He talked about the brilliance of LeBron James and Stephen Curry—not as basketball talents but as grounded individuals. I asked him whether he was angry at his father, who had abandoned him at a young age to move back to Kenya, and whether that motivated any of his rhetoric. He said it did not, and he credited the attitude of his mother and grandparents for this.
Then it was my turn to be autobiographical. I told him that I thought it was not sensitive to the inner turmoil that can be obscured by the hardness kids often evince.
I told him I thought this because I had once been one of those kids. Nonetheless, he agreed to a series of more formal conversations on this and other topics. The improbability of a black president had once been so strong that its most vivid representations were comedic. In this model, so potent is the force of blackness that the presidency is forced to conform to it. But once the notion advanced out of comedy and into reality, the opposite proved to be true.
But black people, then living under a campaign of terror for more than half a century, had quite a bit to fear, and Roosevelt could not save them. To reinforce the majoritarian dream, the nightmare endured by the minority is erased. It is also the only tradition in existence that could have possibly put a black person in the White House. Whenever he attempted to buck this directive, he was disciplined.
His mild objection to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. Race and Politics in the Obama Era , very little had improved. Yet despite this entrenched racial resentment, and in the face of complete resistance by congressional Republicans, overtly launched from the moment Obama arrived in the White House, the president accomplished major feats.
He revitalized a Justice Department that vigorously investigated police brutality and discrimination, and he began dismantling the private-prison system for federal inmates. Obama nominated the first Latina justice to the Supreme Court, gave presidential support to marriage equality, and ended the U.
Millions of young people now know their only president to have been an African American. In , the Obama administration committed itself to reversing the War on Drugs through the power of presidential commutation. The administration said that it could commute the sentences of as many as 10, prisoners. As of November, the president had commuted only sentences.
Obama was born into a country where laws barring his very conception—let alone his ascendancy to the presidency—had long stood in force.
A black president would always be a contradiction for a government that, throughout most of its history, had oppressed black people. The attempt to resolve this contradiction through Obama—a black man with deep roots in the white world—was remarkable. The price it exacted, incredible. The world it gave way to, unthinkable.
When Barack Obama was 10, his father gave him a basketball, a gift that connected the two directly. Obama was born in in Hawaii and raised by his mother, Ann Dunham, who was white, and her parents, Stanley and Madelyn.
They loved him ferociously, supported him emotionally, and encouraged him intellectually. They also told him he was black. Ann gave him books to read about famous black people. This biography makes Obama nearly unique among black people of his era. That passion was directed at something more than just the mastering of the pick-and-roll or the perfecting of his jump shot. These are lessons, particularly the last one, that for black people apply as much on the street as they do on the court.
Basketball was a link for Obama, a medium for downloading black culture from the mainland that birthed the Fabulous Five. Historically, in black autobiography, to be remanded into the black race has meant exposure to a myriad of traumas, often commencing in childhood. Frederick Douglass is separated from his grandmother. The enslaved Harriet Ann Jacobs must constantly cope with the threat of rape before she escapes.
The division is not neat; the two are linked, and it is incredibly hard to be a full participant in the world of cultural identity without experiencing the trauma of racial identity. Obama is somewhat different. But the kinds of traumas that marked African Americans of his generation—beatings at the hands of racist police, being herded into poor schools, grinding out a life in a tenement building—were mostly abstract for him.
Moreover, the kind of spatial restriction that most black people feel at an early age—having rocks thrown at you for being on the wrong side of the tracks, for instance—was largely absent from his life. In its place, Obama was gifted with a well-stamped passport and admittance to elite private schools—all of which spoke of other identities, other lives and other worlds where the color line was neither determinative nor especially relevant.
Obama could have grown into a raceless cosmopolitan. Surely he would have lived in a world of problems, but problems not embodied by him. He was sitting on Air Force One , his tie loosened, his shirtsleeves rolled up. Why that is, I think, is complicated. You feel pretty good about it. Stanley, his grandfather, who came originally from Kansas, took him to basketball games at the University of Hawaii, as well as to black bars.
