Ta-Nehisi Coates | The Atlantichttps://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/2022-05-23T14:20:10-04:00Copyright 2024 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-620628<p>I always find it hard to list the books that have influenced me the most. Memory is tricky, and a work can assert its influences over my thinking long after I’ve forgotten its particular details, or even its title. Moreover, people who set as their job the task of judging what others do, and why, are not always reliable when turning the lens upon themselves. And then there’s the fact that any list of books that I feel made me, as both a writer and a human, changes with the day and feeling. Still, on that changing list there are a few mainstays.</p><p>Take Tony Judt’s <i>Postwar</i>. I first encountered Tony in a swirl of legend and myth, an intellectual hero who, in the dark post-9/11 years, inveighed against the Israeli occupation and filleted the “<a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n18/tony-judt/bush-s-useful-idiots">useful idiots</a>” who sanctified the War on Terror. Having, at that time, read very little of Tony, I was left with the impression of an intellectual monk who eschewed the dictates of party or crowd. I’ve always been skeptical of writers who are spoken of in this way, intellectuals praised for violating the dictums of both “the left and the right” as though the best answer somehow lay unerringly in between. Maybe that’s why I didn’t read a book by Tony until after he’d died. It was my mistake. It was my loss.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/03/the-struggles-of-tony-judt/37606/?utm_source=feed">Read: The struggles of Tony Judt</a>]</i></p><p><i>Postwar</i>—Tony’s much-lauded synthesis of European history after World War II—felt like a natural starting place. I had taken the idea of race in American life as my field of study. That road necessarily led to Europe, where the idea of race was invented. But as much as the contents of <i>Postwar</i> ultimately influenced me, it was Tony’s style that left a mark. I was then a writer in my mid-30s, experiencing a period of novel stability and unlikely prominence. I found the former a better fit than the latter. I began to take note of the unique pressures that the world puts on “prominent” Black writers—specifically the demand that one write in a way that necessarily and explicitly provides “hope.” In its benevolent manifestation, the request originated in the very real inspiration that people took from the Black struggle in America. Less honorably, the demand for “hope” was little more than a demand to bleach the past. Benevolent or not, it somehow felt wrong to write with the intent of authoring a morality play in which the forces of good necessarily triumph. I didn’t quite know why I felt that way. I didn’t really know why quotes about the “arc of the universe” and the sense that good and right ultimately prevail repulsed me so. For me, the answers were in the pages of <i>Postwar</i>.</p><figure class="left"><img alt="Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt" height="459" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/img/posts/2021/11/Ill_Fares_the_Land/93e8e6559.jpg" width="300">
<figcaption class="caption">This piece is adapted from <em><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9780143118763">Ill Fares the Land</a>. </em></figcaption>
</figure><p>I had never read so merciless a book. Tony had no use for pieties—no tolerance for invocations of a “Good War” or the “Greatest Generation.” Power reigns in <i>Postwar</i>, often in brutal ways. Tony writes of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust returning to Poland only to be asked, “Why have you come back?” He introduced me to intellectuals, such as François Furet, forced to reckon not just with Stalin’s crimes but with a discrediting of a “Grand Narrative” of history itself. “All the lives lost, and resources wasted in transforming societies under state direction,” Tony writes of this reckoning, were “just what their critics had always said they were: loss, waste, failure and crime.” Early in <i>Postwar</i>, Tony quotes the observations of a journalist covering the ethnic cleansings that characterized postwar Europe. The journalist self-satisfyingly claims that history will “exact a terrible retribution.” But, Tony tells us, history “exacted no such retribution.” No righteous, God-ordained price was to be paid for this crime against humanity. The arc of history did not magically bend. It was bent, even broken, by those with power.</p><p>I can’t tell you how liberating I found all of this. By the time I’d encountered Tony, I was already fairly convinced that there was darkness in this world, and that darkness often triumphed. Now I was freed to say so. It is perhaps odd to find intellectual liberation in such grim work. All I can say is that the work was never so much grim to me as it was illuminating. It answered the gnawing question of why evil was so resilient, and why it was so difficult to bring forth a more egalitarian world. <i>Postwar</i> might have been grim, but it did not despair. It was a ruthless accounting of the depths to which men might sink, and thus a necessary precondition of a vision of the future that did not depend on slogans and fairy tales—that is to say, a true and durable hope.</p><p>In some ways his book <i>Ill Fares the Land</i> is an addendum—a remarkable effort at sketching out what such durable hope might look like. Published originally in 2010, at the height of the Obama presidency—five days before the Affordable Care Act passed—<i>Ill Fares the Land</i> takes as its subject the rise of social democracy in the mid-20th century, its subsequent fall toward the century’s end, and the potential path back. The social democrat, in Judt’s eyes, holds a classical liberal’s belief in “a commitment to cultural and religious tolerance” but adds to that a faith “in the possibility and virtue of collective action for a collective good.” In that vision, the state is the central vehicle, and much of <i>Ill Fares the Land</i> is a recounting of attacks on the state by conservatives and the halting, feckless defense of the state by liberals who’ve joined their one-time foes in their aversion to “big government” and deep faith in the wisdom of the market. The result of such rhetoric and the policy that has followed it—privatization and the shredding of the welfare state—has been “an eviscerated society,” writes Judt, one where the “thick mesh of social interactions and public goods has been reduced to a minimum, with nothing except authority and obedience binding the citizen to the state.”</p><p>It is this “eviscerated society” and its attendant values of profit and efficiency that have given us an era of shameful inequality wherein a “democratic” country like the United States can have roughly the same index of inequality as authoritarian China. Tony notes that in 2005, about a fifth of America’s national income went to 1 percent of its population. It is a tragic testament to Judt’s book that by 2016, that 1 percent controlled a quarter of all income, and two-fifths of all wealth. And while the “eviscerated society” has allowed for massive wealth distortion, it has also seen the degradation of public goods and services under the logic of efficiency. “Thus, a private company that offers an express bus service for those who can afford it and avoids remote villages where it would be boarded only by the occasional pensioner will make more money for its owner,” writes Judt. “In this sense it is efficient. But someone—the state or the local municipality—must still provide the unprofitable, ‘inefficient’ local service to those pensioners.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/12/the-myth-of-western-civilization/282704/?utm_source=feed">Read: The myth of Western civilization</a>]</i></p><p>Tony wrote those words 10 years ago. It is a compliment to him, but not to the countries he assessed, that they are now more appropriate, not less. Never has the “eviscerated society” been more in evidence than it is today. America is one of the richest countries in the world. And yet, when faced with the threat of COVID-19, it mounted one of the weakest defenses in the world. It would be a mistake to simply see this as the result of Donald Trump’s election. The story of how America became the epicenter of a pandemic may center on Trump, but it began years ago, when one party took as its mission to destroy government and the other decided to grant legitimacy to that effort. Every Democratic politician who sought to shore up their power by echoing conservative denunciations of “big government” reinforced the sense that the key to a prosperous America was to tear down and privatize as much of the state as possible. This was an essential step. For Trump to spurn oversight, fire watchdogs, raise a Cabinet of personal toadies, and generally treat the office he held with disregard, there had to first be a belief that the nonviolent parts of the state were unworthy of defense. So they were not defended. Even now, with 750,000 Americans dead, defenses of the profit motive and assertions that public-health efforts must not interfere with the economy are constant. Efficiency rules.</p><p>For all my admiration for Tony, I can’t say that if he were here, he and I would fall on the same side of every question. In addition to the rise in the cant of efficiency, profits, and the market, Tony saw the plague of identity leading us to this moment. “The politics of the ’60s thus devolved into an aggregation of individual claims upon society and the state. ‘Identity’ began to colonize public discourse: private identity, sexual identity, cultural identity,” Tony writes. “The Vietnam protests and the race riots of the ’60s … were divorced from any sense of collective purpose, being rather understood as extensions of individual self-expression and anger.”</p><p>It’s a curious thing to claim that a movement aimed at ending the Vietnam War lacked “a sense of collective purpose.” And while the Long Hot Summers were certainly expressions of anger, the ghetto, too, is a collective. But the real flaw here is starting the story too soon. The survivors of Jim Crow would be quite shocked to learn that identity <i>began</i> to infiltrate “public discourse” in the ’60s. Indeed, they’d be shocked by the notion that such a “public” discourse ever existed in the first place. We need not even note that the very New Deal programs that Tony holds up were made possible by the racist authoritarianism of the American South. Or that white politicians did all they could to exclude Black people from ostensibly “public” programs. Right now we are in the midst of an effort by agencies of the state to banish Black writers and scholars from the public square. And that effort did not begin with Black Twitter and campus lefties, but with congressional gag rules, the murder of Elijah Lovejoy, and the banishing of Ida B. Wells.</p><p>It would be comforting to chalk this oversight up to Tony being European and thus not understanding the crucial role of white supremacy in American history. In fact, Tony, with his disregard for romanticism and homily, should have been uniquely positioned to see through the nostalgia of a color-blind public. My sense is that such an awareness would have enriched much of Tony’s work. If there is a major weakness that runs through <i>Ill Fares the Land</i> and <i>Postwar</i>, it is the scant attention Tony paid to the role colonialism played in Europe’s prosperity and thus the welfare state that was subsequently erected. I can only wonder how much more insightful Tony’s condemnation of the Iraq War would have been had he thought more about Europe’s own colonial wars.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/in-a-starving-bleeding-captive-land/280723/?utm_source=feed">Read: ‘In a starving, bleeding, captive land’</a>]</i></p><p>Judt was not wholly unaware of the ways in which prejudice and bias have hampered the erection of a truly comprehensive public sphere. “The kind of society where trust is widespread is likely to be fairly compact and quite homogenous,” he tells us, referencing the Nordic states, and a few pages later he notes that “the Dutch and the English don’t much care to share their welfare states with their former colonial subjects from Indonesia, Surinam, Pakistan or Uganda; meanwhile Danes, like Austrians, resent ‘paying’ for the Muslim refugees who have flocked to their country.” But these observations are not made in the context of a history; nor does Tony push past the question of resentment to that of the plunder of “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1915/05/the-african-roots-of-war/528897/?utm_source=feed">the darker nations of the world</a>” (to borrow W. E. B. Du Bois’s phrase.) The fact is that within the best of the Black freedom struggle, the call has always been concerned with both equal rights and a better world. Black Lives Matter, for instance, isn’t a call for special rights, but a reminder that a racist public is no public at all.</p><p>It would be a mistake to ignore this missing element in Tony’s work. But it would also be a mistake to disqualify the whole of it on such basis. No one writer can be totally comprehensive. An intellectual lineage, at its best, means that the progeny pick up, and attempt to improve upon, the work of their ancestors. I count Tony as one of mine. He freed me from cant and sloganeering and reinforced the idea, budding in me, that the writer is not a clergyman.</p><hr><p><small><em>This piece is adapted from </em><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9780143118763">Ill Fares the Land</a> <em>by Tony Judt, with a new preface by Ta-Nehisi Coates.</em></small></p><p></p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedGina LeVay / ReduxThe Man Who Freed Me From Cant2021-11-13T06:00:00-05:002022-05-23T14:20:10-04:00Tony Judt said that there is darkness in this world, and that darkness often triumphed—and liberated me to do the same.tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617731<p><i>Photo illustration by Jon Key</i></p><p>I’ve been thinking about Barbara Tuchman’s medieval history, <em>A Distant Mirror</em>, over the past couple of weeks. The book is a masterful work of anti-romance, a cold-eyed look at how generations of aristocrats and royalty waged one of the longest wars in recorded history, all while claiming the mantle of a benevolent God. The disabusing begins early. In the introduction, Tuchman examines the ideal of chivalry and finds, beneath the poetry and codes of honor, little more than myth and delusion.</p><p>Knights “were supposed, in theory, to serve as defenders of the Faith, upholders of justice, champions of the oppressed,” Tuchman writes. “In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century, the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder.”</p><p>The chasm between professed ideal and actual practice is not surprising. No one wants to believe themselves to be the villain of history, and when you have enough power, you can hold reality at bay. Raw power transfigured an age of serfdom and warmongering into one of piety and courtly love.</p><p>This is not merely a problem of history. <a href="https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2021/01/08/rudy-giuliani-is-accused-of-inciting-a-riot--it-s-not-the-first-time-">Twice now</a>, Rudy Giuliani has incited a mob of authoritarians. In the interim, “America’s Mayor” was lauded locally for crime drops that manifested nationally. No matter. The image of Giuliani as a pioneering crime fighter gave cover to his more lamentable habits—<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/us/politics/22giuliani.html">arresting whistleblowers</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/28/nyregion/grand-jury-clears-detective-in-killing-of-unarmed-guard.html">defaming dead altar boys</a>, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/20/nyregion/police-arrest-125-in-nighttime-raids-on-homeless-shelters.html">raiding homeless shelters</a> in the dead of night. Giuliani was, by <a href="https://archive.org/details/americasmayorhid0000unse">Jimmy Breslin’s lights</a>, “blind, mean, and duplicitous,” a man prone to displays “of great nervousness if more than one black at a time entered City Hall.” And yet much chin-stroking has been dedicated to understanding how Giuliani, once the standard-bearer for <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna17590515">moderate Republicanism</a>, a man who was <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-16-mn-57813-story.html">literally knighted</a>, was reduced to inciting a riot at the U.S. Capitol. The answer is that Giuliani wasn’t reduced at all. The inability to see what was right before us—that Giuliani was always, in Breslin’s words, “a small man in search of a balcony”—is less about Giuliani and more about what people would rather not see.</p><p>And what is true of Giuliani is particularly true of his master. It was popular, at the time of Donald Trump’s ascension, to stand on the thinnest of reeds in order to avoid stating the obvious. It was said that the Trump presidency was the fruit of “economic anxiety,” of trigger warnings and the push for trans rights. We were told that it was wrong to call Trump a white supremacist, because he had merely “<a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/09/donald-trump-white-supremacy-and-the-discourse-of-panic.html">drawn upon their themes</a>.”</p><p>One hopes that after four years of brown children in cages; of attempts to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2020/11/20/f0d11954-2b71-11eb-9b14-ad872157ebc9_story.html">invalidate the will</a> of Black voters in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Detroit; of hearing Trump tell congresswomen of color to <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/14/trump-congress-go-back-where-they-came-from-1415692">go back where they came from</a>; of claims that Joe Biden would turn Minnesota into “<a href="https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1311481175689568256">a refugee camp</a>”; of his constant invocations of “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/03/20/coronavirus-trump-chinese-virus/">the Chinese virus</a>,” we can now safely conclude that Trump believes in a world where white people are—or should be—on top. It is still deeply challenging for so many people to accept the reality of what has happened—that a country has been captured by the worst of its history, while millions of Americans cheered this on.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/trump-worst-president-history/617730/?utm_source=feed">Tim Naftali: The worst president in history</a>]</i></p><p>The temptation to look away is strong. This summer I watched as whole barrels of ink were emptied to champion free speech and denounce “cancel culture.” Meanwhile, from the most powerful office in the world, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/elanagross/2020/11/02/trump-signs-executive-order-to-establish-a-1776-commission-to-instill-patriotic-education/?sh=516ef7166dc3">Trump issued executive orders</a> targeting a journalistic institution and promoted “patriotic education.” The indifference to his incredible acts was telling. So much for chivalry.</p><p>The mix of blindness and pedantry did not plague merely writers, but also policy makers and executives. “The FBI does not talk in terms of terrorism committed by white people,” <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/after-the-capitol-riots-the-last-thing-we-need-is-another-war-on-terror">the journalist Spencer Ackerman wrote</a> in the days after the January 6 riot at the Capitol. “Attempting to appear politically ecumenical, a recent bureaucratic overhaul during an accelerated period of domestic terrorism created the category of ‘racially motivated violent extremism.’” But only so ecumenical. “For all its hesitation over white terror,” Ackerman continued, “the FBI until at least 2018 maintained an investigative category about a nebulous and exponentially less deadly thing it called ‘<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/fbi-abandons-use-of-terms-black-identity-extremism-11563921355">Black Identity Extremism</a>.’”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>“When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide,” Tuchman writes, “the system breaks down.” One hopes that this moment for America has arrived, that it can at last see that <a href="https://time.com/5929398/police-officers-involved-capitol-riots-charges/">the sight of cops</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/us/politics/confederate-flag-capitol.html">a Confederate flag</a> among the mob on January 6, <a href="https://news.yahoo.com/trump-supporters-appear-mock-floyd-005428735.html">the mockery of George Floyd</a> and the <a href="https://www.vox.com/22224765/capitol-riot-dc-police-officers">politesse on display</a> among some of the Capitol Police, are not a matter of chance.</p><p>More, that Trumpism did not begin with Trump; that the same Republican Party some now recall in wistful and nostalgic tones planted seeds of insurrection with <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-can-vote/vote-suppression/myth-voter-fraud">specious claims</a> of <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/06/02/low-rates-of-fraud-in-vote-by-mail-states-show-the-benefits-outweigh-the-risks/">voter fraud</a>; that the decision to storm the Capitol follows directly, and logically, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/opinion/voter-fraud-capitol-attack.html">from respectable Republicans</a> who claim that Democrats steal elections and defraud this country’s citizens out of their right to self-government.