I came to this book because I heard an African American activist say on a podcast something like:
White people tell me all the time that they support racial equality and that they "would have voted for a third Obama term if they could". That's the whitest possible thing to say.
I was hoping this book would shed some light on what is behind that sentiment, and I wasn't disappointed. I think this series of quotes is the explanation:
“There are no more,” the comedian Sinbad joked back in 2010. “There are no black men raised in Kansas and Hawaii. That’s the last one. Y’all better treat this one right. The next one gonna be from Cleveland. He gonna wear a perm. Then you gonna see what it’s really like.” Throughout their residency, the Obamas had refrained from showing America “what it’s really like,” and had instead followed the first lady’s motto, “When they go low, we go high.”
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 1961—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. But that danger is not part of Obama’s story. 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.
He had an ability to emote a deep and sincere connection to the hearts of black people, while never doubting the hearts of white people.
What Obama was able to offer white America is something very few African Americans could—trust.
So not only was this guy one of the most incredible leaders, orators and politicians of a generation, but his upbringing uniquely positioned him to be able to appeal to white voters. So of course you would have taken Obama for a third term. If as a white voter, Obama wasn't good enough for you, it's unlikely that any person of colour would ever get your vote.
In the contest of upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they’ve won by being twice as good—and enduring twice as much.
And your vote doesn't cost you anything personally. You had to give it to someone. Another podcast "rich white parents" introduced me to the concept that the only time rights for African Americans advance is when their objectives happen to overlap with those of white people. Such was the case with Obama given his obviously strong leadership and suitability for president.
It’s likely that should white supremacy fall, the means by which that happens might be unthinkable to those of us bound by present realities and politics.
For someone who didn't grow up in the US and with limited American history knowledge this book was a difficult read, and generally pretty dense, but still approachable. I didn't know the names Du Bois, Garvey, Dyson and even those I did recognize: MLK, Malcolm X, I learned more about their world view and how they fit into the the bigger picture.
The historical context in the earlier essays is interesting, as is Coates' narration and background for each of the published essays that goes along with each. What really got to me though was that “We were eight years in power” was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. And how Coates draws a depressingly strong connection between that reaction and the election of Trump.
For some not-insubstantial sector of the country, the elevation of Barack Obama communicated that the power of the [white person] badge had diminished. For eight long years, the badge-holders watched him.
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. And yet only a black man with that same biography could underestimate his opposition’s resolve to destroy him.
“If Republicans didn’t cooperate,” Obama told me, “and there was not a portrait of bipartisan cooperation and a functional federal government, then the party in power would pay the price and they could win back the Senate and/or the House. That wasn’t an inaccurate political calculation.”
Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that in working twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive—work half as hard as black people and even more is possible.
Trump’s dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly every white demographic. Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31). He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37). He won young whites, age 18 to 29 (+4), adult whites, age 30 to 44 (+17), middle-age whites, age 45 to 64 (+28), and senior whites, age 65 and older (+19).
Four years later, an incumbent Obama lost in ten counties in West Virginia to Keith Russell Judd, a white felon incarcerated in a federal prison who racked up more than 40 percent of the Democratic primary vote. A simple thought experiment should be run here—can one imagine a black felon in a federal prison running in a primary against an incumbent white president doing the same?
It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.”
It does not take much to imagine another politician, wiser in the ways of Washington, schooled in the methodology of governance, now liberated from the pretense of anti-racist civility, doing a much more effective job than Trump.
I feel significantly more enlightened after reading this book, but I know I still have a lot to learn. (4 stars)
