that the programs would eschew discrimination.
My own history tells me something different. The large numbers of black men in jail, for instance, are not just the result of poor policy, but of not seeing those men as human. When President Obama and I had this conversation, the target he was aiming to reach seemed to me to be many generations away, and now—as President-Elect Trump prepares for office—seems even many more generations off.
Obama was also the first sitting president to visit a federal prison. The truth is, it was never safe. Only Obama, a black man who emerged from the best of white America, and thus could sincerely trust white America, could be so certain that he could achieve broad national appeal.
In some sense an Obama presidency could never have succeeded along the normal presidential lines; he needed a partner, or partners, in Congress who could put governance above party. But he struggled to win over even some of his own allies. Ben Nelson, the Democratic senator from Nebraska whom Obama helped elect, became an obstacle to health-care reform. The obstruction grew out of narrow political incentives. Obama is not sure of the degree to which individual racism played into this calculation.
But personal animus is just one manifestation of racism; arguably the more profound animosity occurs at the level of interests. The most recent Congress boasted members from the states that comprised the old Confederacy. Of the Republicans in that group, 96 are white and one is black.
Of the 37 Democrats, 18 are black and 15 are white. There are no white congressional Democrats in the Deep South. Exit polls in Mississippi in found that 96 percent of voters who described themselves as Republicans were white. The Republican Party is not simply the party of whites, but the preferred party of whites who identify their interest as defending the historical privileges of whiteness.
The researchers Josh Pasek, Jon A. Krosnick, and Trevor Tompson found that in , 32 percent of Democrats held antiblack views, while 79 percent of Republicans did. These attitudes could even spill over to white Democratic politicians, because they are seen as representing the party of blacks.
And yet he suspected that there might be more to it. Racism greeted Obama in both his primary and general-election campaigns in Photos were circulated of him in Somali garb. A fifth of all West Virginia Democratic-primary voters in openly admitted that race had influenced their vote. Hillary Clinton trounced him 67 to 26 percent. After Obama won the presidency in defiance of these racial headwinds, traffic to the white-supremacist website Stormfront increased sixfold. Before the election, in August, just before the Democratic National Convention, the FBI uncovered an assassination plot hatched by white supremacists in Denver.
By then, birtherism—inflamed in large part by a real-estate mogul and reality-TV star named Donald Trump—had overtaken the Republican rank and file. Still, in , Obama had been elected. His supporters rejoiced. As Jay-Z commemorated the occasion:.
Not quite. In fact, right-wing ideologues had been planning just such a resistance for decades. One of the intellectual forerunners of the Tea Party is said to be Ron Paul, the heterodox two-time Republican presidential candidate, who opposed the war in Iraq and championed civil liberties.
On other matters, Paul was more traditional. Either way, the views of the newsletters have found their expression in his ideological comrades. In a rare act of cowardice, the Obama administration cravenly submitted to this effort. In those rare moments when Obama made any sort of comment attacking racism, firestorms threatened to consume his governing agenda.
A chastened Obama then determined to make sure his public statements on race were no longer mere riffs but designed to have an achievable effect. This was smart, but still the invective came. Yet in , as in , Obama won anyway. Prior to the election, Obama, ever the optimist, had claimed that intransigent Republicans would decide to work with him to advance the country. No such collaboration was in the offing. Instead, legislation ground to a halt and familiar themes resurfaced.
The bait was a slice of watermelon. They got less freedom. It found a city that, through racial profiling, arbitrary fines, and wanton harassment, had exploited law enforcement for the purposes of municipal plunder.
The plunder was sanctified by racist humor dispensed via internal emails among the police that later came to light.
The president of the United States, who during his first year in office had reportedly received three times the number of death threats of any of his predecessors, was a repeat target. Much ink has been spilled in an attempt to understand the Tea Party protests, and the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, which ultimately emerged out of them. One theory popular among primarily white intellectuals of varying political persuasions held that this response was largely the discontented rumblings of a white working class threatened by the menace of globalization and crony capitalism.
Dismissing these rumblings as racism was said to condescend to this proletariat, which had long suffered the slings and arrows of coastal elites, heartless technocrats, and reformist snobs. Racism was not something to be coolly and empirically assessed but a slander upon the working man. Deindustrialization, globalization, and broad income inequality are real.
And they have landed with at least as great a force upon black and Latino people in our country as upon white people. And yet these groups were strangely unrepresented in this new populism.
Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto, political scientists at the University of Washington and UCLA, respectively, have found a relatively strong relationship between racism and Tea Party membership.
The notion that the Tea Party represented the righteous, if unfocused, anger of an aggrieved class allowed everyone from leftists to neoliberals to white nationalists to avoid a horrifying and simple reality: A significant swath of this country did not like the fact that their president was black, and that swath was not composed of those most damaged by an unquestioned faith in the markets.
Far better to imagine the grievance put upon the president as the ghost of shambling factories and defunct union halls, as opposed to what it really was—a movement inaugurated by ardent and frightened white capitalists, raging from the commodities-trading floor of one of the great financial centers of the world.