</p><p>This, of course, is not my first time contemplating the import of such things. “The First White President” was the culmination of the years I’d spent watching the pieces fall into place. Pieces that, once assembled, finally gave us Trump. I’m sorry to report that I think the article holds up well. This would be a much better world if it didn’t. But in this world, an army has been marshaled and barbed wire installed, and the FBI is on guard against an <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/17/inside-attack-defense-guard-vetting-460137">inside job</a>. Whatever this is—whatever we decide to call this—it is not peaceful, and it is not, in many ways, a transition. It is something darker. Are we now, at last, prepared to ask why?</p><hr><p><em>The following is an excerpt from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s October 2017 cover story, “The First White President.” You can find the full essay <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/?utm_source=feed">here</a>.</em></p><p><span style="text-transform:uppercase;"><b>It is insufficient </b><b>to state</b></span> the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.</p><p>His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, <i>Dreams From My Father</i>, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.</p><p>It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from <i>cuckold</i>, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur <i>cuck</i> casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”</p><p>In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards—and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.</p><p>To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work 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.</p><p>For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally. The insult intensified when Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. But the bloody heirloom ensures the last laugh. Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president.</p><p><em>Read the rest of the story <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/?utm_source=feed">here</a>.</em></p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedJon KeyDonald Trump Is Out. Are We Ready to Talk About How He Got In?2021-01-19T13:32:26-05:002021-01-20T09:22:49-05:00“The First White President,” revisitedtag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-559763<p class="dropcap">I <span class="smallcaps">could have</span> <span class="smallcaps">seen it</span> only there, on the waxed hardwood floor of my elementary-school auditorium, because I was young then, barely 7 years old, and cable had not yet come to the city, and if it had, my father would not have believed in it. Yes, it had to have happened like this, like folk wisdom, because when I think of that era, I do not think of MTV, but of the futile attempt to stay awake and navigate the yawning whiteness of <em>Friday Night Videos</em>, and I remember that there were no VCRs among us then, and so it would have had to have been there that I saw it, in the auditorium that adjoined the cafeteria, where after the daily serving of tater tots and chocolate milk, a curtain divider was pulled back and all the kids stormed the stage. And I would have been there among them, awkwardly uprocking, or worming in place, or stiffly snaking, or back-spinning like a broken rotor, and I would have looked up and seen a kid, slightly older, facing me, smiling to himself, then moving across the floor by popping up alternating heels, gliding in reverse, walking on the moon.</p><p dir="ltr">Nothing happens that way anymore. Nothing can. But this was 1982, and Michael Jackson was God, but not just God in scope and power, though there was certainly that, but God in his great mystery; God in how a child would hear tell of him, God in how he lived among the legend and lore; God because the Walkman was still uncommon, and I was young and could not count on the car radio, because my parents lived between NPR and WTOP. So the legends were all I had—tales of remarkable feats and fantastic deeds: Michael Jackson mediated gang wars; Michael Jackson was the zombie king; Michael Jackson tapped his foot and stones turned to light. Even his accoutrements felt beyond me—the studded jacket, the sparkling glove, the leather pants—raiment of the divine, untouchable by me, a mortal child who squinted to see past Saturday, who would not even see <em>Motown 25</em> until it was past 30, who would not even own a copy of <em>Thriller</em> until I was a grown man, who no longer believed in miracles, and knew in my heart that if the black man’s God was not dead, he surely was dying.</p><p>And he had always been dying—dying to be white. That was what my mother said, that you could see the dying all over his face, the decaying, the thinning, that he was disappearing into something white, desiccating into something white, erasing himself, so that we would forget that he had once been Africa beautiful and Africa brown, and we would forget his pharaoh’s nose, forget his vast eyes, his dazzling smile, and Michael Jackson was but the extreme of what felt in those post-disco years to be a trend. Because when I think of that time, I think of black men on album covers smiling back at me in Jheri curls and blue contacts and I think of black women who seemed, by some mystic edict, to all be the color of manila folders. Michael Jackson might have been dying to be white, but he was not dying alone. There were the rest of us out there, born, as he was, in the muck of this country, born in The Bottom. We knew that we were tied to him, that his physical destruction was our physical destruction, because if the black God, who made the zombies dance, who brokered great wars, who transformed stone to light, if he could not be beautiful in his own eyes, then what hope did we have—mortals, children—of ever escaping what they had taught us, of ever escaping what they said about our mouths, about our hair and our skin, what hope did we ever have of escaping the muck? And he was destroyed. It happened right before us. God was destroyed, and we could not stop him, though we did love him, we could not stop him, because who can really stop a black god dying to be white?</p><figure><img alt="" height="378" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2018/05/glennharvey_theatlantic_2018_05_06_final2_1/e0ccb489d.jpg" width="672">
<figcaption class="credit">Glenn Harvey</figcaption>
</figure><p class="dropcap">K<span class="smallcaps">anye West, a god in this time</span>, awakened, recently, from a long public slumber to embrace Donald Trump. He hailed Trump, as a “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2018/04/25/rapper-kanye-west-calls-trump-my-brother-says-they-share-dragon-energy/?utm_term=.60652da1cb67">brother</a>,” a fellow bearer of “dragon energy,” and impugned those who objected as suppressors of “unpopular questions,” “thought police” whose tactics were “based on fear.” It was Trump, West argued, not Obama, who gave him hope that a black boy from the South Side of Chicago could be president. “Remember like when I said I was gonna run for president?” Kanye said in an interview with the radio host Charlamagne Tha God. “I had people close to me, friends of mine, making jokes, making memes, talking shit. Now it’s like, oh, that was proven that that could have happened.”</p><p dir="ltr">There is an undeniable logic here. Like Trump, West is a persistent bearer of slights large and small—but mostly small. (Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Barack Obama, and Nike all came in for a harangue.) Like Trump, West is narcissistic, “the greatest artist of all time,” he claimed, helming what would soon be “the biggest apparel company in human history.” And, like Trump, West is shockingly ignorant. Chicago was “the murder capital of the world,” West asserted, when in fact Chicago <a href="https://www.thetrace.org/2017/01/chicago-not-most-dangerous-city-america/">is not even the murder capital of America</a>. West’s ignorance is not merely deep, but also dangerous. For if Chicago truly is “the murder capital of the world,” then perhaps it is in need of the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/01/24/trump-threatens-to-send-in-the-feds-to-address-chicago-carnage/?utm_term=.943241a4a253">federal occupation</a> threatened by Trump.</p><p>It is so hard to honestly discuss the menace without forgetting. It is hard because what happened to America in 2016 has long been happening in America, before there was an America, when the first Carib was bayoneted and the first African delivered up in chains. It is hard to express the depth of the emergency without bowing to the myth of past American unity, when in fact American unity has always been the unity of conquistadors and colonizers—unity premised on Indian killings, land grabs, noble internments, and the gallant General Lee. Here is a country that specializes in defining its own deviancy down so that the criminal, the immoral, and the absurd become the baseline, so that even now, amidst the long tragedy and this lately disaster, the guardians of truth rally to the liar’s flag.</p><p>Nothing is new here. The tragedy is so old, but even within it there are actors—some who’ve chosen resistance, and some, like West, who, however blithely, have chosen collaboration.</p><p dir="ltr">West might plead ignorance—“I don’t have all the answers that a celebrity is supposed to have,” he told Charlamagne. But no citizen claiming such a large portion of the public square as West can be granted reprieve. The planks of Trumpism are clear—<a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-35036567/outcry-as-donald-trump-calls-for-us-muslim-ban">the better banning of Muslims</a>, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/05/politics/trump-west-virginia-immigration-comments/index.html">the improved</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/771294347501461504?lang=en">scapegoating</a> <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/06/07/paul-ryan-rips-trump-comments-textbook-definition-racist/85548042/">of Latinos</a>, <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/29/16713664/trump-obama-birth-certificate">the endorsement of racist conspiracy</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/265895292191248385?lang=en">the denialism of science</a>, <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/new-trump-economist-kudlow-has-been-wrong-about-everything.html">the cheering of economic charlatans</a>,<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/nyregion/trump-police-too-nice.html"> the urging on of barbarian cops</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/sep/22/donald-trump-nfl-national-anthem-protests">and barbarian bosses</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/13/us/politics/gina-haspel-cia-director-nominee-trump-torture-waterboarding.html">the cheering of torture</a>, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-referred-haiti-african-countries-shithole-nations-n836946">and the condemnation of whole countries</a>. The pain of these policies is not equally distributed. Indeed the rule of Donald Trump is predicated on the infliction of maximum misery on West’s most ardent parishioners, the portions of America, the muck, that made the god Kanye possible.</p><p dir="ltr">And he is a god, though one born of a different time and a different need. Jackson rose in the last days of enigma and wonder; West, in an accessible age, when every fuck is a tweet and every defecation a status update. And perhaps, in that way, West has done something more remarkable, more amazing than Jackson, because he is a man of no mystery, overexposed, who holds the world’s attention through simply the consistent, amazing, near-peerless quality of his work.</p><p>He arrived to us with Bin Laden, on September 11, 2001—life emerging out of mass death—and I guess it is more accurate to say here that he arrived to me on that day, because West had been producing since at least five years before. All I know is when I heard his production on <em>The Blueprint</em>, I felt that he was the one I had been waiting for. I was then, still, an aesthetic conservative, a vulgar backpacker who truly and absurdly believed that shiny suits had broken the cypher, scratched the record, and killed my beloved hip-hop. My theme music alternated between Common’s “I Used to Love H.E.R.,” The Roots’ “What They Do,” and O.C.’s “Time’s Up.” Slick Rick’s admonition—“Their time’s limited, hard-rocks’ too”—was my mantra, so that on that day of mass murder, when Kanye West greeted me, chopping up the Jackson 5, drawing from Bobby “Blue” Bland, pulling from David Ruffin, arrived with Jay-Z, an MC who dated back to the Golden Age, I did not see myself simply in the presence of a great album, but bearing witness to the fulfillment of prophecy. This was insane, and it has been the great boon of my life that Twitter did not exist back then, to come of age in the last days of mystery, because Lord knows how many times I would have told you hip-hop was dead, and Lord knows how many times I would have said “Incarcerated Scarfaces” was the peak of civilization. Forgive me, but that is who I was, an old man before my time, and all I can say is that when I heard Kanye, I felt myself back in communion with something that I felt had been lost, a sense of ancestry in every sample, a sound that went back to the separated and unequal, that went back to the slave.</p><p dir="ltr">That was almost 20 years ago. It is easy to forget just how long West has been at this, that he’s been excellent for so long, that there are adults out there, now, who have never seen the sun set on the empire of Kanye West. And he made music for them, for the young and futuristic, not for the old and conservative like me, and so avoided the tempting rut of nostalgia, of soul samples and visions of what hip-hop had been. And so to those who had been toddlers in the era of <em>The Blueprint</em>, he became a god, by pulling from that generation raised in hip-hop’s golden age, and yet never being shackled by it. (Even after the events of the week, it would shock no one if West’s impending was the best of the year.)</p><p dir="ltr">West is 40 years old, a product of the Crack era and Reaganomic Years, a man who remembers the <em>Challenger</em> crash and <em>The Cosby Show</em> before syndication. But he never fell into the bitterness of his peers. He could not be found chasing ghosts, barking at Soulja Boy, hectoring Lil Yachty, and otherwise yelling at clouds. To his credit, West seemed to remember rappers having to defend their music as music against the withering fire of their elders. And so while, today, you find some of these same artists, once targets, adopting the sanctimonious pose of the arthritic jazz-men whom they vanquished, you will not find Yeezy among them, because Yeezy never got old.</p><p dir="ltr">Maybe that was the problem.</p><p>Everything is darker now and one is forced to conclude that an ethos of “light-skinned girls and some Kelly Rowlands,” of “mutts” and “thirty white bitches,” deserved more scrutiny, that <a href="http://people.com/celebrity/kanye-west-wears-a-confederate-flag-says-react-how-you-want/">the embrace of a slaveholder’s flag</a> warranted more inquiry, that <a href="https://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/kanyes-politics-are-what-happens-when-you-dont-read-boo-1825475113">a blustering illiteracy</a> should have given pause, that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pVTrnxCZaQ">the telethon</a> was not wholly born of keen insight, and the bumrushing of Taylor Swift was not solely righteous anger, but was something more spastic and troubling, evidence of an emerging theme—a paucity of wisdom, and more, a paucity of loved ones powerful enough to perform the most essential function of love itself, protecting the beloved from destruction.</p><figure><img alt="" height="378" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2018/05/glennharvey_theatlantic_2018_05_06_final3/f5c84593e.jpg" width="672">
<figcaption class="credit">Glenn Harvey</figcaption>
</figure><p class="dropcap">I <span class="smallcaps">want to tell you</span> a story about the time, still ongoing as of this writing, when I almost lost my mind. In the summer of 2015, I published a book, and in so doing, became the unlikely recipient of a mere fraction of the kind of celebrity Kanye West enjoys. It was small literary fame, not the kind of fame that accompanies Grammys and Oscars, and there may not have been a worse candidate for it. I was the second-youngest of seven children. My life had been inconsequential, if slightly amusing. I had never stood out for any particular reason, save my height, and even that was wasted on a lack of skills on the basketball court. But I learned to use this ordinariness to my advantage. I was a journalist. There was something soft and unthreatening about me that made people want to talk. And I had a capacity for disappearing into events and thus, in that way, reporting out a scene. At home, I built myself around ordinary things—family, friends, and community. I might never be a celebrated writer. But I was a good father, a good partner, a decent friend.</p><p dir="ltr">Fame fucked with all of that. I would show up to do my job, to report, and become, if not the scene, then part of it. I would take my wife out to lunch to discuss some weighty matter in our lives, and come home, only to learn that the couple next to us had covertly taken a photo and tweeted it out. The family dream of buying a home, finally achieved, became newsworthy. My kid’s Instagram account was scoured for relevant quotes. And when I moved to excise myself, to restrict access, this would only extend the story.</p><p>It was the oddest thing. I felt myself to be the same as I had always been, but everything around me was warping. My sense of myself as part of a community of black writers disintegrated before me. Writers, whom I loved, who had been mentors, claimed tokenism and betrayal. Writers, whom I knew personally, whom I felt to be comrades in struggle, took to Facebook and Twitter to announce my latest heresy. No one enjoys criticism, but by then I had taken my share. What was new was criticism that I felt to originate as much in what I had written, as how it had been received. One of my best friends, who worked in radio, came up with the idea of a funny self-deprecating segment about me and my weird snobbery. But when it aired, the piece was mostly concerned with this newfound fame, how it had changed me, and how it all left him feeling a type of way. I was unprepared. The work of writing had always been, for me, the work of enduring failure. It had never occurred to me that one would, too, have to work to endure success.</p><p dir="ltr">The incentives toward a grand ego were ever present. I was asked to speak on matters which my work evidenced no knowledge of. I was invited to do a speaking tour via private jet. I was asked to direct a music video. I began to understand how and why famous writers falter, because writing is hard and there are “writers” who only do that work because they have to. But it was now clear there was another way—a life of lectures, visiting-writer gigs, galas, prize committees. There were dark expectations. I remember going with a friend to visit an older black writer, an elder statesman. He sized me up and the first thing he said to me was, “You must be getting all the pussy now.”</p><p dir="ltr">What I felt, in all of this, was a profound sense of social isolation. I would walk into a room, knowing that some facsimile of me, some mix of interviews, book clubs, and private assessment, had preceded me. The loss of friends, of comrades, of community, was gut-wrenching. I grew skeptical and distant. I avoided group dinners. In conversation, I sized everyone up, convinced that they were trying to extract something from me. And this is where the paranoia began, because the vast majority of people were kind and normal. But I never knew when that would fail to be the case.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>On top of the skewed incentives, the wrecked friendships, the paranoia, the ruin of community, there was a part of me that I was left to confront. I was the loneliest I’d ever felt in my life—and part of me loved it, loved the way I’d walk into a restaurant in New York and make the wait disappear, loved the random swag, the green Air Force Ones, the blue joggers. I loved the movie stars, rappers, and ballplayers who cited my work, and there was so much more out there waiting to be loved. I loved my small fame because, though I had brokered a peace with all my Baltimore ordinariness, with how I faded into a crowd, with how unremarkable I really was—and though I decided to till, as Emerson says, my own plot of ground, whole other acres now appeared before me. It almost didn’t matter whether I claimed those acres or not, because who are you if, even as you do good, you feel the desire to do evil? The terrible thing about that small fame was how it undressed me, stripped me of self-illusion, and showed how easily I could be swept away, how part of me wanted to be swept away, and even if no one ever saw it, even if I never acted on it, I now knew it, knew that I could love that small fame in the same terrible way that I want to live forever, in that way, to paraphrase Walcott, that drowned sailors loved the sea.