My President Was Black: A Comprehensive Analysis

I. “Love Will Make You Do Wrong”

President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama hosted a farewell party in late October during the final days of his administration.
The party occurred on Friday, October 21st, with Obama campaigning for Hillary Clinton in crucial states like Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Obama was in high spirits, making jokes and dancing at rallies, such as one in Orlando on October 28th.
Staffers counted down the days to Inauguration Day with a mix of pride and longing.
The farewell party was presented by BET (Black Entertainment Television) and was the last in a series of concerts hosted at the White House.
Guests, mainly black, queued at the Treasury Building for security checks, humorously referring to the queue as the "good-hair line."
Security was tight, with some guests undergoing secondary background checks.
Dave Chappelle discussed the implications of a potential Donald Trump presidency, noting the "pussygate scandal."
Weeks later, Chappelle was criticised for saying he reluctantly voted for Clinton, feeling her behaviour wasn't "coinworthy."
At the party, cellphones were confiscated to prevent unauthorized recordings.
Janelle Monáe joked about the historical significance of "sitting in the back of the bus" while boarding a trolley to the South Lawn.
Obama opened the event by acknowledging the BET influence, contrasting it with typical White House events.
Obama referenced the Kennedy's fondness for "the twist" likening it to "twerking" but made it clear that there would be no twerking that night, especially not by him.
Obama mentioned the White House’s musical tradition, noting performances by various artists over the past eight years.
Common's performance in 2011 had caused a media fracas, but he was invited back and performed well.
Usher led a call-and-response, "Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud,” and Jill Scott showcased her vocal talent.
Bell Biv DeVoe suggested to a presidential audience that one should "never trust a big butt and a smile."
The Obama White House had strong ties with the hip-hop community, including social connections with Beyoncé and Jay-Z.
Lin-Manuel Miranda freestyled in the Rose Garden using flash cards with words provided by Obama.
Obama’s symbolic power derived from being the first black president and his connection to hip-hop’s foundational generation.
Guests dressed sharply, with some making fashion statements reflective of black excellence.
Jesse Williams acknowledged the historical context of the event, taking place where slaves once toiled.
Obama’s victories were dismissed by some as merely symbolic, but symbols hold significant power.
The Obamas represented the "best of black people," setting a high standard of elegance and grace.
The Obamas refrained from showing America "what it’s really like," instead following the motto, "When they go low, we go high."
Obama was called "our crown jewel", and Michelle was the woman "who put the O in Obama."
The election of Barack Obama communicated that being black was no longer a prohibition to attaining the highest office in government.
Before Obama, depictions of black success were mainly limited to entertainers or athletes.
Obama demonstrated that it was possible to be smart and cool simultaneously and avoided scandals.
His time in the White House showcased a healthy and successful black family.
Whiteness in America carries a badge of advantage, but Obama’s election suggested the badge’s power had diminished.
Insidious rumours were concocted to undermine the first black White House.
At the end of the party, Obama referenced Dave Chappelle’s Brooklyn concert, saying, "You got your block party. I got my block party."