Stanley introduced him to the black writer Frank Marshall Davis. The facilitation was as much indirect as direct. That suspicion of rootlessness extends throughout Dreams From My Father.
But instead of being in awe, Obama realized that he and the woman lived in different worlds. After college, Obama found a home, as well as a sense of himself, working on the South Side of Chicago as a community organizer. It was less obvious to me. How do I pull all these different strains together: Kenya and Hawaii and Kansas, and white and black and Asian—how does that fit?
And through action, through work, I suddenly see myself as part of the bigger process for, yes, delivering justice for the [African American community] and specifically the South Side community, the low-income people—justice on behalf of the African American community. But also thereby promoting my ideas of justice and equality and empathy that my mother taught me were universal. And I can fit the African American struggle for freedom and justice in the context of the universal aspiration for freedom and justice.
If women, as a gender, must suffer the constant evaluations and denigrations of men, black women must suffer that, plus a broad dismissal from the realm of what American society deems to be beautiful. But Michelle Obama is beautiful in the way that black people know themselves to be.
Her prominence as first lady directly attacks a poison that diminishes black girls from the moment they are capable of opening a magazine or turning on a television. The South Side of Chicago, where Obama began his political career, is home to arguably the most prominent and storied black political establishment in the country.
Washington forged the kind of broad coalition that Obama would later assemble nationally. But Washington did this in the mids in segregated Chicago, and he had not had the luxury, as Obama did, of becoming black with minimal trauma. Axelrod recalled sitting around a conference table with Washington after he had won the Democratic primary for his reelection in , just as the mayor was about to hold a press conference.
He felt those things. He had fought in an all-black unit in World War II. He had come up in times—and that and the sort of indignities of what you had to do to come up through the machine really seared him. Like Washington, Obama attempted to forge a coalition between black South Siders and the broader community. But Obama, despite his adherence to black cultural mores, was, with his roots in Kansas and Hawaii, his Ivy League pedigree, and his ties to the University of Chicago, still an exotic out-of-towner.
But even as many in the black political community were skeptical of Obama, others encouraged him—sometimes when they voted against him. You just have to be patient. And being able to break through in the African American community is difficult because of the enormous loyalty that people feel towards anybody who has been around awhile. There was no one around to compete for loyalty when Obama ran for Senate in , or for president in He was no longer competing against other African Americans; he was representing them.
Obama ran for the Senate two decades after the death of Harold Washington. Axelrod checked in on the precinct where Washington had been so loudly booed by white Chicagoans. Obama believes that his statewide victory for the Illinois Senate seat held particular portent for the events of Illinois effectively allowed Obama to play a scrimmage before the big national game in And so part of the reason I was willing to run [for president in ] was that I had had two years in which we were generating enormous crowds all across the country—and the majority of those crowds were not African American; and they were in pretty remote places, or unlikely places.
So what that told me was, it was possible. What those crowds saw was a black candidate unlike any other before him. For most African Americans, white people exist either as a direct or an indirect force for bad in their lives. Biraciality is no shield against this; often it just intensifies the problem.
What proved key for Barack Obama was not that he was born to a black man and a white woman, but that his white family approved of the union, and approved of the child who came from it. They did this in —a time when sex between black men and white women, in large swaths of the country, was not just illegal but fraught with mortal danger.
The first white people he ever knew, the ones who raised him, were decent in a way that very few black people of that era experienced. And he was like a blue-black brother. And so, yeah, I will always give my grandparents credit for that.
In this, the first lady is more representative of black America than her husband is. African Americans typically raise their children to protect themselves against a presumed hostility from white teachers, white police officers, white supervisors, and white co-workers. But that willingness to help is also a defense, produced by decades of discrimination.
Obama sees race through a different lens, Kaye Wilson told me. He needs that frame of reference. He needs that lens. Or Al Sharpton. Different lens. What Obama was able to offer white America is something very few African Americans could—trust. The vast majority of us are, necessarily, too crippled by our defenses to ever consider such a proposition.