</p><p>But I did not drown. I felt the gravity of that small fame, feel its gravity even now, and it revealed securities as sure as it did insecurities, reasons to preserve the peace. I really did love to write—the irreplaceable thrill of transforming a blank page, the search for the right word, like pieces of a puzzle, the surgery of stitching together odd paragraphs. I loved how it belonged to me, a private act of creation, a fact that dissipated the moment I stepped in front of a crowd. So, that really was me. But more importantly, I think, were things beyond me, the pre-fame web of connections around me—child, spouse, brothers, sisters, friends—the majority of whom held fast and remained.</p><p>What would I be both without that web and with a larger, more menacing fame? I think of Michael Jackson, whose father beat him and called him “big nose.” I think of the sad tale of West’s rumored stolen laptop. (“And as far as real friends, tell my cousins I love ‘em / Even the one that stole the laptop, you dirty motherfucker.”) I think of West confessing to an opioid addiction, which had its origins in his decision to get liposuction out of fear of being seen as fat. And I wonder what private pain would drive a man to turn to the same procedure that ultimately led to the death of his mother.</p><p>There’s nothing original in this tale and there’s ample evidence, beyond West, that humans were not built to withstand the weight of celebrity. But for black artists who rise to the heights of Jackson and West, the weight is more, because they come from communities in desperate need of champions. Kurt Cobain’s death was a great tragedy for his legions of fans. Tupac’s was a tragedy for an entire people. When brilliant black artists fall down on the stage, they don’t fall down alone. The story of West “drugged out,” as he put it, reduced by the media glare to liposuction, is not merely about how he feels about his body. It was that drugged-out West who appeared in that gaudy lobby, dead-eyed and blonde-haired, and by his very presence endorsed the agenda of Donald Trump.</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><p class="dropcap">I <span class="smallcaps">finally saw Michael Jackson</span> moonwalk in 2001, finally watched the myth descend into the real, though <em>finally</em> overstates the matter. I had, by then of course, seen the legendary tape of his performance at <em>Motown 25</em>, but somehow it was not yet real to me, because I had not shared in the actual moment, at that moment, because I still, after all those years, remembered the longing of having missed a great event, and having experienced it secondhand. But this time I really was there, live as it was airing—the 30th anniversary of Jackson’s entrance into the pop-music world—and I am thankful that it happened then, at the end of that era of myth and legend, when the internet was still embryonic, and DVRs were not omnipresent, and the world had not yet been YouTubed, and reality television had just begun to peek over the horizon. This was a world still filled with the mysteries, secrets, and crank theories of my childhood, where the Klan manufactured tennis shoes and bottled iced tea, and shipped it all into the ghetto. What I am saying is that this was still a time, as in my childhood, when you mostly had to see things as they happened, and if you had not seen them that way, there still was a gnawing disbelief as to whether they had happened at all.</p><p dir="ltr">I think this, in part, explains the screaming and fainting. Jackson cranked up “Billie Jean” and I felt it too. For when I saw Michael Jackson glide across the stage that night at Madison Square Garden, mere days before the Twin Towers fell, I did not imagine him so much walking on the moon, as walking on water. And the moonwalk was the least of things. He whipped his mop of hair and, cuffing the mic, stomped with the drums, spun, grabbed the air. I was astounded. There was the matter of his face, which took me back to the self-hatred of the ’80s, but this seemed not to matter because I was watching a miracle—a man had been born to a people who controlled absolutely nothing, and yet had achieved absolute control over the thing that always mattered most—his body.</p><p dir="ltr">And then the song climaxed. He screamed and all the music fell away, save one solitary drum, and boneless Michael seemed to break away, until it was just him and that “Billie Jean” beat, carnal, ancestral. He rolled his shoulders, snaked to the ground, and then backed up, pop-locked, seemed to slow time itself, and I saw him pull away from his body, from the ravished face, which wanted to be white, and all that remained was the soul of him, the gift given onto him, carried in the drum.</p><p dir="ltr">I like to think I thought of Zora while watching Jackson. But if not, I am thinking of her now:</p><blockquote>
<p dir="ltr">It was said, “He will serve us better if we bring him from Africa naked and thing-less.” So the bukra reasoned. They tore away his clothes so that Cuffy might bring nothing away, but Cuffy seized his drum and hid it in his skin under the skull bones. The shin-bones he bore openly, for he thought, “Who shall rob me of shin-bones when they see no drum?” So he laughed with cunning and said, “I, who am borne away, to become an orphan, carry my parents with me. For rhythm is she not my mother, and Drama is her man?” So he groaned aloud in the ships and hid his drum and laughed.</p>
</blockquote><p dir="ltr">There is no separating the laughter from the groans, the drum from the slave ships, the tearing away of clothes, the being borne away, from the cunning need to hide all that made you human. And this is why the gift of black music, of black art, is unlike any other in America, because it is not simply a matter of singular talent, or even of tradition, or lineage, but of something more grand and monstrous. When Jackson sang and danced, when West samples or rhymes, they are tapping into a power formed under all the killing, all the beatings, all the rape and plunder that made America. The gift can never wholly belong to a singular artist, free of expectation and scrutiny, because the gift is no more solely theirs than the suffering that produced it. Michael Jackson did not invent the moonwalk. When West raps, “And I basically know now, we get racially profiled / Cuffed up and hosed down, pimped up and ho’d down,” the <em>we</em> is instructive.</p><p>What Kanye West seeks is what Michael Jackson sought—liberation from the dictates of that <em>we</em>. In his visit with West, the rapper T.I. was stunned to find that West, despite his endorsement of Trump, had never heard of the travel ban. “He don’t know the things that we know because he’s removed himself from society to a point where it don’t reach him,” T.I. said. West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and <em>fuck you anyway, bitch</em>; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.</p><p>It would be nice if those who sought to use their talents as entrée into another realm would do so with the same care which they took in their craft. But the Gods are fickle and the history of this expectation is mixed. Stevie Wonder fought apartheid. James Brown endorsed a racist Nixon. There is a Ray Lewis for every Colin Kaepernick, an O.J. Simpson for every Jim Brown, or, more poignantly, <a href="https://deadspin.com/jim-brown-did-great-things-he-also-beat-woman-1784269329">just another </a><a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/understanding-jim-browns-ugly-support-of-donald-trump/">Jim Brown</a>. And we suffer for this, because we are connected. Michael Jackson did not just destroy his own face but endorsed the destruction of all those made in similar fashion.</p><p>The consequences of Kanye West’s unlettered view of America and its history are, if anything, more direct. For his fans, it is the quality of his art that ultimately matters, not his pronouncements. If his upcoming album is great, the dalliance with Trump will be prologue. If it’s bad, then it will be foreshadowing. In any case what will remain is this—West lending his imprimatur, as well as his Twitter platform of some 28 million people, to the racist rhetoric of the conservative movement. West’s thoughts are not original—the apocryphal Harriet Tubman quote and the notion that slavery was a “choice” echoes <a href="http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-a-brief-for-whitey-969">the ancient</a> <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/7/16748038/roy-moore-slavery-america-great">trope</a> <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/26/gop-rep-blacks-worse-off_n_478744.html">that slavery wasn’t that bad</a>; <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/04/why-dont-black-people-protest-black-on-black-violence/255329/?utm_source=feed">the myth</a> that blacks do not protest crime in their community<a href="http://insider.foxnews.com/2016/07/11/rudy-giuliani-black-lives-matter-violence-chicago-fox-and-friends"> is pure Giulianism</a>; and West’s desire to “go to Charlottesville and talk to people on both sides” is an extension of <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/trump-defends-white-nationalist-protesters-some-very-fine-people-on-both-sides/537012/?utm_source=feed">Trump’s response to the catastrophe</a>. These are not stray thoughts. They are the propaganda that justifies voter suppression, and feeds police brutality, and minimizes the murder of Heather Heyer. And Kanye West is now a mouthpiece for it.</p><p>It is the young people among the despised classes of America who will pay a price for this—the children parted from their parents at the border, the women warring to control the reproductive organs of their own bodies, the transgender soldier fighting for his job, the students who dare not return home for fear of a “travel ban,” which West is free to have never heard of. West, in his own way, will likely pay also for his thin definition of freedom, as opposed to one that experiences history, traditions, and struggle not as a burden, but as an anchor in a chaotic world.</p><p>It is often easier to choose the path of self-destruction when you don’t consider who you are taking along for the ride, to die drunk in the street if you experience the deprivation as your own, and not the deprivation of family, friends, and community. And maybe this, too, is naive, but I wonder how different his life might have been if Michael Jackson knew how much his truly black face was tied to all of our black faces, if he knew that when he destroyed himself, he was destroying part of us, too. I wonder if his life would have been different, would have been longer. And so for Kanye West, I wonder what he might be, if he could find himself back into connection, back to that place where he sought not a disconnected freedom of “I,” but a black freedom that called him back—back to the bone and drum, back to Chicago, back to Home.</p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedGlenn HarveyI’m Not Black, I’m Kanye2018-05-07T07:03:55-04:002021-04-28T17:57:45-04:00Kanye West wants freedom—white freedom.tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-553991<p>Two years ago I began taking up the childhood dream of writing comics. To say it is more difficult than it looks is to commit oneself to criminal understatement. Writers don’t write comics so much as they draw them with words. Everything has to be shown, a fact I knew going into the work, but could not truly know until I had actually done it. For two years I’ve lived in the world of Wakanda, writing the title <em>Black Panther</em>. I’ll continue working in that world. This summer, I’m entering a new one—the world of Captain America.</p><p>There’s a lot to unpack here. Those of you who’ve never read a <em>Captain America </em>comic book or seen him in the Marvel movies would be forgiven for thinking of Captain America as an unblinking mascot for American nationalism. In fact, the best thing about the story of <em>Captain America</em> is the implicit irony. Captain America begins as Steve Rogers—a man with the heart of a god and the body of a wimp. The heart and body are brought into alignment through the Super Soldier Serum, which transforms Rogers into a peak human physical specimen. Dubbed Captain America, Rogers becomes the personification of his country’s egalitarian ideals—an anatomical Horatio Alger who through sheer grit and the wonders of science rises to become a national hero.</p><p>Rogers’s transformation into Captain America is underwritten by the military. But, perhaps haunted by his own roots in powerlessness, he is a dissident just as likely to be feuding with his superiors in civilian and military governance as he is to be fighting with the supervillain Red Skull. Conspirators against him rank all the way up to the White House, causing Rogers to, at one point, reject the very title of Captain America. At the end of World War II, Captain America is frozen in ice and awakens in our time—and this, too, distances him from his country and its ideals. He is “a man out of time,” a walking emblem of greatest-generation propaganda brought to life in this splintered postmodern time. Thus, Captain America is not so much tied to America as it is, but to an America of the imagined past. In one famous scene, flattered by a treacherous general for his “loyalty,” Rogers—grasping the American flag—retorts, “I’m loyal to nothing, general … except the dream.”</p><p>I confess to having a conflicted history with this kind of proclamation—which is precisely why I am so excited to take on<em> Captain America</em>. I have my share of strong opinions about the world. But one reason that I chose the practice of opinion journalism—which is to say a mix of reporting and opinion—is because understanding how those opinions fit in with the perspectives of others has always been more interesting to me than repeatedly restating my own. Writing, for me, is about questions—not answers. And Captain America, the embodiment of a kind of Lincolnesque optimism, poses a direct question for me: Why would anyone believe in The Dream? What is exciting here is not some didactic act of putting my words in Captain America’s head, but attempting to put Captain America’s words in my head. What is exciting is the possibility of exploration, of avoiding the repetition of a voice I’ve tired of.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>And then there is the basic challenge of drawing with words—the fear that accompanies every effort. And the fear is part of the attraction because, if I am honest, the “opinion” part of opinion-journalism is no longer as scary it once was. Reporting—another word for discovery—will always be scary. Opining, less so. And nothing should really scare a writer more than the moment when they are no longer scared. I think it’s then that one might begin to lapse into self-caricature, endlessly repeating the same insights and the same opinions over and over. I’m not convinced I can tell a great <em>Captain America</em> story—which is precisely why I want so bad to try.</p><p>In this endeavor, I’ll be joined—hopefully for all my time doing it—by the incredible <a href="https://twitter.com/leinilyu">Leinil Yu</a> on interior panels and <a href="https://www.alexrossart.com/">Alex Ross</a> on covers. Both Leinil and Alex are legends. Even if you don’t consider yourself a comics-head, you should check out their work to see what the best of the form has to offer. I’m lucky to have them—and have been luckier still to have a community of comic creators (<a href="http://mattfraction.com/">Matt Fraction</a>, <a href="https://marvel.com/comics/creators/8901/kieron_gillen">Kieron Gillen</a>, <a href="http://jamiemckelvie.com/">Jamie McKelvie</a>, <a href="https://comicstore.marvel.com/Ed-Brubaker/comics-creator/16">Ed Brubaker</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/kellysue">Kelly Sue DeConnick</a>, <a href="http://marvel.com/comics/creators/12494/chip_zdarsky">Chip Zdarsky</a>, and <a href="http://www.warrenellis.com/">Warren Ellis</a>, among others) who’ve embraced me and helped me learn the form. And I’ve been lucky in my editors—<a href="http://marvel.com/comics/creators/11841/sana_amanat">Sana Amanat</a>, who brought me on; <a href="http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Wil_Moss/Editor">Wil Moss</a>, who edits <em>Black Panther;</em> <a href="http://marvel.com/comics/creators/2133/tom_brevoort">Tom Brevoort</a>, who’s editing <em>Captain America;</em> <a href="https://twitter.com/CBCebulski?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor">C.B. Cebulski</a>, who just helped me refashion the script to the first issue; and <a href="https://twitter.com/axelalonsomarv?lang=en">Axel Alonso</a>, who first broached the idea of me writing Cap.</p><p>Finally, but most importantly, I have to thank the black comic creators I admired as a youth, often without even knowing they were black—<a href="https://marvel.com/comics/creators/110/christopher_priest">Christopher Priest</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/DenysCowan">Denys Cowan</a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/24/arts/design/24mcduffie.html">Dwayne McDuffie</a>, specifically—without whom none of this would be possible. There has long been a complaint among black comic creators that they are restricted to black characters. I don’t know what it means to live in a world where people restrict what you write, and the reason I don’t know is largely because of the sacrifices of all those who were forced to know before me. I have not forgotten this.</p><p><em>Captain America #1</em> drops on the Fourth of July. Excelsior, family.</p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedAlex Ross / MarvelThe cover of <i>Captain America #1</i>, which will be released on July 4, 2018.Why I'm Writing <i>Captain America</i>2018-02-28T10:59:12-05:002018-02-28T18:17:28-05:00And why it scares the hell out of metag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-622317<p><em>Editor’s Note:</em> This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. <br /></p><p>On Monday, the retired four-star general and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly asserted that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.” This was an incredibly stupid thing to say. Worse, it built on a long tradition of endorsing stupidity in hopes of making Americans stupid about their own history. Stupid enjoys an unfortunate place in the highest ranks of American government these days. And while one cannot immediately affect this fact, one can choose to not hear stupid things and quietly nod along.</p><p>For the past 50 years, some of this country’s most celebrated historians have taken up the task of making Americans less stupid about the Civil War. These historians have been more effective than generally realized. It’s worth remembering that General Kelly’s remarks, which were greeted with mass howls of protests, reflected the way much of this country’s stupid-ass intellectual class once understood the Civil War. I do not contend that this improved history has solved everything. But it is a ray of light cutting through the gloom of stupid. You should run to that light. Embrace it. Bathe in it. Become it.</p><p>Okay, maybe that’s too far. Let’s start with just being less stupid.</p><p>One quick note: In making this list I’ve tried to think very hard about readability, and to offer books you might actually complete. There are a number of books that I dearly love and have found indispensable that are not on this list. (Du Bois’s <em>Black Reconstruction</em> i<em>n America</em> immediately comes to mind.) I mean no slight to any of those volumes. But this is about being less stupid. We’ll get to those other ones when we talk about how to be smart.</p><p>1) <em>Battle Cry Of Freedom: </em>Arguably among the greatest single-volume histories in all of American historiography, James McPherson’s synthesis of the Civil War is a stunning achievement. Brisk in pace. A big-ass book that reads like a much slimmer one. The first few hundred pages offer a catalogue of evidence, making it clear not just that the white South went to war for the right to own people, <em>but that it warred for the right to expand the right to own people</em>. Read this book. You will immediately be less stupid than some of the most powerful people in the West Wing.</p><p>2) <em>Grant: </em>Another classic in the Ron Chernow oeuvre. Again, eminently readable but thick with import. It does not shy away from Grant’s personal flaws, but shows him to be a man constantly struggling to live up to his own standard of personal and moral courage. It corrects nearly a half-century of stupidity inflicted upon America by the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/hillary-clinton-reconstruction/427095/?utm_source=feed">Dunning school</a> of historians, which preferred a portrait of Grant as a bumbling, corrupt butcher of men. Finally, it reframes the Civil War away from the overrated Virginia campaigns and shows us that when the West was won, so was the war. <em>Grant</em> hits like a Mack truck of knowledge. Stupid doesn’t stand a chance.</p><p>3)<em> Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee: </em>Elizabeth Pryor’s biography of Lee, through Lee’s own words, helps part with a lot of stupid out there about Lee—chiefly that he was, somehow, “anti-slavery.” It dispenses with the boatload of stupid out there which hails the military genius of Lee while ignoring the world that all of that genius was actually trying to build.</p><p>4.) <em>Out of the House of Bondage: </em>A slim volume that dispenses with the notion that there was a such thing as “good,” “domestic,” or “matronly” slavery. The historian Thavolia Glymph focuses on the relationships between black enslaved women and the white women who took them as property. She picks apart the stupid idea that white mistresses were somehow less violent and less exploitative than their male peers. Glymph has no need of Scarlett O’Haras. “Used the rod” is the quote that still sticks with me. An important point here—stupid ideas about ladyhood and the soft feminine hand meant nothing when measured against the fact of a slave society. Slavery was the monster that made monsters of its masters. Compromising with it was morally bankrupt—and stupid.</p><p>5.) <em>The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass:</em> The final of three autobiographies written by the famed abolitionist, and my personal favorite. Epic and sweeping in scope. The chapter depicting the bounty of food on which the enslavers feasted while the enslaved nearly starved is just devastating.</p><p>So that should get you to unstupid—but don’t stop there. Read Du Bois. Read Grant’s own memoirs. Read Harriet Jacobs. Read Eric Foner. Read Bruce Levine. It’s not that hard, you know. You’ve got nothing to lose, save your own stupid.</p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedLibrary of Congress29th Regiment Connecticut Volunteers, U.S. Colored Troops in formation near Beaufort, South Carolina, 1864Five Books to Make You Less Stupid About the Civil War2017-11-01T10:39:47-04:002022-03-22T15:45:08-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-541845<p>One common response to the national anthem protests originated by Colin Kaepernick is to disparage them as polarizing. Joe Scarborough, host of <em>Morning Joe</em>, summed up this particular critique in a tweet last weekend:</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">This may be unpopular but it is a political reality:<br>