II. He Walked on Ice but Never Fell

The author visited the White House to meet with President Obama for lunch in the spring.
The receiving party included diverse individuals, such as a deaf receptionist, a black woman in the press office, a Muslim woman on the National Security Council, and an Iranian American aide.
Obama seemed untroubled by Donald Trump’s candidacy, attributing it to several factors.
Obama believed Trump couldn't win, due to his faith in the American people's wisdom.
Obama's optimism and faith propelled his rise from Illinois state legislature to president.
His keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention appealed to unity among Americans.
Obama addressed himself to his “fellow Americans, Democrats, Republicans, independents,”
Obama spoke of civil libertarians and "gay friends" in red states.
Obama said that inner-city black families understood "that government alone can’t teach our kids to learn … that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white."
Obama believed perceived differences were caused by "spinmasters and negative-ad peddlers."
By Obama’s lights, there was no liberal America, no conservative America, no black America, no white America, no Latino America, no Asian America, only “the United States of America.”
Obama's 2004 keynote address included the hope of slaves singing freedom songs.
Obama's 2004 keynote address included the history of the people it sought to address which ran counter to the history of the people it sought to address. Some of those same immigrants had firebombed the homes of the children of those same slaves.
Obama's 2004 keynote address includes the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta.
Obama's 2004 keynote address included the hope of a mill worker’s son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too.
After 12 years, the author regarded Obama as a skilled politician, moral human being, and one of the greatest presidents.
Obama was seen as the most agile interpreter and navigator of the color line.
He could emote a deep connection to black people while trusting white people.
The author had criticized Obama for his color-blind policies and "personal responsibility" rhetoric.
Obama invited the author and other journalists for off-the-record conversations.
The author felt discombobulated by Obama’s brilliance during these sessions.
Obama spoke in depth about various subjects, from politics to the economy and environmental policy.
The improbability of a black president was once represented comically.
Once the notion advanced into reality, the opposite proved to be true.
Obama’s 2004 keynote address conflated the slave and the nation of immigrants who profited from him.
Obama's DNC speech belongs to the literature of prospective presidents.
Obama's 2004 keynote address that erases the near-extermination of one people and the enslavement of another.
Obama's 2004 keynote address that invokes the dream of American omnipotence and boundless capability.
When Roosevelt told the country that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,”
The author states that, "To reinforce the majoritarian dream, the nightmare endured by the minority is erased."
Obama's embrace of white innocence was necessary for political survival.
Obama's mild objection to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 2009 contributed to his declining favorability numbers among whites.
Michael Tesler studied the effect of Obama’s race on the American electorate.
According to Tesler, "No other factor, in fact, came close to dividing the Democratic primary electorate as powerfully as their feelings about African Americans,"
In 2012, racial attitudes affected people associated with Obama.
Obama accomplished major feats despite racial resentment and Republican resistance.
He remade the nation’s health-care system and revitalized the Justice Department.
Obama nominated the first Latina justice to the Supreme Court and ended the "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" policy.
His existence both inflamed and expanded America’s anti-racist imagination.
Obama’s 944 commutations are the most in nearly a century. This amount is more than the past 11 presidents’ combined.
Obama was born into a country where laws barring his conception and ascendancy had stood in force.
The attempt to resolve the contradiction through Obama was remarkable but exacting.

III. “I Decided to Become Part of That World”

When Barack Obama was 10, his father gave him a basketball, symbolizing their connection.
Obama was raised in Hawaii by his white mother, Ann Dunham, and her parents, Stanley and Madelyn.
His family loved and supported him and instilled in him that he was black.
Ann gave him books about famous black people.
Obama says he was not an especially talented basketball player, but he played with a consuming passion.
Obama saw the University of Hawaii basketball team’s “Fabulous Five,” an all-black starting five.
The Fabulous Five weren’t just game, but a culture he found attractive.
Obama writes that he watched the University of Hawaii players laughing at “some inside joke,” winking “at the girls on the sidelines,” or “casually flipping lay-ups.”
Obama writes that he was part of Punahou’s teams, and could take his game to the university courts, where a handful of black men, mostly gym rats and has-beens, would teach him an attitude that didn’t just have to do with the sport.
Obama says that respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was.
Obama says that you could talk stuff to rattle an opponent, but that you should shut the hell up if you couldn’t back it up.
Obama says that you didn’t let anyone sneak up behind you to see emotions—like hurt or fear—you didn’t want them to see.
Obama says in his memoir that he, "I decided to become part of that world.”
Obama is making the argument that in black autobiography when being part of the black race has meant exposure to a myriad of traumas, often commencing in childhood.
Black culture serves as a balm for such traumas, as well as the means to resist them.
Obama’s embrace of blackness was more of a conscious choice.
He recalls bloodying the nose of a white kid who called him a “coon."
Obama chafing at racist remarks from a tennis coach.
Obama feeling offended after a white woman in his apartment building told the manager that he was following her.
The author says it this way: Instead, he decided to enter this world. “I always felt as if being black was cool,”
Obama’s embrace of blackness was facilitated, not impeded, by white people.
After college, Obama found a home working on the South Side of Chicago as a community organizer.
"When I started doing that work, my story merges with a larger story. That happens naturally for a John Lewis,”
Obama came to see himself as part of the bigger process for delivering justice for the African American community.
Stanley, his grandfather, took him to basketball games and black bars.
Stanley introduced Obama to the black writer Frank Marshall Davis.
He describes integration as a “one-way street” on which black people are asked to abandon themselves to fully experience America’s benefits.
During Obama’s 2008 campaign and into his presidency, this attitude proved key to his deep support in the black community.
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.
In addition to Oscar Stanton De Priest, the first African American elected to Congress in the 20th century, the South Side produced the city’s first black mayor, Harold Washington.
Other politicians from the South Side was Jesse Jackson, who twice ran for president; and Carol Moseley Braun, the first African American woman to win a Senate race.
These victories helped give rise to Obama’s own.
Obama attempted to forge a coalition between black South Siders and the broader community, but outsiders were skeptical of him.
When Obama lost the 2000 Democratic-primary race against Bobby Rush, "You’re a wonderful young man, you’re going to do great things. You just have to be patient.’ "
He was representing all African Americans in his run for president.
Obama believes that his statewide victory for the Illinois Senate seat held particular portent for the events of 2008 because it is demographically representative state.
“[if] you took that cross section across the country and you shrank it, it would be Illinois."
He was asked to run for president after his win for senate.
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.
Obama said laughingly of his father saying, “It wasn’t Harry Belafonte,”
Obama also states that “This was like an African African. And he was like a blue-black brother. Nilotic. And so, yeah, I will always give my grandparents credit for that.”
He continued, “The kind of working assumption” that white people would discriminate against him or treat him poorly “is less embedded in my psyche than it is, say, with Michelle.”
Obama sees race through a different lens, according to, Kaye Wilson.
That lens, born of literally relating to whites, allowed Obama to imagine that he could be the country’s first black president.
Obama says to the country something virtually no black person can, but every president must: “I believe you.”