But Obama, through a mixture of ancestral connections and distance from the poisons of Jim Crow, can credibly and sincerely trust the majority population of this country. That trust is reinforced, not contradicted, by his blackness. That, too, is defensive, and deep down, I suspect, white people know it. Four days earlier, The Washington Post had published an old audio clip that featured Donald Trump lamenting a failed sexual conquest and exhorting the virtues of sexual assault.
As we flew to North Carolina, the president was in a state of bemused disbelief. A feeling of cautious inevitability emanated from his staff, and why not? He had likely not paid taxes in 18 years. He had been denounced by leadership in his own party, and the trickle of prominent Republicans—both in and out of office—who had publicly repudiated him threatened to become a geyser. At this moment, the idea that a campaign so saturated in open bigotry, misogyny, chaos, and possible corruption could win a national election was ludicrous.
This was America. It is a quintessentially Obama program—conservative in scope, with impacts that are measurable. But what are we going to do? They told stories of being in the street, of choosing quick money over school, of their homes being shot up, and—through the help of mentoring or job programs brokered by MBK—transitioning into college or a job. Obama listened solemnly and empathetically to each of them. When he asked the young men whether they had a message he should take back to policy makers in Washington, D.
He was correct. The ghettos of America are the direct result of decades of public-policy decisions: the redlining of real-estate zoning maps, the expanded authority given to prosecutors, the increased funding given to prisons. And all of this was done on the backs of people still reeling from the year legacy of slavery.
The results of this negative investment are clear—African Americans rank at the bottom of nearly every major socioeconomic measure in the country. Blacks disproportionately benefit from this effort, since they are disproportionately in need. Its full benefit has yet to be felt by African Americans, because several states in the South have declined to expand Medicaid. Obama also emphasized the need for a strong Justice Department with a deep commitment to nondiscrimination.
And what the [George W. Holder is certainly blunter, and this worried some of the White House staff. But positioning the two men as opposites elides an important fact: Holder was appointed by the president, and went only as far as the president allowed. I asked Holder whether he had toned down his rhetoric after that controversial speech. He is the Zen guy. But he and I share a worldview, you know?
Obama would deliver this lecture to any black audience, regardless of context. This part of the Obama formula is the most troubling, and least thought-out. This judgment emerges from my own biography. I am the product of black parents who encouraged me to read, of black teachers who felt my work ethic did not match my potential, of black college professors who taught me intellectual rigor.
And they did this in a world that every day insulted their humanity. It was not so much that the black layabouts and deadbeats Obama invoked in his speeches were unrecognizable. 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.
In this one sentence about the economy from a news conference on August 20, , Obama used the word "folks" while referring to himself and two larger groups of people:. And I continue to be open to seeing Congress approach this with a balanced plan that has tough spending cuts, building on the trillion dollars' worth of spending cuts that we've already made, but also asks for additional revenue from folks like me, from folks in the top 1 or 2 percent, to make sure that folks who can least afford it aren't suddenly bearing the burden and we're providing some additional certainty to small businesses and families going forward.
Obama also used the word "folks" in August to refer to victims of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques. McWhorter said that there was a "major shift" in speech during George W.
Bush's presidency towards a more informal style. One of the things that both Bush and Obama have in common? Using "okay" more often than most. Dubya used the phrase 12 times per 10, words — more than any other president.
He also sought to assure world leaders that the United States was indeed back at the negotiating table as a credible partner. President Donald Trump, who weakened climate protections. Earlier Monday, Obama appeared on a panel with leaders from island nations vulnerable to climate-fueled sea level rise. Rich nations now say the funds will be available in Obama tried to shine a light on progress made since the Paris deal, which his administration helped broker. But he acknowledged that deal was only meant as a starting point, with countries expected to "constantly ratchet up" their ambitions.
Obama said he is convinced that President Joe Biden, his former vice president, will get the U.
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