<br>
Every NFL player refusing to stand for the national anthem helps Trump politically.</p>
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) <a href="https://twitter.com/JoeNBC/status/911942295452372993?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 24, 2017</a></blockquote><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>The idea here is that kneeling NFL players are committing an act of such blatant disrespect that they hand Trump an easy image with which to demagogue. Often attendant to the idea that protesting players are shooting themselves in the foot is the notion that in some other era, black protest proved to be a unifying force that altered the psychology of some critical mass of open-minded whites.</p><p>David Leonhardt <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/opinion/football-kneeling-winning-trump.html">offers a version</a> of this in Monday’s <em>New York Times</em>:</p><blockquote>
<p data-para-count="399" data-total-count="1253">In one of his first prominent speeches, during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. <a href="http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/the_addres_to_the_first_montgomery_improvement_association_mia_mass_meeting.1.html">spoke of</a> “the glory of America, with all its faults.” At the March on Washington, King <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vDWWy4CMhE">described</a> not just a dream but “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” Before finishing, he recited the first seven lines of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” ending with “Let freedom ring!”</p>
<p data-para-count="217" data-total-count="1470">A year-and-a-half later, marchers from Selma to Montgomery carried American flags. Segregationist hecklers along the route held up Confederate flags. Within six months, Lyndon Johnson had signed the Voting Rights Act.</p>
</blockquote><p>Leonhardt goes on to contrast this species of activism, which aligned “the civil-rights movement with the symbols and ideals of America,” with kneeling during the national anthem, which presumably signals opposition to those same symbols. Leonhardt is sympathetic to the aims of Kaepernick’s protest but he contrasts this “angry” approach with the “smart” approach of the civil-rights movement.</p><p>There’s a lot of ground covered in this column, and not all of it thoroughly. Leonhardt’s rendering of the civil-rights movement, for instance, implies a kind of direct and seamless chain of events, from the March on Washington’s invocation of American ideals, to growing white support, to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. This elides self-interested motives for civil-rights reform—the influence of the Cold War, the threat of urban rebellion—in favor of warm and fuzzy ones.</p><p>The trajectory of Leonhardt’s argument is doomed by the defective pad from which it was launched. The problem here is not just a just-so chain of events, but the actual effects of the events. Implicit in Leonhardt’s critique is the idea that Martin Luther King and other civil-rights pioneers, and their protests, were better able to appeal to the hearts of white Americans than Kaepernick and his allies. Leonhardt cites a Yougov poll showing that “only 36 percent consider the kneeling protest to be ‘appropriate.’” This might be damning if not for the fact that the very civil-rights movement Leonhardt cites was generally thought to be equally, if not more, inappropriate.</p><p>As <em>The Washington Post</em><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/19/black-lives-matters-and-americas-long-history-of-resisting-civil-rights-protesters/?utm_term=.a61f627a6132"> noted last year</a>, only 22 percent of all Americans approved of the Freedom Rides, and only 28 percent approved of the sit-ins. The vast majority of Americans—60 percent—had “unfavorable” feelings about the March on Washington. As <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-nfl-protests-may-be-unpopular-now-but-that-doesnt-mean-theyll-end-that-way/"><em>FiveThirtyEight</em> notes</a>, in 1966, 63 percent of Americans had a negative opinion of Martin Luther King. The popular hostility toward King extended to the very government he tried to embrace—King was bugged and harassed by the FBI until the end of his life. His assassination sprang from the deep hostility with which he was viewed, not by a fringe radical minority, but by the majority of the American citizenry.</p><p>That the civil-rights movement was unpopular is not shocking to the activists who protested at the time. <a id="Correction1" name="Correction1"></a>“When I’m told by people, ‘Thank you for what you did,’ I almost want to look around and see who they’re talking to,” Joyce Ladner told the <em>Post</em>.<a href="#Correction">*</a> The paper quotes Julian Bond satirizing the kind of history Leonhardt’s argument is premised—“Rosa sat down, Martin stood up and then the white folks saw the light and saved the day.”</p><p>Leonhardt is a smart and knowledgeable columnist. It is thus surprising to see him embrace a mythical rendition of the civil-rights movement that runs counter to the the facts and figures of the time. But Leonhardt’s column seems less interested in offering an accurate apprehension of the civil-rights movement than in employing the civil-rights movement as a club against radicalism in general, and the Bernie Sanders-wing of the left in particular:</p><blockquote>
<p>Getting smart means nominating progressive candidates who can win, even if they aren’t progressive on every issue. Getting smart means delaying internal fights (like single-payer health care) and unifying against Trump’s agenda (as Democrats in Congress have). Getting smart means understanding, as civil-rights leaders did, that American symbols are a worthy ally.</p>
</blockquote><p>Reading this you would think Blanche Lincoln was primaried, that Alison Lundergan Grimes was done in by her implacable leftist fanaticism, that Evan Bayh never ran in 2016, that Bob Casey wasn’t pro-life, that Joe Manchin wasn’t a senator. But more, you'd think that “smart” necessarily equated with “centrist.” In fact, the very history Leonhardt summons says the opposite.</p><p>Whatever symbols they embraced, civil-rights activists—much like black activists today—never successfully connected with the hearts of the majority of adults of their own day. The process was neither neat nor particularly unifying. In fact, it destroyed the Democratic Party of Roosevelt and Truman. But the activists did sketch a theater of violence, with men like Bull Connor in starring roles, that shamed and embarrassed the country. And aided by an intemperate radicalism within and the Cold War threat without, the activists were able to use that shame to affect meaningful change.</p><p>Perhaps most importantly they affected the attitudes of the children of those white Americans who scorned them. This points to the true target, in terms of white people, of Kaepernick’s protest. The point is not to convince people who boo even when a team kneels before the anthem is sung. The point is to reach the children of those people. The point is the future.</p><p>Kaepernick did not inaugurate his protest in hopes of helping elect more centrist Democrats, or any kind of Democrat. That said, he was not immune to compromise. When his initial efforts were met with disdain and deemed disrespectful, he actually consulted a group of veterans to see how he might better pursue a protest. That is <a href="https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/heres-how-nate-boyer-got-colin-kaepernick-to-go-from-sitting-to-kneeling/">the origin of Kaepernick kneeling</a>, and the fact that it too has been met with scoffs points to deeper problem. If young people attempting to board a bus are unacceptable, if gathering on the National Mall is verboten, if preaching nonviolence gets you harassed by your own government and then killed, if a protest founded in consultation with military veterans is offensive, then what specific manner of protest is white America willing to endure?</p><p>It’s almost as if the manner of protest isn’t the real problem.</p><hr><p><a id="Correction" name="Correction"></a><small><a href="#Correction1">*</a> <i>This article originally attributed this quote to Dorie Ladner. We regret the error. </i></small></p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedAPCivil-Rights Protests Have Never Been Popular2017-10-03T16:18:26-04:002017-10-16T11:18:35-04:00Activists can’t persuade their contemporaries—they’re aiming at the next generation.tag:theatlantic.com,2017:178-539754<iframe width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" src="https://www.theatlantic.com/video/iframe/539754/"></iframe>
<p>“The foundation of Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates in <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/">his feature</a> for <em>The Atlantic’</em>s October 2017 issue. In this animated excerpt from a recent interview with Coates about his article, the writer explains how tribalism and white supremacy paved the way for Trump. Gallup research shows that white voters overwhelmingly supported the candidate across demographics.</p>
Tynesha Foremanhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/tynesha-foreman/?utm_source=feedNicolas Pollockhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/nicolas-pollock/?utm_source=feedTa-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedKasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegghttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/kasia-cieplak-mayr-von-baldegg/?utm_source=feed‘It’s Impossible to Imagine Trump Without the Force of Whiteness'2017-09-14T12:45:00-04:002017-09-14T12:45:46-04:00Ta-Nehisi Coates explores how the 2016 election was a reaction to Obama’s presidency.tag:theatlantic.com,2017:39-537909<figure class="u-block-center"><img alt="" height="341" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/08/Numeral1/1fd710bc8.png" width="300"></figure><p><span style="text-transform:uppercase;"><b>It is insufficient </b><b>to state</b> </span>the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.</p><p><i class="audm--listen-cta">Listen to the audio version of this article:</i><iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/341035969%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-nQkRB&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%"></iframe><i class="audm--download-cta">Feature stories, read aloud: <a href="https://goo.gl/HsxAdb">download the Audm app for your iPhone.</a></i></p><p>His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, <i>Dreams From My Father</i>, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="magazine-issue"></aside><p>It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from <i>cuckold</i>, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur <i>cuck</i> casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”</p><p>In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards—and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.</p><p>To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work 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.</p><p>For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally. The insult intensified when Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. But the bloody heirloom ensures the last laugh. Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president.</p><figure class="u-block-center"><img alt="" height="225" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/08/Numeral2/a64cd9edf.png" width="233"></figure><p><span style="text-transform:uppercase;"><b>The scope of </b><b>Trump’s</b></span> commitment to whiteness is matched only by the depth of popular disbelief in the power of whiteness. We are now being told that support for Trump’s “Muslim ban,” his scapegoating of immigrants, his defenses of police brutality are somehow the natural outgrowth of the cultural and economic gap between Lena Dunham’s America and Jeff Foxworthy’s. The collective verdict holds that the Democratic Party lost its way when it abandoned everyday economic issues like job creation for the softer fare of social justice. The indictment continues: To their neoliberal economics, Democrats and liberals have married a condescending elitist affect that sneers at blue-collar culture and mocks the white man as history’s greatest monster and prime-time television’s biggest doofus. In this rendition, Donald Trump is not the product of white supremacy so much as the product of a backlash against contempt for white working-class people.</p><p>“We so obviously despise them, we so obviously condescend to them,” the conservative social scientist Charles Murray, who co-wrote <i>The Bell Curve</i>, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/hillary-clinton-and-the-populist-revolt">recently told</a> <i>The New Yorker</i>, speaking of the white working class. “The only slur you can use at a dinner party and get away with is to call somebody a redneck—that won’t give you any problems in Manhattan.”</p><p>“The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes,” <a href="http://reason.com/archives/2016/12/29/anthony-bourdain">charged</a> the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, “is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now.”</p><p>That black people, who have lived for centuries under such derision and condescension, have not yet been driven into the arms of Trump does not trouble these theoreticians. After all, in this analysis, Trump’s racism and the racism of his supporters are incidental to his rise. Indeed, the alleged glee with which liberals call out Trump’s bigotry is assigned even more power than the bigotry itself. Ostensibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by arguments about intersectionality, and oppressed by new bathroom rights, a blameless white working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an orcish reality-television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="478" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/09/ConventionTRIP/3e2cbac42.jpg" width="960">
<figcaption class="caption">The Republican National Convention, Cleveland, July 2016. According to preelection polling, if you tallied only white voters, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81 in the Electoral College. (Gabriella Demczuk)</figcaption>
</figure><p>Asserting that Trump’s rise was primarily powered by cultural resentment and economic reversal has become de rigueur among white pundits and thought leaders. But evidence for this is, at best, mixed. In a study of preelection polling data, the Gallup researchers Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell found that “people living in areas with diminished economic opportunity” were “somewhat more likely to support Trump.” But the researchers also found that voters in their study who supported Trump generally had a higher mean household income ($81,898) than those who did not ($77,046). Those who approved of Trump were “less likely to be unemployed and less likely to be employed part-time” than those who did not. They also tended to be from areas that were very white: “The racial and ethnic isolation of whites at the zip code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.”</p><p>An analysis of exit polls conducted during the presidential primaries estimated the median household income of Trump supporters to be about $72,000. But even this lower number is almost double the median household income of African Americans, and $15,000 above the American median. Trump’s white support was not determined by income. According to Edison Research, Trump won whites making less than $50,000 by 20 points, whites making $50,000 to $99,999 by 28 points, and whites making $100,000 or more by 14 points. This shows that Trump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker. So when white pundits cast the elevation of Trump as the handiwork of an inscrutable white working class, they are being too modest, declining to claim credit for their own economic class. 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 whites ages 18–29 (+4), 30–44 (+17), 45–64 (+28), and 65 and older (+19). Trump won whites in midwestern Illinois (+11), whites in mid-Atlantic New Jersey (+12), and whites in the Sun Belt’s New Mexico (+5). In no state that Edison polled did Trump’s white support dip below 40 percent. Hillary Clinton’s did, in states as disparate as Florida, Utah, Indiana, and Kentucky. From the beer track to the wine track, from soccer moms to <span class="smallcaps">nascar</span> dads, Trump’s performance among whites was dominant. According to <i>Mother Jones</i>, based on preelection polling data, if you tallied the popular vote of only white America to derive 2016 electoral votes, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81, with the remaining 68 votes either a toss-up or unknown.</p><p>Part of Trump’s dominance among whites resulted from his running as a Republican, the party that has long cultivated white voters. Trump’s share of the white vote was similar to Mitt Romney’s in 2012. But unlike Romney, Trump secured this support by running against his party’s leadership, against accepted campaign orthodoxy, and against all notions of decency. By his sixth month in office, embroiled in scandal after scandal, a Pew Research Center poll found Trump’s approval rating underwater with every single demographic group. Every demographic group, that is, except one: people who identified as white.</p><h3>Video: “It’s Impossible to Imagine Trump Without the Force of Whiteness”</h3><figure><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gyiH3YcvRH0" width="640"></iframe>
<figcaption class="caption">An animated excerpt from a recent interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates</figcaption>