Having risen unexpectedly on this basis into the stratosphere of Republican politics, Trump spent the campaign freely and liberally trafficking in misogyny, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. And on November 8, , he won election to the presidency. Historians will spend the next century analyzing how a country with such allegedly grand democratic traditions was, so swiftly and so easily, brought to the brink of fascism. That was in October. His words proved too optimistic. The tiger would devour us all.
One Saturday morning last May, I joined the presidential motorcade as it slipped out of the southern gate of the White House. A mostly white crowd had assembled. As the motorcade drove by, people cheered, held up their smartphones to record the procession, and waved American flags. To be within feet of the president seemed like the thrill of their lives. I was astounded. An old euphoria, which I could not immediately place, gathered up in me.
I had never seen so many white people cheer on a black man who was neither an athlete nor an entertainer. And it seemed that they loved him for this, and I thought in those days, which now feel so long ago, that they might then love me, too, and love my wife, and love my child, and love us all in the manner that the God they so fervently cited had commanded.
I had been raised amid a people who wanted badly to believe in the possibility of a Barack Obama, even as their very lives argued against that possibility. So they would praise Martin Luther King Jr. Then came Obama and the Obama family, and they were black and beautiful in all the ways we aspired to be, and all that love was showered upon them. We were launched into the Obama era with no notion of what to expect, if only because a black presidency had seemed such a dubious proposition.
There was no preparation, because it would have meant preparing for the impossible. There were few assessments of its potential import, because such assessments were regarded as speculative fiction.
In retrospect it all makes sense, and one can see a jagged but real political lineage running through black Chicago. If the lineage is apparent in hindsight, so are the limits of presidential power.
For a century after emancipation, quasi-slavery haunted the South. And more than half a century after Brown v. Board of Education , schools throughout much of this country remain segregated. There are no clean victories for black people, nor, perhaps, for any people. The presidency of Barack Obama is no different.
One can now say that an African American individual can rise to the same level as a white individual, and yet also say that the number of black individuals who actually qualify for that status will be small.
The gate is open and yet so very far away. Howard alumni, of which I am one, are an obnoxious fraternity, known for yelling the school chant across city blocks, sneering at other historically black colleges and universities, and condescending to black graduates of predominantly white institutions.
I like to think I am more reserved, but I felt an immense satisfaction in being in the library where I had once found my history, and now found myself with the first black president of the United States. It seemed providential that he would give the commencement address here in his last year. The same pride I felt radiated out across the Yard, the large green patch in the main area of the campus where the ceremony would take place. His usual riff on respectability politics was missing.
He was their champion, and this was evident in the smallest of things. And yet here, in the face of a black man in his last year in power, it scanned not as a protest, but as a salute. Six months later the awful price of a black presidency would be known to those students, even as the country seemed determined not to acknowledge it. As if enslavement had nothing to do with global economics, or as if lynchings said nothing about the idea of women as property.
As though the past years could be reduced to the irrational resentment of full lips. Racism is never simple. And there was nothing simple about what was coming, or about Obama, the man who had unwittingly summoned this future into being.
The word racist would be dismissed as a profane slur put upon the common man, as opposed to an accurate description of actual men. But whereas the followers of an Islamophobic white nationalist enjoy the sympathy that must always greet the salt of the earth, the followers of an anti-Semitic black nationalist endure the scorn that must ever greet the children of the enslaved.
One Donald Trump claimed Obama would not show his birth certificate because there was something on it he didn't like. Perhaps, he suggested, it said Obama was Muslim. Obama addressed the claims at the White House Correspondents dinner that year by playing slightly altered footage of the moment Simba is held up to the light in the Lion King. The film played, with his date of birth in the lower left hand side, and Obama explained: "… that was a joke, that was not my real birth video, that was a children's cartoon.
Trump was at the dinner that night. Obama "praised" him for "making the really hard decisions" like firing Gary Busey over Meatloaf in an episode of The Celebrity Apprentice. At his final White House correspondents dinner, Obama put two fingers to his lips, kissed them and dropped his mic, saying: "Obama out". It will endure as a powerful image of his farewell to the US but it is also a nod to the basketball star Kobe Bryant. Watch Live. Ten reasons why people loved Barack Obama.
Fill 2 Copy 11 Created with Sketch. Thursday 19 January , UK. Why you can trust Sky News. By Zoe Catchpole, News Reporter 1. His tears for the 20 "beautiful little kids" murdered at Sandy Hook On 14 December , Obama gave a speech trying to try to help Americans make sense of the murder of 20 children and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
After a few years, Mrs. Obama decided her true calling was working with people to serve their communities and their neighbors. She served as assistant commissioner of planning and development in Chicago's City Hall before becoming the founding executive director of the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, an AmeriCorps program that prepares youth for public service. In , Mrs. Obama joined the University of Chicago with a vision of bringing campus and community together.
As Associate Dean of Student Services, she developed the university's first community service program, and under her leadership as Vice President of Community and External Affairs for the University of Chicago Medical Center, volunteerism skyrocketed. Obama has continued her efforts to support and inspire young people during her time as First Lady.
About the office As President Obama has said, the change we seek will take longer than one term or one presidency.
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