IV. “You Still Gotta Go Back to the Hood”

Obama was in a state of bemused disbelief over the Donald Trump tape and claimed it was "locker room talk."
Every day seemed to bring a new shocking discovery about Donald Trump that made the author think it was ludicrous that Trump could win.
President Obama was going to North Carolina to keynote a campaign rally for Clinton but first he was scheduled for a conversation about My Brother’s Keeper, his initiative on behalf of disadvantaged youth.
MBK serves as a kind of network for those elements of federal, state, and local government that might already have a presence in the lives of these young men. It is a quintessentially Obama program—conservative in scope, with impacts that are measurable.
When he asked the young men whether they had a message he should take back to policy makers in Washington, D.C., one observed that despite their best individual efforts, they still had to go back to the very same deprived neighborhoods that had been the sources of trouble for them. “It’s your environment,” the young man said. “You can do what you want, but you still gotta go back to the hood.”
The ghettos of America are the direct result of decades of public-policy decisions.
African Americans rank at the bottom of nearly every major socioeconomic measure in the country.
Obama’s formula for closing this chasm between black and white America, like that of many progressive politicians today, proceeded from policy designed for all of America.
The Affordable Care Act, which cut the uninsured rate in the black community by at least a third, was Obama’s most prominent example.
The Civil Rights Division when Obama moved into the White House in 2009 “was in shambles,”
Career civil servants were not even invited to the meetings in which the key hiring and policy decisions were made.
In Obama's first term, Holder gave a speech on race in which he said the United States had been a “nation of cowards” on the subject.
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.
For much of his presidency, a standard portion of Obama’s speeches about race riffed on black people’s need to turn off the television, stop eating junk food, and stop blaming white people for their problems.
This part of the Obama formula is the most troubling, and least thought-out.
Unemployment rate among black college graduates (4.1 percent) is almost the same as the unemployment rate among white high-school graduates (4.6 percent).
According to research by the Brookings Institution, African Americans tend to carry more student debt four years after graduation (53,000 versus 28,000) and suffer from a higher default rate on their loans (7.6 percent versus 2.4 percent) than white Americans.
According to Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University who studies economic mobility, black families making 100,000 a year or more live in more-disadvantaged neighborhoods than white families making less than 30,000.
White households, on average, hold seven times as much wealth as black households.
“Theoretically, you can make obviously a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps,” Obama said,
Obama acknowledges that discrimination against black families exists in the U.S, and in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment,
Obama went as far as to say that said investment can be in the form of a Marshall Plan.
According to Obama some of the political problems with turning the argument for reparations into reality are manifold, Obama said.
Obama says he always tells his staff that “better is good.”
EARLY IN 2016, Obama invited a group of African American leaders to meet with him at the White House.
You can’t refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position,"
Obama believes that the value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then start trying to figure out how is this problem going to be solved.
Obama stated that, “do you think that the only problem is that I don’t care enough about the plight of poor people, or gay people?’ ”
Obama sees no need to vent before authority.
Obama hopes that "as we’re moving through the world right now, we’re able to get that psychological or emotional peace by seeing very concretely our kids doing better and being more hopeful and having greater opportunities.”
He believes in the equality in the justice department.
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.
Obama's accomplishments were real such as a 1 billion settlement on behalf of black farmers, a Justice Department that exposed Ferguson’s municipal plunder, the increased availability of Pell Grants (and their availability to some prisoners), and the slashing of the crack/cocaine disparity in sentencing guidelines, to name just a few.
It’s tempting to say that foundation is now endangered. The truth is, it was never safe.