</figure><p>The focus on one subsector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump’s presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required.</p><p>This transfiguration is not novel. It is a return to form. The tightly intertwined stories of the white working class and black Americans go back to the prehistory of the United States—and the use of one as a cudgel to silence the claims of the other goes back nearly as far. Like the black working class, the white working class originated in bondage—the former in the lifelong bondage of slavery, the latter in the temporary bondage of indenture. In the early 17th century, these two classes were remarkably, though not totally, free of racist enmity. But by the 18th century, the country’s master class had begun etching race into law while phasing out indentured servitude in favor of a more enduring labor solution. From these and other changes of law and economy, a bargain emerged: The descendants of indenture would enjoy the full benefits of whiteness, the most definitional benefit being that they would never sink to the level of the slave. But if the bargain protected white workers from slavery, it did not protect them from near-slave wages or backbreaking labor to attain them, and always there lurked a fear of having their benefits revoked. This early white working class “expressed soaring desires to be rid of the age-old inequalities of Europe and of any hint of slavery,” according to David R. Roediger, a professor of American studies at the University of Kansas. “They also expressed the rather more pedestrian goal of simply not being mistaken for slaves, or ‘negers’ or ‘negurs.’ ”</p><p>Roediger relates the experience, around 1807, of a British investor who made the mistake of asking a white maid in New England whether her “master” was home. The maid admonished the investor, not merely for implying that she had a “master” and thus was a “sarvant” but for his basic ignorance of American hierarchy. “None but negers are sarvants,” the maid is reported to have said. In law and economics and then in custom, a racist distinction not limited to the household emerged between the “help” (or the “freemen,” or the white workers) and the “servants” (the “negers,” the slaves). The former were virtuous and just, worthy of citizenship, progeny of Jefferson and, later, Jackson. The latter were servile and parasitic, dim-witted and lazy, the children of African savagery. But the dignity accorded to white labor was situational, dependent on the scorn heaped upon black labor—much as the honor accorded a “virtuous lady” was dependent on the derision directed at a “loose woman.” And like chivalrous gentlemen who claim to honor the lady while raping the “whore,” planters and their apologists could claim to honor white labor while driving the enslaved.</p><p>And so George Fitzhugh, a prominent 19th-century Southern pro-slavery intellectual, could in a single stroke deplore the exploitation of free whites’ labor while defending the exploitation of enslaved blacks’ labor. Fitzhugh attacked white capitalists as “cannibals,” feeding off the labor of their fellow whites. The white workers were “ ‘slaves without masters;’ the little fish, who were food for all the larger.” Fitzhugh inveighed against a “professional man” who’d “amassed a fortune” by exploiting his fellow whites. But whereas Fitzhugh imagined white workers as devoured by capital, he imagined black workers as elevated by enslavement. The slaveholder “provided for them, with almost parental affection”—even when the loafing slave “feigned to be unfit for labor.” Fitzhugh proved too explicit—going so far as to argue that white laborers might be better off if enslaved. (“If white slavery be morally wrong,” he wrote, “the Bible cannot be true.”) Nevertheless, the argument that America’s original sin was not deep-seated white supremacy but rather the exploitation of white labor by white capitalists—“white slavery”—proved durable. Indeed, the panic of white slavery lives on in our politics today. Black workers suffer because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic among mostly white people is greeted with calls for compassion and treatment, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic among mostly black people is greeted with scorn and mandatory minimums. Sympathetic op‑ed columns and articles are devoted to the plight of working-class whites when their life expectancy plummets to levels that, for blacks, society has simply accepted as normal. White slavery is sin. Nigger slavery is natural. This dynamic serves a very real purpose: the consistent awarding of grievance and moral high ground to that class of workers which, by the bonds of whiteness, stands closest to America’s aristocratic class.</p><p>This is by design. Speaking in 1848, Senator John C. Calhoun saw slavery as the explicit foundation for a democratic union among whites, working and not:</p><blockquote>With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.</blockquote><p>On the eve of secession, Jefferson Davis, the eventual president of the Confederacy, pushed the idea further, arguing that such equality between the white working class and white oligarchs could not exist at all without black slavery:</p><blockquote>I say that the lower race of human beings that constitute the substratum of what is termed the slave population of the South, elevates every white man in our community … It is the presence of a lower caste, those lower by their mental and physical organization, controlled by the higher intellect of the white man, that gives this superiority to the white laborer. Menial services are not there performed by the white man. We have none of our brethren sunk to the degradation of being menials. That belongs to the lower race—the descendants of Ham.</blockquote><p>Southern intellectuals found a shade of agreement with Northern white reformers who, while not agreeing on slavery, agreed on the nature of the most tragic victim of emerging capitalism. “I was formerly like yourself, sir, a very warm advocate of the abolition of slavery,” the labor reformer George Henry Evans argued in a letter to the abolitionist Gerrit Smith. “This was before I saw that there was <i>white</i> slavery.” Evans was a putative ally of Smith and his fellow abolitionists. But still he asserted that “the landless white” was worse off than the enslaved black, who at least enjoyed “surety of support in sickness and old age.”</p><p>Invokers of “white slavery” held that there was nothing unique in the enslavement of blacks when measured against the enslavement of all workers. What evil there was in enslavement resulted from its status as a subsidiary of the broader exploitation better seen among the country’s noble laboring whites. Once the larger problem of white exploitation was solved, the dependent problem of black exploitation could be confronted or perhaps would fade away. Abolitionists focused on slavery were dismissed as “substitutionists” who wished to trade one form of slavery for another. “If I am less troubled concerning the Slavery prevalent in Charleston or New-Orleans,” wrote the reformer Horace Greeley, “it is because I see so much Slavery in New-York, which appears to claim my first efforts.”</p><p>Firsthand reports by white Union soldiers who witnessed actual slavery during the Civil War rendered the “white slavery” argument ridiculous. But its operating premises—white labor as noble archetype, and black labor as something else—lived on. This was a matter of rhetoric, not fact. The noble-white-labor archetype did not give white workers immunity from capitalism. It could not, in itself, break monopolies, alleviate white poverty in Appalachia or the South, or bring a decent wage to immigrant ghettos in the North. But the model for America’s original identity politics was set. Black lives literally did not matter and could be cast aside altogether as the price of even incremental gains for the white masses. It was this juxtaposition that allowed Theodore Bilbo to campaign for the Senate in the 1930s as someone who would “raise the same kind of hell as President Roosevelt” and later endorse lynching black people to keep them from voting.</p><p>The juxtaposition between the valid and even virtuous interests of the “working class” and the invalid and pathological interests of black Americans was not the province merely of blatant white supremacists like Bilbo. The acclaimed scholar, liberal hero, and future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his time working for President Richard Nixon, approvingly quoted Nixon’s formulation of the white working class: “A new voice” was beginning to make itself felt in the country. “It is a voice that has been silent too long,” Nixon claimed, alluding to working-class whites. “It is a voice of people who have not taken to the streets before, who have not indulged in violence, who have not broken the law.”</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="641" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/09/WEL_Coates_Monument/137ccb39e.jpg" width="960">
<figcaption class="caption">The fact of a black president seemed to insult Donald Trump personally. He has made the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. (Gabriella Demczuk)</figcaption>
</figure><p>It had been only 18 years since the Cicero riots; eight years since Daisy and Bill Myers had been run out of Levittown, Pennsylvania; three years since Martin Luther King Jr. had been stoned while walking through Chicago’s Marquette Park. But as the myth of the virtuous white working class was made central to American identity, its sins needed to be rendered invisible. The fact was, working-class whites had been agents of racist terrorism since at least the draft riots of 1863; terrorism could not be neatly separated from the racist animus found in every class of whites. Indeed, in the era of lynching, the daily newspapers often whipped up the fury of the white masses by invoking the last species of property that all white men held in common—white women. But to conceal the breadth of white racism, these racist outbursts were often disregarded or treated not as racism but as the unfortunate side effect of legitimate grievances against capital. By focusing on that sympathetic laboring class, the sins of whiteness itself were, and are still being, evaded.</p><p>When David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, shocked the country in 1990 by almost winning one of Louisiana’s seats in the U.S. Senate, the apologists came out once again. They elided the obvious—that Duke had appealed to the racist instincts of a state whose schools are, at this very moment, still desegregating—and instead decided that something else was afoot. “There is a tremendous amount of anger and frustration among working-class whites, particularly where there is an economic downturn,” a researcher told the <i>Los Angeles Times</i>. “These people feel left out; they feel government is not responsive to them.” By this logic, postwar America—with its booming economy and low unemployment—should have been an egalitarian utopia and not the violently segregated country it actually was.</p><p>But this was the past made present. It was not important to the apologists that a large swath of Louisiana’s white population thought it was a good idea to send a white supremacist who once fronted a terrorist organization to the nation’s capital. Nor was it important that blacks in Louisiana had long felt left out. What was important was the fraying of an ancient bargain, and the potential degradation of white workers to the level of “negers.” “A viable left must find a way to differentiate itself strongly from such analysis,” David Roediger, the University of Kansas professor, has written.</p><p>That challenge of differentiation has largely been ignored. Instead, an imagined white working class remains central to our politics and to our cultural understanding of those politics, not simply when it comes to addressing broad economic issues but also when it comes to addressing racism. At its most sympathetic, this belief holds that most Americans—regardless of race—are exploited by an unfettered capitalist economy. The key, then, is to address those broader patterns that afflict the masses of all races; the people who suffer from those patterns more than others (blacks, for instance) will benefit disproportionately from that which benefits everyone. “These days, what ails working-class and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts,” Senator Barack Obama wrote in 2006:</p><blockquote>Downsizing, outsourcing, automation, wage stagnation, the dismantling of employer-based health-care and pension plans, and schools that fail to teach young people the skills they need to compete in a global economy.</blockquote><p>Obama allowed that “blacks in particular have been vulnerable to these trends”—but less because of racism than for reasons of geography and job-sector distribution. This notion—raceless antiracism—marks the modern left, from the New Democrat Bill Clinton to the socialist Bernie Sanders. Few national liberal politicians have shown any recognition that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions.</p><figure class="u-block-center"><img alt="" height="225" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/08/Numeral3/251849e5d.png" width="364"></figure><p><span style="text-transform:uppercase;"><b>In 2016, Hillary </b><b>Clinton</b></span> acknowledged the existence of systemic racism more explicitly than any of her modern Democratic predecessors. She had to—black voters remembered too well the previous Clinton administration, as well as her previous campaign. While her husband’s administration had touted the rising-tide theory of economic growth, it did so while slashing welfare and getting “tough on crime,” a phrase that stood for specific policies but also served as rhetorical bait for white voters. One is tempted to excuse Hillary Clinton from having to answer for the sins of her husband. But in her 2008 campaign, she evoked the old dichotomy between white workers and loafing blacks, claiming to be the representative of “hardworking Americans, white Americans.” By the end of the 2008 primary campaign against Barack Obama, her advisers were hoping someone would uncover an apocryphal “whitey tape,” in which an angry Michelle Obama was alleged to have used the slur. During Bill Clinton’s presidential-reelection campaign in the mid-1990s, Hillary Clinton herself had endorsed the “super-predator” theory of William J. Bennett, John P. Walters, and John J. DiIulio Jr. This theory cast “inner-city” children of that era as “almost completely unmoralized” and the font of “a new generation of street criminals … the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known.” The “baddest generation” did not become super-predators. But by 2016, they were young adults, many of whom judged Hillary Clinton’s newfound consciousness to be lacking.</p><p>It’s worth asking why the country has not been treated to a raft of sympathetic portraits of this “forgotten” young black electorate, forsaken by a Washington bought off by Davos elites and special interests. The unemployment rate for young blacks (20.6 percent) in July 2016 was double that of young whites (9.9 percent). And since the late 1970s, William Julius Wilson and other social scientists following in his wake have noted the disproportionate effect that the decline in manufacturing jobs has had on African American communities. If anyone should be angered by the devastation wreaked by the financial sector and a government that declined to prosecute the perpetrators, it is African Americans—the housing crisis was one of the primary drivers in the past 20 years of the wealth gap between black families and the rest of the country. But the cultural condescension toward and economic anxiety of black people is not news. Toiling blacks are in their proper state; toiling whites raise the specter of white slavery.</p><p>Moreover, a narrative of long-neglected working-class black voters, injured by globalization and the financial crisis, forsaken by out-of-touch politicians, and rightfully suspicious of a return of Clintonism, does not serve to cleanse the conscience of white people for having elected Donald Trump. Only the idea of a long-suffering white working class can do that. And though much has been written about the distance between elites and “Real America,” the existence of a class-transcending, mutually dependent tribe of white people is evident.</p><p>Joe Biden, then the vice president, last year:</p><blockquote>“They’re all the people I grew up with … And they’re not racist. They’re not sexist.”</blockquote><p>Bernie Sanders, senator and former candidate for president, last year:</p><blockquote>“I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from.”</blockquote><p>Nicholas Kristof, the <i>New York Times </i>columnist, in February of this year:</p><blockquote>My hometown, Yamhill, Ore., a farming community, is Trump country, and I have many friends who voted for Trump. I think they’re profoundly wrong, but please don’t dismiss them as hateful bigots.</blockquote><p>These claims of origin and fidelity are not merely elite defenses of an aggrieved class but also a sweeping dismissal of the concerns of those who don’t share kinship with white men. “You can’t eat equality,” asserts Joe Biden—a statement worthy of someone unthreatened by the loss of wages brought on by an unwanted pregnancy, a background-check box at the bottom of a job application, or the deportation of a breadwinner. Within a week of Sanders lambasting Democrats for not speaking to “the people” where he “came from,” he was making an example of a woman who dreamed of representing the people where she came from. Confronted with a young woman who hoped to become the second Latina senator in American history, Sanders responded with a parody of the Clinton campaign: “It is not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’ No, that’s not good enough … One of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics.” The upshot—attacking one specimen of identity politics after having invoked another—was unfortunate.</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="718" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/09/UVADIP/36c28253d.jpg" width="960">
<figcaption class="caption">The KKK and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, July 8, 2017. Not every Trump voter is a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one. (Gabriella Demczuk)</figcaption>
</figure><p>Other Sanders appearances proved even more alarming. On MSNBC, he attributed Trump’s success, in part, to his willingness to “not be politically correct.” Sanders admitted that Trump had “said some outrageous and painful things, but I think people are tired of the same old, same old political rhetoric.” Pressed on the definition of political correctness, Sanders gave an answer Trump surely would have approved of. “What it means is you have a set of talking points which have been poll-tested and focus-group-tested,” Sanders explained. “And that’s what you say rather than what’s really going on. And often, what you are not allowed to say are things which offend very, very powerful people.”</p><p>This definition of political correctness was shocking coming from a politician of the left. But it matched a broader defense of Trump voters. “Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and just deplorable folks,” Sanders said later. “I don’t agree.” This is not exculpatory. Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist, just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.</p><p>One can, to some extent, understand politicians’ embracing a self-serving identity politics. Candidates for high office, such as Sanders, have to cobble together a coalition. The white working class is seen, understandably, as a large cache of potential votes, and capturing these votes requires eliding uncomfortable truths. But journalists have no such excuse. Again and again in the past year, Nicholas Kristof could be found pleading with his fellow liberals not to dismiss his old comrades in the white working class as bigots—even when their bigotry was evidenced in his own reporting. A visit to Tulsa, Oklahoma, finds Kristof wondering why Trump voters support a president who threatens to cut the programs they depend on. But the problem, according to Kristof ’s interviewees, isn’t Trump’s attack on benefits so much as an attack on <i>their </i>benefits. “There’s a lot of wasteful spending, so cut other places,” one man tells Kristof. When Kristof pushes his subjects to identify that wasteful spending, a fascinating target is revealed: “Obama phones,” the products of a fevered conspiracy theory that turned a long-standing government program into a scheme through which the then-president gave away free cellphones to undeserving blacks. Kristof doesn’t shift his analysis based on this comment and, aside from a one-sentence fact-check tucked between parentheses, continues on as though it were never said.</p><p>Observing a Trump supporter in the act of deploying racism does not much perturb Kristof. That is because his defenses of the innate goodness of Trump voters and of the innate goodness of the white working class are in fact defenses of neither. On the contrary, the white working class functions rhetorically not as a real community of people so much as a tool to quiet the demands of those who want a more inclusive America.</p><p>Mark Lilla’s <i>New York Times </i>essay “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html">The End of Identity Liberalism</a>,” published not long after last year’s election, is perhaps the most profound example of this genre. Lilla denounces the perversion of liberalism into “a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity,” which distorted liberalism’s message “and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.” Liberals have turned away from their working-class base, he says, and must look to the “pre-identity liberalism” of Bill Clinton and Franklin D. Roosevelt. You would never know from this essay that Bill Clinton was one of the most skillful identity politicians of his era—flying home to Arkansas to see a black man, the lobotomized Ricky Ray Rector, executed; upstaging Jesse Jackson at his own conference; signing the Defense of Marriage Act. Nor would you know that the “pre-identity” liberal champion Roosevelt depended on the literally lethal identity politics of the white-supremacist “solid South.” The name Barack Obama does not appear in Lilla’s essay, and he never attempts to grapple, one way or another, with the fact that it was identity politics—the possibility of the first black president—that brought a record number of black voters to the polls, winning the election for the Democratic Party, and thus enabling the deliverance of the ancient liberal goal of national health care. “Identity politics … is largely expressive, not persuasive,” Lilla claims. “Which is why it never wins elections—but can lose them.” That Trump ran and won on identity politics is beyond Lilla’s powers of conception. What appeals to the white working class is ennobled. What appeals to black workers, and all others outside the tribe, is dastardly identitarianism. All politics are identity politics—except the politics of white people, the politics of the bloody heirloom.</p><p>White tribalism haunts even more-nuanced writers. George Packer’s <i>New Yorker </i><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/hillary-clinton-and-the-populist-revolt">essay</a> “The Unconnected” is a lengthy plea for liberals to focus more on the white working class, a population that “has succumbed to the ills that used to be associated with the black urban ‘underclass.’ ” Packer believes that these ills, and the Democratic Party’s failure to respond to them, explain much of Trump’s rise. Packer offers no opinion polls to weigh white workers’ views on “elites,” much less their views on racism. He offers no sense of how their views and their relationship to Trump differ from other workers’ and other whites’.</p><p>That is likely because any empirical evaluation of the relationship between Trump and the white working class would reveal that one adjective in that phrase is doing more work than the other. In 2016, Trump enjoyed majority or plurality support among every economic branch of whites. It is true that his strongest support among whites came from those making $50,000 to $99,999. This would be something more than working-class in many nonwhite neighborhoods, but even if one accepts that branch as the working class, the difference between how various groups in this income bracket voted is revealing. Sixty-one percent of whites in this “working class” supported Trump. Only 24 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of blacks did. Indeed, the plurality of all voters making less than $100,000 and the majority making less than $50,000 voted for the Democratic candidate. So when Packer laments the fact that “Democrats can no longer really claim to be the party of working people—not white ones, anyway,” he commits a kind of category error. The real problem is that Democrats aren’t the party of white people—working or otherwise. White workers are not divided by the fact of labor from other white demographics; they are divided from all other laborers by the fact of their whiteness.</p><p>Packer’s essay was published before the election, and so the vote tally was not available. But it should not be surprising that a Republican candidate making a direct appeal to racism would drive up the numbers among white voters, given that racism has been a dividing line for the national parties since the civil-rights era. Packer finds inspiration for his thesis in West Virginia—a state that remained Democratic through the 1990s before turning decisively Republican, at least at the level of presidential politics. This relatively recent rightward movement evinces, to Packer, a shift “that couldn’t be attributed just to the politics of race.” This is likely true—the politics of race are, themselves, never attributable “just to the politics of race.” The history of slavery is also about the growth of international capitalism; the history of lynching must be seen in light of anxiety over the growing independence of women; the civil-rights movement can’t be disentangled from the Cold War. Thus, to say that the rise of Donald Trump is about more than race is to make an empty statement, one that is small comfort to the people—black, Muslim, immigrant—who live under racism’s boot.</p><p>The dent of racism is not hard to detect in West Virginia. In the 2008 Democratic primary there, 95 percent of the voters were white. Twenty percent of those—one in five—openly admitted that race was influencing their vote, and more than 80 percent voted for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. Four years later, the incumbent Obama lost the primary in 10 counties to Keith Judd, a white felon incarcerated in a federal prison; Judd racked up more than 40 percent of the Democratic-primary vote in the state. A simple thought experiment: Can one imagine a black felon in a federal prison running in a primary against an incumbent white president doing so well?</p><p>But racism occupies a mostly passive place in Packer’s essay. There’s no attempt to understand why black and brown workers, victimized by the same new economy and cosmopolitan elite that Packer lambastes, did not join the Trump revolution. Like Kristof, Packer is gentle with his subjects. When a woman “exploded” and told Packer, “I want to eat what I want to eat, and for them to tell me I can’t eat French fries or Coca-Cola—no way,” he sees this as a rebellion against “the moral superiority of elites.” In fact, this elite conspiracy dates back to 1894, when the government first began advising Americans on their diets. As recently as 2002, President George W. Bush launched the HealthierUS initiative, urging Americans to exercise and eat healthy food. But Packer never allows himself to wonder whether the explosion he witnessed had anything to do with the fact that similar advice now came from the country’s first black first lady. Packer concludes that Obama was leaving the country “more divided and angrier than most Americans can remember,” a statement that is likely true only because most Americans identify as white. Certainly the men and women forced to live in the wake of the beating of John Lewis, the lynching of Emmett Till, the firebombing of Percy Julian’s home, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers would disagree.</p><p>The triumph of Trump’s campaign of bigotry presented the problematic spectacle of an American president succeeding at best in spite of his racism and possibly because of it. Trump moved racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the overt and freely claimed. This presented the country’s thinking class with a dilemma. Hillary Clinton simply could not be correct when she asserted that a large group of Americans was endorsing a candidate because of bigotry. The implications—that systemic bigotry is still central to our politics; that the country is susceptible to such bigotry; that the salt-of-the-earth Americans whom we lionize in our culture and politics are not so different from those same Americans who grin back at us in lynching photos; that Calhoun’s aim of a pan-Caucasian embrace between workers and capitalists still endures—were just too dark. Leftists would have to cope with the failure, yet again, of class unity in the face of racism. Incorporating all of this into an analysis of America and the path forward proved too much to ask. Instead, the response has largely been an argument aimed at emotion—the summoning of the white working class, emblem of America’s hardscrabble roots, inheritor of its pioneer spirit, as a shield against the horrific and empirical evidence of trenchant bigotry.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Packer dismisses the Democratic Party as a coalition of “rising professionals and diversity.” The dismissal is derived from, of all people, Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard president and White House economist, who last year labeled the Democratic Party “a coalition of the cosmopolitan élite and diversity.” The inference is that the party has forgotten how to speak on hard economic issues and prefers discussing presumably softer cultural issues such as “diversity.” It’s worth unpacking what, precisely, falls under this rubric of “diversity”—resistance to the monstrous incarceration of legions of black men, resistance to the destruction of health providers for poor women, resistance to the effort to deport parents, resistance to a policing whose sole legitimacy is rooted in brute force, resistance to a theory of education that preaches “no excuses” to black and brown children, even as excuses are proffered for mendacious corporate executives “too big to jail.” That this suite of concerns, taken together, can be dismissed by both an elite economist like Summers and a brilliant journalist like Packer as “diversity” simply reveals the safe space they enjoy. Because of their identity.</p><figure class="u-block-center"><img alt="" height="220" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/08/Numeral4/a187a3771.png" width="377"></figure><p><span style="text-transform:uppercase;"><b>When Barack Obama</b></span><span class="smallcaps"> </span>came into office, in 2009, he believed that he could work with “sensible” conservatives by embracing aspects of their policy as his own. Instead he found that his very imprimatur made that impossible. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that the GOP’s primary goal was not to find common ground but to make Obama a “one-term president.” A health-care plan inspired by Romneycare was, when proposed by Obama, suddenly considered socialist and, not coincidentally, a form of reparations. The first black president found that he was personally toxic to the GOP base. An entire political party was organized around the explicit aim of negating one man. It was thought by Obama and some of his allies that this toxicity was the result of a relentless assault waged by Fox News and right-wing talk radio. Trump’s genius was to see that it was something more, that it was a hunger for revanche so strong that a political novice and accused rapist could topple the leadership of one major party and throttle the heavily favored nominee of the other.</p><p>“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” Trump bragged in January 2016. This statement should be met with only a modicum of skepticism. Trump has mocked the disabled, withstood multiple accusations of sexual violence (all of which he has denied), fired an FBI director, sent his minions to mislead the public about his motives, personally exposed those lies by boldly stating his aim to scuttle an investigation into his possible collusion with a foreign power, then bragged about that same obstruction to representatives of that same foreign power. It is utterly impossible to conjure a black facsimile of Donald Trump—to imagine Obama, say, implicating an opponent’s father in the assassination of an American president or comparing his physical endowment with that of another candidate and then successfully capturing the presidency. Trump, more than any other politician, understood the valence of the bloody heirloom and the great power in not being a nigger.</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="564" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/09/WEL_Coates_Congress-6/546cba9b6.jpg" width="960">
<figcaption class="caption">January 6, 2017. Republicans applaud after Congress certifies Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College. The American tragedy now being wrought will not end with him. (Gabriella Demczuk)</figcaption>
</figure><p>But the power is ultimately suicidal. Trump evinces this, too. In a recent <i>New Yorker </i>article, a former Russian military officer pointed out that interference in an election could succeed only where “necessary conditions” and an “existing background” were present. In America, that “existing background” was a persistent racism, and the “necessary condition” was a black president. The two related factors hobbled America’s ability to safeguard its electoral system. As late as July 2016, a majority of Republican voters doubted that Barack Obama had been born in the United States, which is to say they did not view him as a legitimate president. Republican politicians acted accordingly, infamously denying his final Supreme Court nominee a hearing and then, fatefully, refusing to work with the administration to defend the country against the Russian attack. Before the election, Obama found no takers among Republicans for a bipartisan response, and Obama himself, underestimating Trump and thus underestimating the power of whiteness, believed the Republican nominee too objectionable to actually win. In this Obama was, tragically, wrong. And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over all its affairs—the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 300 million citizens; the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food; the future of its vast system of education; the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways; the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal—to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase <i>grab ’em by the pussy</i> into the national lexicon. 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.” And in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled.</p><p>The American tragedy now being wrought is larger than most imagine and will not end with Trump. In recent times, whiteness as an overt political tactic has been restrained by a kind of cordiality that held that its overt invocation would scare off “moderate” whites. This has proved to be only half true at best. Trump’s legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is and revealing just how much a demagogue can get away with. It does not take much to imagine another politician, wiser in the ways of Washington and better schooled in the methodology of governance—and now liberated from the pretense of antiracist civility—doing a much more effective job than Trump.</p><p>It has long been an axiom among certain black writers and thinkers that while whiteness endangers the bodies of black people in the immediate sense, the larger threat is to white people themselves, the shared country, and even the whole world. There is an impulse to blanch at this sort of grandiosity. When W. E. B. Du Bois claims that slavery was “singularly disastrous for modern civilization” or James Baldwin claims that whites “have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white,” the instinct is to cry exaggeration. But there really is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump. The first white president in American history is also the most dangerous president—and he is made more dangerous still by the fact that those charged with analyzing him cannot name his essential nature, because they too are implicated in it.</p><hr><p><small><em>This essay is drawn from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, </em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0399590560/theatla05-20/">We Were Eight Years in Power</a><em>.</em></small></p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedJesse Draxler; Photo: David Hume Kennerly / GettyThe First White President2017-09-07T05:00:00-04:002018-05-22T15:11:38-04:00The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-535512<p>HBO’s prospective series <em>Confederate </em>will offer an alternative history of post-Civil War America. It will ask the question, according to co-creator David Benioff, “What would the world have looked like … if the South had won?” A swirl of virtual protests and op-eds have greeted this proposed premise. In response, HBO has expressed “great respect” for its critics but also said it hopes that they will “reserve judgment until there is something to see.”</p><p>This request sounds sensible at first pass. Should one not “reserve judgment” of a thing until after it has been seen? But HBO does not actually want the public to reserve judgment so much as it wants the public to make a positive judgment. A major entertainment company does not announce a big new show in hopes of garnering dispassionate nods of acknowledgement. HBO executives themselves judged <em>Confederate</em> before they’d seen it—they had to, as no television script actually exists. HBO hoped to communicate that approval to its audience through the announcement. And had that communication been successful, had <em>Confederate</em> been greeted with rapturous anticipation, it is hard to imagine the network asking its audience to tamp down and wait.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>HBO’s motives aside, the plea to wait supposes that a problem of conception can be fixed in execution. We do not need to wait to observe that this supposition is, at best, dicey. For over a century, Hollywood has churned out well-executed, slickly produced epics which advanced the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/hillary-clinton-reconstruction/427095/?utm_source=feed">Lost Cause</a> myth of the Civil War. These are true “alternative histories,” built on “alternative facts,” assembled to depict the Confederacy as a wonderland of virtuous damsels and gallant knights, instead of the sprawling kleptocratic police state it actually was. From last century’s <em>The </em><em>Birth of a Nation</em> to this century’s <em>Gods and Generals</em>, Hollywood has likely done more than any other American institution to obstruct a truthful apprehension of the Civil War, and thus modern America’s very origins. So one need not wait to observe that any foray by HBO into the Civil War must be met with a spirit of pointed inquiry and a withholding of all benefit of the doubt.</p><p>Skepticism must be the order of the day. So that when Benioff asks “what would the world have looked like … if the South had won,” we should not hesitate to ask what Benioff means by “the South.” He obviously does not mean the minority of white Southern unionists, who did win. And he does not mean those four million enslaved blacks, whom the Civil War ultimately emancipated, yet whose victory was tainted. Comprising 40 percent of the Confederacy’s population, this was the South’s indispensable laboring class, its chief resource, its chief source of wealth, and the sole reason why a Confederacy existed in the first place. But they are not the subject of Benioff’s inquiry, because he is not so much asking about “the South” winning, so much as he is asking about “the <em>white</em> South” winning.</p><p>The distinction matters. For while the Confederacy, as a political entity, was certainly defeated, and chattel slavery outlawed, the racist hierarchy which Lee and Davis sought to erect, lives on. It had to. The terms of the white South’s defeat were gentle. Having inaugurated a war which killed more Americans than all other American wars combined, the Confederacy’s leaders were back in the country’s political leadership within a decade. Within two, they had effectively retaken control of the South.</p><p>Knowing this, we do not have to wait to point out that comparisons between <em>Confederate</em> and <em>The Man in the High Castle</em> are fatuous. Nazi Germany was also defeated. But while its surviving leadership was put on trial before the world, not one author of the Confederacy was convicted of treason. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg. Confederate General John B. Gordon became a senator. Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.</p><p>The symbols point to something <em>Confederate</em>’s creators don’t seem to understand—the war is over for them, not for us. At this very hour, black people all across the South are still fighting the battle which they joined during Reconstruction—securing equal access to the ballot—and resisting a president whose <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1866/09/the-johnson-party/518748/?utm_source=feed">resemblance to Andrew Johnson is uncanny</a>. <em>Confederate</em> is the kind of provocative thought experiment that can be engaged in when someone else’s lived reality really is fantasy to you, when your grandmother is not in danger of losing her vote, when the terrorist attack on Charleston evokes honest sympathy, but inspires no direct fear. And so we need not wait to note that <em>Confederate</em>’s interest in Civil War history is biased, that it is premised on a simplistic view of white Southern defeat, instead of the more complicated morass we have all around us.</p><p>And one need not wait to ask if Benioff and D.B. Weiss are, at any rate, the candidates to help lead us out of that morass or deepen it. A body of work exists in the form of their hit show <em>Game of Thrones</em>. We do not have to wait to note the persistent criticism of that show is its depiction of rape. Rape—generational rape, mass rape—is central to the story of enslavement. For 250 years the bodies of enslaved black women were regarded as property, to be put to whatever use—carnal and otherwise—that their enslavers saw fit. Why HBO believes that this duo, given their past work, is the best team to revisit that experience is a question one should not wait to ask.</p><p>And all this must be added to a basic artistic critique—<em>Confederate</em> is a shockingly unoriginal idea, especially for the allegedly avant garde HBO. “What if the white South had won?” may well be the most trod-upon terrain in the field of American alternative history. There are novels about it, comic books about it, games about it, and a mockumentary about it. It’s been barely a year since Ben Winters published <em><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780316261241">Underground Airlines</a>.</em></p><p>Storytellers have the right to answer any question they choose. But we do not need to wait to examine all the questions that are not being chosen: What if John Brown had succeeded? What if the Haitian Revolution had spread to the rest of the Americas? What if black soldiers had been enlisted at the onset of the Civil War? What if Native Americans had halted the advance of whites at the Mississippi? And we need not wait to note that more interesting than asking what the world would be like if the white South had won is asking why so many white people are enthralled with a world where the dreams of Harriet Tubman were destroyed by the ambitions of Robert E. Lee.</p><p>The problem of <em>Confederate</em> can’t be redeemed by production values, crisp writing, or even complicated characters. That is not because its conceivers are personally racist, or seek to create a show that endorses slavery. Far from it, I suspect. Indeed, the creators have <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2017/07/hbo-confederate-producers-exclusive-interview.html">said</a> that their hope is to use science fiction to “show us how this history is still with us in a way no strictly realistic drama ever could.” And that really is the problem. African Americans do not need science-fiction, or really any fiction, to tell them that that “history is still with us.” It’s right outside our door. It’s in our politics. It’s on our networks. And <em>Confederate </em>is not immune. The show’s very operating premise, the fact that it roots itself in a long white tradition of imagining away emancipation, leaves one wondering how “lost” the Lost Cause really was.