V. “They Rode the Tiger”

Obama needed a partner, or partners, in Congress who could put governance above party.
Obama is not sure of the degree to which individual racism played into this calculation.
Obama said of Bill and Hillary Clinton, “And if you ask them, I’m sure they would say, ‘No, actually what you’re experiencing is not because you’re black, it’s because you’re a Democrat."
Obama's rudimentary knowledge of American history tells you that the relationship between the federal government and the states was very much mixed up with attitudes towards slavery, attitudes towards Jim Crow, attitudes towards antipoverty programs and who benefited and who didn’t,"
In 2012, 32 percent of Democrats held antiblack views, while 79 percent of Republicans did.
Studying the 2016 election, the political scientist Philip Klinkner found that the most predictive question for understanding whether a voter favored Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump was “Is Barack Obama a Muslim?”
After Obama won the presidency in defiance of these racial headwinds, traffic to the white-supremacist website Stormfront increased sixfold.
Rush Limbaugh dubbed him “Barack the Magic Negro.”
Roger Stone, who would go on to advise the Trump campaign, claimed that Michelle Obama could be heard on tape yelling “Whitey.”
A fifth of all West Virginia Democratic-primary voters in 2008 openly admitted that race had influenced their vote. Hillary Clinton trounced him 67 to 26 percent.
“They rode the tiger. And now the tiger is eating them,”
After Obama entered the White House, a CNBC personality named Rick Santelli called for a “Tea Party” to resist the Obama presidency.
Throughout Obama’s first term, Tea Party activists voiced their complaints in racist terms.
One of the Tea Party’s most prominent sympathizers, the radio host Laura Ingraham, wrote a racist tract depicting Michelle Obama gorging herself on ribs, while Glenn Beck said the president was a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred for white people.”
During Obama’s 2009 address on health care before a joint session of Congress, Joe Wilson, a Republican congressman from South Carolina, incredibly, and in defiance of precedent and decorum, disrupted the proceedings by crying out “You lie!”
Tea Party Supporters compared Obama to a chimp.
Newt Gingrich dubbed him the “food-stamp president.”
The rhetorical attacks on Obama were matched by a very real attack on his political base—in 2011 and 2012, 19 states enacted voting restrictions that made it harder for African Americans to vote.
Legislations ground to a halt and familiar themes resurfaced after Obama won the presidency again.
“They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton,” Bundy explained. “And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
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.
The movement came into full bloom in the summer of 2015, with the candidacy of Donald Trump, a man who’d risen to political prominence by peddling the racist myth that the president was not American.
That movement came into full bloom in the summer of 2015, with the candidacy of Donald Trump, a man who’d risen to political prominence by peddling the racist myth that the president was not American.
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.
“They rode the tiger. And now the tiger is eating them,” David Axelrod, speaking of the Republican Party, told me. That was in October. His words proved too optimistic. The tiger would devour us all.

VI. “When You Left, You Took All of Me With You”

An old euphoria, which I could not immediately place, gathered up in me. And then I remembered, it was what I felt through much of 2008, as I watched Barack Obama’s star shoot across the political sky.
As Obama’s motorcade approached its destination, Howard University, the complexion of the crowd darkened, and I understood that the love was specific.
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.
If the lineage is apparent in hindsight, so are the limits of presidential power.
There are no clean victories for black people.
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.
The presidency of Barack Obama is no different.
The gate is open and yet so very far away.
Howard Alumni 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.
The students held up the black-power fist—a symbol of defiance before power. 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.
In the days after Donald Trump’s victory, there would be an insistence that something as “simple” as racism could not explain it.
Racism is never simple.
David Brooks would write in The New York Times, “We simply don’t yet know how much racism or misogyny motivated Trump voters,”
He continues by saying, If you were stuck in a jobless town, watching your friends OD on opiates, scrambling every month to pay the electric bill, and then along came a guy who seemed able to fix your problems and hear your voice, maybe you would stomach some ugliness, too.”
Much would be made of blue-collar voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan who’d pulled the lever for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then for Trump in 2016.
She continues by stating Obama needed to be a Harvard-trained lawyer with a decade of political experience and an incredible gift for speaking to cross sections of the country; Donald Trump needed only money and white bluster.
The idea that America would follow its first black president with Donald Trump accorded with its history.
By some cosmic coincidence, a week after the election I received a portion of my father’s FBI file.
Hours after the author receives the FBI file, the author, had my last conversation with the president.
In the memo, the author was called a racist pig nigger.
Then Donald Trump offered Lieutenant General Michael Flynn the post of national-security adviser and picked Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama as his nominee for attorney general.
The feeling was that little black boy touching the president’s hair. It was watching Obama on the campaign trail, always expecting the worst and amazed that the worst never happened. It was how I’d felt seeing Barack and Michelle during the inauguration, the car slow-dragging down Pennsylvania Avenue, the crowd cheering, and then the two of them rising up out of the limo, rising up from fear, smiling, waving, defying despair, defying history, defying gravity.
The author still wants Obama to be right and fold himself into the dream.