</p><p>It’s good that the show-runners have brought on two noted and talented black writers—Nichelle Tramble Spellman and Malcolm Spellman. But one wonders: If black writers, in general, were to have HBO’s resources and support to create an alternative world, would they choose the world dreamed up by the progenitors of the Ku Klux Klan? Or would they address themselves to other less trod areas of Civil War history in the desire to say something new, in the desire to not, yet again, produce a richly imagined and visually beguiling lie?</p><p>We have been living with the lie for so long. And we cannot fix the lie by asking “What if the white South won?” and waiting for an answer, because the lie is not in the answer, but in the question itself.</p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedGetty ImagesA promotional poster for D.W. Griffith's <i>The Birth of a Nation</i>The Lost Cause Rides Again2017-08-04T14:36:00-04:002017-08-05T10:52:08-04:00HBO’s <em>Confederate</em> takes as its premise an ugly truth that black Americans are forced to live every day: What if the Confederacy wasn’t wholly defeated?tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-526920<p><em>Dear White People </em>is not about white people. The show, Netflix’s adaptation of Justin Simien’s 2014 critically acclaimed film of the same name, is in some ways both a continuation of the source material and a radical departure. The original film’s satirical portrayal of race relations and black identity at the fictional Ivy League school Winchester University followed a group of black students, led by Samantha White (Tessa Thompson), and a budding campaign against the predominantly white humor magazine <em>Pastiche</em> that culminates in a blackface party and small-time race riot.</p><p>The 2017 incarnation of <em>Dear White People</em> picks up where the original left off. With some holdovers from the original cast, the first four episodes of the show reconstruct the party and backlash that ended the film, and begin a story on a campus—and within a racial climate—that’s much different than the one viewers last saw at Winchester. But does the show, also written and co-directed by Simien, exceed the expectations set by the original? <em>The Atlantic</em>’s Vann Newkirk, Adrienne Green, Gillian White, and Ta-Nehisi Coates discuss the whole first season, so spoilers abound.</p><hr align="center" size="2" width="100%"><p><strong>Vann Newkirk: </strong>I enjoyed the show, and that’s an accomplishment because I didn’t like the film at all. I think this incarnation did a lot to flesh out characters in ways I found satisfying, and its use of multiple angles on the same basic events worked pretty well. But one of the things that sat in the back of my mind for all 10 episodes was that I have no idea whether <em>Dear White People </em>is primarily a commentary on race or a college sitcom. The use of different directors for different episodes makes it hard to tell sometimes, and it’s unclear whether the moralizing elements are sincere or played for laughs (see: the show’s incessant use of the word <em>woke</em>).</p><p><strong>Adrienne Green:</strong> I would argue that <em>Dear White People</em> juggles aspirations to be both a scripted commentary on race and a sitcom about college students, and fails mildly in both regards. It’s a better show for assigning full episodes to the perspectives of each of the five black leads—Sam, Lionel, Troy, Coco, and Reggie—an obvious attempt to remedy critiques of the film’s lack of character development. Where this method falls short is the show’s use of the love triangle between Sam, the biracial activist leader of Winchester’s Black Student Union; Gabe, the white graduate student she’s dating; and Reggie, another member of the Black Student Union who has pined for her since freshman year, as the throughline for the season. At times of heightened tension, it felt like Gabe’s feelings, perspectives, and anxieties were centered in a narrative that could have spent a lot more time unpacking the trauma experienced by the other main characters. </p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>As a sitcom about college students, <em>Dear White People </em>isn’t good comedy either. Even when employing obvious satire, especially when dealing with subdivisions in the black community, the jokes are <a href="https://theringer.com/dear-white-people-netflix-tv-show-2017-473a56842803">outdated</a> (<em>so</em> many uses of the word <em>hashtag</em>). Many of the supporting characters seem more like hollow stand-ins for ideologies than they are members of a cohesive cast: There’s a token African student, another student whose only references are to religion, and an Asian student whom viewers are forced to assume is “down.” Joelle, another black female student who’s best friends with the insufferable Sam, received glaringly little development despite having, I’d argue, the potential to be the most well-rounded character on the show. All in all, I think the series, while a detailed improvement on the film, struggles with its intersecting identities as much as its main characters did. I did laugh a little at the <em>Scandal</em> parody, though.</p><p><strong>Gillian White</strong>: I think the archetypes of black students at prestigious, white institutions were limited and somewhat flawed, even in their obvious hyperbole. The bifurcation of the black campus population between the “woke” students—their dress, their speech, their plans of action—and the preppy, weave-wearing, non-agitators they deemed to be decidedly less worthy of that title, was clearly an intentional exaggeration of what kinds of black people exist on the campuses of Ivy League schools.</p><p>But that bifurcation still leaves out some important players in the black student space on such campuses: Caribbean and African students (they only get a small nod via one character, as you mentioned, Adrienne), who often make up a large portion of the black student population on such campuses. Because many are from overseas or have families that immigrated in recent decades, their experiences are often very different than black American students’, which brings with it its own set of differing viewpoints on what progress should look and feel like. Though the show has Troy and Coco, who don’t agree with agitation but still show up for conversations about race, it leaves out the black kids on campus who choose to not participate in such conversations or engage socially with other black students at all. And those stories, too, are an important part of the experience and dynamic on campuses like Winchester’s.</p><p><strong>Ta-Nehisi Coates</strong>: I should say, I didn’t see the movie, and I didn’t see it almost entirely because of the title, <em>Dear White People</em>. There’s a long tradition of black folks pleading with white people. It’s a tradition that emerges from political necessity, so I get it; I’m just not very interested in it. Maybe the movie isn’t part of that tradition. Maybe it was everything I would have loved. But my prejudices kept me away. Make of that what you will.</p><p>There is some of that in the show, as it’s concerned primarily with racism, and only secondarily with black people. What I mean is that blackness in Netflix’s <em>Dear White People </em>is largely a mode of protest. Nearly everything revolves around racism and the pariah-like feelings it inspires. The show is much less concerned with the interior lives of black people. Is there a single scene of a black party in the series? There is a black sorority, but is there a single step show? Even the communal amusement—like the parody of <em>Scandal</em>—revolves around the relationship with white power.</p><p>If this sounds like criticism, it isn’t. I think <em>Dear White People</em>, the show, is a tremendous artistic achievement. It’s always hinting that there is something beyond the pleading and wokeness, something that the show’s more militant characters can’t see. Sometimes it comes in humor—Joelle’s interrupting Sam’s broadcast to figure out how to get “waist-thin and ass-thick.” Other times it comes in moments of deep pain—Coco’s confrontation with Sam over colorism after being autotuned. I couldn’t really handle a <em>Dear White People</em> that was literally “DEAR WHITE PEOPLE!” But this show feels like it’s more about what happens when your sense of being is married to people who don’t much like you.</p><p><strong>Newkirk: </strong>Having attended a historically black college (Morehouse), I agree with Ta-Nehisi’s not-criticism that racism was the star of the show, and not the black characters. My own college experience wasn’t defined by how it clashed with whiteness, and I know that even on real-life campuses like Winchester’s, it’s a lot more than dealing with racism. There’s so much drama within black college communities that needs unearthing, too. Hopefully in Season 2 we’ll get more frat calls and step shows and fried-chicken Wednesdays. Hopefully.</p><p>To Gillian’s point, I can say the show’s depictions of its characters is kind of how black students at elite, predominantly white institutions (PWIs) are viewed by many people who don’t attend such schools. All the characters on <em>Dear White People </em>are different shades of—can we say bougie here? Yeah, bougie. And it’s sometimes funny watching the students of Winchester struggle over their own particular slice of bougieness, although the heavy moments still feel heavy. I’ve always approached the dialogues about race and flare-ups on Ivy League campuses with a sort of detachment, because in my mind there’s still some of that stereotype of bougieness left. (Also, the <em>Scandal </em>parody was golden, as was the Iyanla Vanzant knock-off. I died.)</p><p><strong>Green:</strong> While I wouldn’t necessarily say I connected to any of the characters in the show, I did attend a PWI (Ohio University) at a time when issues of race and brutality against black people were at the forefront of discussion after the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Mike Brown. Factions of students dealt with those tensions in different ways, and I think the rift between Sam, an agitator, and Troy, the obedient son of the dean, was somewhat a true reflection of how multiple approaches to talking about race and flare-ups on campuses play out in real life.</p><p><strong>White: </strong>As someone who also went to a PWI (Columbia), I get that the perception of the black student body at PWIs might align closely with what’s presented in <em>Dear White People</em>. In reality I think the black students who wind up going to PWIs are incredibly varied, just like the black students who go to HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities). That’s true not just in background, but also in views on racial issues that arise, be they external (like those Adrienne mentioned) or internal campus relations (the main kind the show deals with).</p><p>The presumption of bougieness is actually why I found the Coco-Sam dynamic to be so interesting. Of course there are black kids who grew up in nice neighborhoods with lots of privilege. But there are many black kids at these very affluent institutions who are certainly not from affluent backgrounds, who are there in hopes that their four years will give them access to a better life. I also think that black kids who go to PWIs have the additional task of trying to navigate the differences within the black community, while coping with the realities of being black in America, while also trying to find a place at elite, white institutions that have histories of being inaccessible, hostile, and discriminatory. I think that can be a complex space to navigate, especially for young adults who are still trying to figure out where they stand absent parental influence.</p><p><strong>Newkirk</strong>: I thought the show’s attention to detail helped illustrate the students’ efforts at navigating those complex spaces, but it takes an eye and familiarity to make sense of those details. The little things like Troy and Coco’s conservative-leaning Congress of Racial Equality are hilarious if you know the history behind the real-life CORE, and its transformation from a mainstream civil-rights organization to a radical black-power organization in the ’60s, then to <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/05/put-tiger-your-think-tank">a right-wing, climate-denying</a> think tank after Nixon. The style cues also fit in here, and watching the characters’ transformations from freshman year to their adult identities (especially Sam’s adoption of an impressive accessories collection) are fun if you’ve followed black popular culture and aesthetics over the past few years.</p><p><strong>Coates</strong>: Yeah. I’m intentionally avoiding learning too much about who wrote what in the show, but Vann, you are dead-on in terms of the show’s deep knowledge of tradition. I feel like that’s all through the show too. And maybe that is what lends itself to the kinds of generalizations you guys didn’t like. The whole thing felt like satire to me, though. In a good way. None of these black people really resembled any I knew—with two exceptions, Joelle and Coco. The latter gets more screen time, and I think there is a <em>strong</em> argument that Coco is the grounding of the show. (Maybe an argument for Lionel too.) But I thought Antoinette Robertson’s performance as Coco was so spot-on, and the character so sculpted, that I found myself rooting for her even as she sold out. It felt like she’d earned a break.</p><p><strong>White: </strong>I totally agree with that sentiment. I thought “Chapter 4,” where we learn more about Coco’s backstory and her relationship with Sam, was one of the most compelling episodes of the series. The splintering of their friendship and views about how to carve out a space for themselves on a campus where neither feels immediately accepted set up perhaps some of the show’s most interesting and illuminating relationship dynamics. The revelation that Coco is, in fact, keenly aware of her blackness and that her lack of acceptance of her skin, hair, and upbringing comes not only from white people but also from other black people was critically important.</p><p>Similarly, her assertion that Sam’s experience of searching for acceptance is drastically different, since her upbringing, light skin, and hair give her the ability to move more fluidly between crowds, brought some necessary history and context to a plot that could sometimes feel a bit narrow. (The plot felt especially limited for how it centered on the response to the blackface party while so many other issues swirled around the main characters.) I think the backstories explored in that particular episode really helped inform viewers about the choices that characters made when responding to racial tensions and discrimination at an institution apparently eager to turn a blind eye.</p><p><strong>Newkirk:</strong> I will advance that this season was the most useful addition to the campus free-speech debate in years<strong>. </strong>So much of the media freakout over “safe spaces” and “political correctness” comes from 50-year-old columnists and seems strangely disconnected from actual campus life today. <em>Dear White People</em> attempts to complicate that by illustrating both the destructive ends of bigoted speech and the usefulness of speech in advancing marginalized causes. And it shows the debates over free speech in the midst of students actually navigating the marketplace of ideas and coming up against the differences between the ideal and real life. I thought the fact that Lionel’s reporting at the fictional <em>Independent </em>newspaper was stonewalled by moneyed, racist interests helps put the debate back into focus too. The real power to dictate speech and ideas still comes from circles well beyond those of liberal students.</p><p><strong>Green:</strong> For sure. It felt like the broadest goal of the show was to emphasize how the grievances of black students on majority-white elite campuses are often discounted, manipulated, or ignored by the administration (and in the case of Lionel and <em>Independent</em>, the donor interests associated with them). The series succeeded in highlighting the imperfections in the strategies students use to cope with identity politics, and the challenges that will likely stay with them once they leave the campus.</p><p>For example, Sam and Reggie relied on a much more militant approach than Troy and Coco, who advocated for engaging with the university administration, and Lionel, who chose to process his experiences as a black Winchester student via his reporting. These differences were most apparent in their responses to <em>Pastiche</em>’s blackface party and Reggie’s encounter with police in episode five. However, I was disappointed by the times the show meditated more on the strained relationships that resulted from the Reggie party scene (Sam/Gabe, Troy/his father) than on how Reggie dealt with his own trauma on a personal level.</p><p><strong>Newkirk:</strong> That’s pretty spot-on. While I personally appreciated the focus on those strained relationships, I think <em>Dear White People</em> missed a golden opportunity to dig deep into Reggie’s psyche and make a commentary about the psychological effects of activism and involvement in policy brutality, as well as the line between activism and experience.</p><p><strong>White</strong>: I found the episode that starts with Reggie agreeing to try to break out of his shell and have a fun time hanging out with both his white and black peers—only to end in a racial brawl and a cop pulling a gun on him—to be the most heartbreaking of the series. I loved that the episode ended with Reggie, who has been shown to have no problem sticking up for himself, and even goading others into tense encounters, crying on the floor of his dorm room as he tries to process what just happened and the powerlessness that he feels. For a show that’s ostensibly trying to grapple with these very complexities, <em>Dear White People </em>wasted its chance to delve into a devastating moment that so many black Americans, and black students, could surely relate to by not building on that raw emotion in the next episode.</p><p><strong>Green:</strong> Agreed, Gillian. The fallout from Reggie’s encounter with the police felt more like a buildup of passion between Sam and Reggie, and minimized what, as Vann said, was a golden opportunity. The poem that Reggie performed at the open mike could have been the sole outlet for him to vocalize his pain, thus offering him and viewers some catharsis after a very emotional fifth episode. Instead, it was treated as an effort to spark intimacy with Sam. The deflated reread of the same poem on her radio show, that he performed halfheartedly while watching Sam plead with Gabe to take her back, only underscored how mismatched this thread was for the gravity of the situation. Oddly, Coco delivered the most direct line of the season about race at Winchester: “As soon as you double down on your blackness, they will double down on their bullshit … Who cares if you’re ‘woke’ or not if you’re dead?”</p><p><strong>Newkirk: </strong>If I hear the word <em>woke</em> again, I’m gonna vomit. I’m a fan of the comedy in the show iteration of <em>Dear White People,</em> but the dialogue at times felt it was written by a parody statement T-shirt generator. The “woke or not” app made me want to fight people. I get that it seems exactly like something college kids actually do and look back on as adults and groan about, but I really can’t tell if the show is serious about it or not. I can’t tell if a lot of the things that I laughed about with <em>Dear White People</em> were intended as knowing jokes or were actually just written on a slam blog from 2014, but the “woke” stuff was just especially bad.</p><p><strong>Coates: </strong><em>I liked “WOKE OR NOT”!</em> Come on! It was satire. All kidding aside, I take your point, but I thought the writers were very self-aware. Wasn’t the whole idea of that app to pan the self-righteousness of its creators?</p><p>One thing that is perhaps shading my view, for the better, of the show is I don’t watch that much TV. I’ve seen, and liked, <em>Insecure</em> and <em>Atlanta</em>. But I have a hard time situating <em>Dear White People</em> in the larger universe of black television. Also. It is incredible that one can now say <em>larger universe of black television</em> earnestly. I remember when no one in my city had cable. And it was, like, three channels. Damn, I’m old …</p><p><strong>Green: </strong>Having seen and enjoyed new shows like<em> Insecure</em> and <em>Atlanta</em>—shows that came out in 2016, widely regarded as a “banner year” for black television—what stood out to me was how many of them not only advanced the conversation about the potential for diversity in television but also supplied nuance to stories that represented specific iterations of the black experience.</p><p>While I found <em>Dear White People</em> to be somewhat relatable and filled with <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/sylviaobell/dear-black-people?utm_term=.nsYkdOrJk#.xcPmrADPm">many cultural references</a> that could resonate with its black viewers—my favorite being the quip about why nothing Stacey Dash did after <em>Clueless</em> matters—it might lack the intentionality around making characters both flawed but well-rounded that made these other shows so appealing. This first season ends with the apparent dissolution of the love triangle and a final gut punch, with Sam unable to answer the question of whether protesting accomplishes anything at all. The season has come full circle in a way that I think gives the second season a lot of room to work on its missteps.</p>Vann R. Newkirk IIhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/vann-newkirk/?utm_source=feedAdrienne Greenhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/adrienne-green/?utm_source=feedGillian B. Whitehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/gillian-b-white/?utm_source=feedTa-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedNetflixHow Insightful Is <em>Dear White People</em>?2017-05-17T15:07:00-04:002021-06-20T18:40:30-04:00Four <em>Atlantic </em>staffers discuss the Netflix show’s portrayal of a group of black students at a mostly white elite university.tag:theatlantic.com,2017:178-522486<iframe width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" src="https://www.theatlantic.com/video/iframe/522486/"></iframe>
<p>While he was still president, Barack Obama <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/">sat down with Ta-Nehisi Coates</a> and discussed what it’s like to be a symbol of power and the recipient of people’s anger and excitement. “When people criticize or respond negatively to me, usually they’re responding to this character that they’re seeing on TV called Barack Obama, or the office of the presidency, or the White House and what that represents,” he says in this animated interview. “So, you don’t take it personally. You understand that if people are angry that somehow the government is failing, than they are going to look to the guy who represents government.”</p>
Jackie Layhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/jackie-lay/?utm_source=feedTa-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedBarack Obama Is Okay With the Criticism2017-04-10T17:38:10-04:002017-05-04T11:47:55-04:00The former president explains what it’s like to be both a person and a symbol.tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-622622<p><em>Editor’s Note:</em> This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. <br /></p><p><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="321" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9MPbVUJIQHM?start=64" width="570"></iframe></p><p><em>(Editor’s note: Reader questions are in bold, followed by Ta-Nehisi’s replies. The speech above was delivered the day after Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.)</em></p><p><strong>With the election and current political climate, there’s a lot of very understandable gloom and trepidation right now. But is there anything happening in America now that makes you feel optimistic about our future as a society? Any bright spots you would like to see more focus on and draw peoples’ attention to?</strong></p><p>I don’t know. I don’t tend to look for reasons for optimism or pessimism. I think human societies tend to be problematic. And we are just conforming to the rule.</p><p><strong>Trump is very aggressively attacking the credibility of the media. How can the media and journalists best respond to his tactics?</strong></p><p>Not sure they can. Dunno if this is really up to them. Feels like something larger happening. Obviously you can do your job well. But I don’t think, say, <em>The New York Times</em> doing its job well is going to garner them cred among the people who believe Trump is a credible press critic.</p><p><strong>Do you believe in the meme that it was liberal intolerance for conservative views that generated the backlash personified by Trump? Or the related meme that liberals have ignored white heartland people?</strong></p><p>Nah. Trump was polling well back in 2012 in GOP primaries.</p><p><strong>How do you think protest movements are gonna evolve in the next few years to counter the alt-right direction that national politics have taken?</strong></p><p>No idea. But they need to take appropriate measures against the very real possibility of government surveillance and harassment. We’ve done it before. Like, in the life-times of many Americans. No real reason to think it could not happen again.</p><p><strong>What lessons can today’s protest movements take from the civil rights movement, Black Panthers, etc.?</strong></p><p>That it is highly likely they will be viewed as a threat. That it is likely that they will be set against each other. That they will be bugged. It’s worth talking to some of the leaders in the Muslim communities here in New York about what the NYPD did to them under Bloomberg.</p><p><strong>What do you think of the recent schism on the left (or maybe just the far left?) about economic populism and “identity politics”?</strong></p><p>Think it’s silly. I guess I’d be put in the ID politics camp. But there is really nothing in the world-view of, say, Bernie Sanders I actually disagree with. I’d like a guaranteed income, single-payer health care, a stronger safety net, etc. The problem is the temptation to paper over historically fraught issues to achieve that is tempting. And you always see that on the left. Whether with Clinton’s “rising tide” rhetoric, with Obama’s adoption of that notion (see the archives [<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/a-rising-tide-lifts-all-yachts/280224/?utm_source=feed">here</a>]), or with Sanders.</p><p>It’s disappointing to see the senator endorse the charge of “political correctness.” It’s disappointing to see him invoke his own identity as coming from the white working class immediately after the election, and then a few weeks later attack identity politics and candidates standing up and saying “Vote for me, I’m a woman.” This is how the attacks on ID politics work. It’s fine for Sanders to invoke his own. It’s a problem when others do the same.</p><p>I also think Hillary Clinton was a very unfortunate vessel for the kind of complaints that folks in the “identity politics” camp typically lodge. Her skills as a politician aside, I think her own history provoked a great deal of skepticism among people like me who actually come from that generation that was written off as “super-predators,” who remember the crime bill, who remember welfare reform. I think that made it easy for those who were (rightly) concerned about Clinton’s speeches, for instance, to throw out the causes Clinton adopted right along with her.</p><p><strong>Which is a bigger concern for you, Trump’s agenda or the upcoming legislative session?</strong></p><p>Both. They’re one and the same. This does not end well. For anyone.</p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedOn Trump and the Election2017-01-13T13:10:00-05:002022-03-22T15:46:07-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-622623<p><em>Editor’s Note:</em> This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. <br /></p><p><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="321" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PY1g5_vERvc" width="570"></iframe></p><p><em>(Editor’s note: Reader questions are in bold, followed by Ta-Nehisi’s replies. In the video above, he discusses issues surrounding his cover story, “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/?utm_source=feed">My President Was Black</a>.”)</em></p><p><strong>After reading you for the last 5+ years or so, and becoming more aware of the racial strains that permeate the U.S. on so very many levels, and realizing that you are so much more aware of these things than I am (from experience and study), I wonder if you despair of Americans ever living together in truly racially peaceful and tranquil society, rather than being riven by racial division, strife, and conflict? Is a real peace—with something approaching fairness and justice—ever going to be on offer in America in your view?</strong></p><p>Nah. I don’t despair. The world is imperfect. Long view of history shows evil triumphing more often than we’d like to admit. That’s just how it is. I don’t despair too much about dying either. It’s just a fact of being human.</p><p><strong>How do you try and communicate that insight to children?</strong></p><p>I talk to them, just like I’m talking here. I’ve never tried to hide anything.</p><p><strong>As a black mother and an advocate for racial equality, I am concerned about your totality of belief that black people will never gain true equality in America. Don’t you think you should use your position in the media to forge alliances and proffer the reality that there are many blacks and whites that seamlessly bridge the gap between the races?</strong></p><p>Nah. I’m a writer. My job is to speak what that which I think is true. If that bridges the gap, that’s good. If it doesn’t, that’s too bad.</p><p><strong>As a Gen-X pundit of repute, what’s the most frustrating gap you see between Boomer and Millennial (and younger, now) activism? Is there something you’d wish both could grasp, but somehow they cannot?</strong></p><p>I don’t feel much of one. I’m immensely proud of BLM, for instance. The only time I felt distance was during the campus protests. But that’s not generational. It’s because I went to an HBCU [historically black college or university] and so couldn’t directly relate to, say, having to walk past a hall named after a white supremacist every day. But that’s just because of my experiences. I think the kids are all right.</p><p><strong>I’m a white guy who went to an HBCU (Del-State). I thought it was a great experience, but there was definitely a mixed response to my presence on some days. In recent years, at least as far as Del-State is concerned, there are more white folks going to HBCUs. Do you think this is good, bad, or no big deal?</strong></p><p>Sure, it’s a good thing. I always thought of Howard being defined by its mission, not by racist exclusion. There is historical precedent for this. A historian recently told there was a time at the end of the 19th/early-20th century when Howard was the only place in the D.C. area that would train women to be doctors. The result was that, for a time, Howard was actually the largest producers of white women doctors in the region.</p><p>That’s right on mission. These places weren’t created to be the inverse of segregated universities. In fact, HBCUs have never been segregated. Howard, specifically, was created to educate and create a class of people invested in the ideals of justice and equality.</p><p>I can’t speak for Del-State. But I don’t fear white students coming to Howard. I think it’s great. We need more. And then we need other non-black institutions— not just higher ed—to follow that same example with black and brown folks.</p><p>As for whatever raised eyebrows you received, I’d say, while it isn’t right, ultimately, that’s good too. America is on permanent raised-eyebrow status toward those of us who are black. It’s not awful to get to see how that might feel.</p><p><strong>What’s the best way for a white person to be an ally and advocate for social justice while de-centering oneself?</strong></p><p>I don’t know. This isn’t really what I’d ask of anyone. I know the vocabulary here is popular. But it’s not really the kind I’d use or ask be used around me.</p><p>I think it’s really important to be conscious of yourself and the world around you. For me, that meant reading a lot and reporting. I don’t know that white people need to be “allies” so much as understand that any black struggle in America is ultimately a struggle for the large country. “Ally” presumes a kind of distance that I am not sure exists.</p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedOn Race Relations2017-01-13T13:05:00-05:002022-03-22T15:46:08-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-622624<p><em>Editor’s Note:</em> This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. <br /></p><p><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="321" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/u_PjM0sRCjc" width="570"></iframe></p><p><em>(Editor’s note: Reader questions are in bold, followed by Ta-Nehisi’s replies.)</em></p><p><strong>I’ve been listening to Blood Orange’s <em>Freetown Sound</em> album on repeat for a couple days now and it blew my mind when I looked at the credits and realized it was you at talking at the end of “Love Ya.” How did that even happen?</strong></p><p>They asked to sample. I said, sure. It’s a cool album.</p><p><strong>What music have you been grooving to recently?</strong></p><p>Rihanna. Frank Ocean. Kilo Kish. Old Jay-Z.</p><p><strong>What sort of history books, if any, are you reading these days? I loved your discussion of <em>Bloodlands</em>.</strong></p><p>Very slowly making my way through Du Bois’s <em>Black Reconstruction</em>.</p><p><strong>Have you been following Jamelle Bouie’s reading of it <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/slate_plus/the_history_of_american_slavery/2016/12/blogging_w_e_b_dubois_black_reconstruction.html">at <em>Slate</em></a>?</strong></p><p>Nah. Gotta stay in my own head.</p><p><strong>I know you’re not much of a football fan these days, but I was wondering if you have any thoughts on (what seems to be) the steadily growing pushback against taxpayer-subsidized stadiums in major cities around the country (including, as of this week, San Diego). Will we see an end to these sorts of deals anytime soon? Should we?</strong></p><p>I actually am back watching. Got pulled back in. Was looking for some part of me that was lost. More on that soon.</p><p><strong>How has your living in France modified your point of view about race and culture, or has it?</strong></p><p>Left me thinking a lot more about the international implications of the twin legacies of colonialism and enslavement. I’m not prepared to say anything definitive. But there’s a lot of interesting stuff there. Things like looking at the reaction of white Southerners to the Civil War, and the reaction of les pieds noirs to the Algerian War.</p><p>Just questions right now, honestly. Nothing certain.</p><p><strong>How’s your French, at this point? Have you tried it out shouting at an American tourist or two?</strong></p><p>Ça avance. Mais la langues étranger sont toujours difficile. Particularmente pour les adults. J'ai une prof privée. Nous rencontrons une fois ou deux fois chaque semaine. Donc, je vais continuer. J'adore français.</p><p>Désolé pour mes faults.</p><p><strong>“Les langues”! C’est pluriel. Bonne continuation!</strong></p><p>Salut!</p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedOn Music and Books2017-01-13T13:00:00-05:002022-03-22T15:46:08-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-622625<p><em>Editor’s Note:</em> This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. <br /></p><p><iframe frameborder="no" height="300" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/297801168&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%"></iframe></p><p><em>(Editor’s note: These questions from </em>Atlantic<em> readers—in bold—and replies from Ta-Nehisi were compiled from an <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/01/on-trump-and-the-election/513017/?utm_source=feed">“Ask Me Anything” he did with the TAD group on 1/12</a>. In the podcast above, starting at the 114:30 mark, Ta-Nehisi speaks at length about the bygone era of blogging and his writing today. Money quote: “Blogging was real-time, ongoing learning process. That went away. … I didn’t write too much [during the 2016 election] because I didn’t want to take this oracular role. There was no space to try to figure it out. There was no space to think about it.”)</em></p><p><strong>I have been dying to ask about the new book. Is it by any chance the historical fiction one you’d started oh so long ago? I always thought you had captured some lightning with that one.</strong></p><p>Hi Sandy. Yes. Signed a two book deal. First, is essays. Second is that historical fiction.</p><p><strong>You <a href="https://twitter.com/tanehisicoates/status/815975576255287296">tweeted earlier this year</a> that you’re focused on book-writing. How much has your process changed as you’ve gotten more attention and a wider audience? How different is your day-to-day process now from the days of <i>The Atlantic</i> blogging and the original Horde?</strong></p><p>Changed a lot. More people looking. Probably more than I’m comfortable with. Much less room to think out loud. So, thinking is much more of a private thing these days. The landscape isn’t really set up for the public act of asking questions.</p><p>It’s cool though. There was a time when I asked questions privately—before I got to <em>The Atlantic</em>. Basically have to go back to that. Maybe that’s as it should be.</p><p><strong>Do you miss blogging? [<em>Atlantic</em> colleague and former <em>Dish</em> editor] Chris B. was lamenting the fall of blogging as a platform for thinking and learning in public and I always found that to be my favorite kind of process to read.</strong></p><p>Yes. Terribly.</p><p><strong>You seem both surprised and a little discomforted by how much attention you got following BTWAM [<em>Between the World and Me</em>] and, obviously, a lot of it was hostile. I remember reading about your Park Slope house purchase and <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/on-homecomings/481818/?utm_source=feed">your comments</a> on the whole response to that. How do you manage that? I'm legit just curious about it as someone who feels, y'know, affection for you from your work but also invested in your work and what it adds to the discourse.</strong></p><p>The house was actually in Lefferts-Garden, where I’d rented when my wife, my son and I first moved to New York. Was attached to that neighborhood. Got the house. Neighborhood blog plastered my face up. Realtor talked. And suddenly it wasn’t home anymore. It was performance.</p><p>When you know that people know who you are, you are always working—and not the work you want to do. You are sort of performing, because you know they are looking, or at least glancing at you. Would hate to walk out thinking about that.</p><p>There is something else: People never stop to think about you as an actual person with a family in these situations. I’ve said this publicly now, so it’s no point hiding it. My wife has long had women’s health issues at the core of her mission, specifically reproductive rights. She’s actually in med-school now, and the plan was always for her to be active on that front. When you want to go into that work, and your address is plastered all of the internet, with pictures and floorpans of your house, well … When I talked about “not feeling safe,” it wasn’t just for me.</p><p>People sort of went crazy when BTWAM came out. I’m happy a bunch of people read it. I’m happy it touched so many people. I’m less happy that it became an object for certain folks, or was discussed that way. I’m less happy that journalists started scrolling through my kid’s Instagram account.</p><p>It’s been a year of adjustment. The good news is I think I understand now. The rules are different. I can’t do things like I used to. I’m not “one of the folks” anymore. I kinda had to accept that. Was very hard to.</p><p><strong>I can only imagine that was difficult—not just the specific risks, but having to reorient your way of carrying yourself both as a writer and person to accommodate and adjust to that sudden level of attention. It’s interesting to me that you became noteworthy in part and while interacting very directly with your audience, which always appealed to the punk fan in me, but also that you never seemed to hold yourself apart or above your readers and commentators.</strong></p><p><strong>So it's hard not to notice when you bought the house that the attention had a specific edge to it, in much the same way that the critiques of BTWAM or “The Case for Reparations” had an edge to it. Part of watching your career has sort of been watching your room to maneuver or margin for error shrink, even as the critiques—particularly from other writers—become more personalized and less focused or astute. I don’t know that there's really a question in there, just observations from being a reader for the past six or seven years. Your growth as a public intellectual and writer has been tremendous and some of the attention you’ve gotten has been warranted, but it’s sad to see how you becoming more widely known and noteworthy enables some of the worst reactions.</strong></p><p>It’s just a fact of “winning.” That’s what it is. I won. I became a “successful” writer. And this is part of what comes with it. My job is to make sure that I don’t let any of that—good or bad—corrupt the things that I love: writing, my health, and my family.</p><p><strong>Hi Mr. Coates, this is the artist formerly known as Horde Centurion Erik Vanderhoff. I’ve been reading you since 2009, and I have to say, it’s been fascinating watching you grow as a thinker and a writer. The time period where you felt brave and curious enough to share that growth in real time through your blog at <i>The Atlantic</i> and interacting so directly with your commenters was a really special thing, something I’ve not seen reproduced and am not sure could be. Now, as a member of the moderator team at TAD, I’ve come to really appreciate the sheer amount of effort curating the Horde must have entailed for you.</strong></p><p><strong>As with all things so special, it had a short life. I’m wondering if you could verify a suspicion of mine: Did the Horde sort of sow its own seeds of its demise? Was there a point where you realized that the Horde was no longer providing the challenge and education it had in the past? I’ve always felt that we moved beyond deep discussion to a more insular community of personality, and that such things invariably attract discord from without</strong></p><p>I never expected my writing to become as popular as it did. You don’t make a case for reparations thinking “Oh yeah, people are gonna love this.” I didn’t see that coming. That, more than anything, killed the blogging. It became impossible to talk. Just too many people.</p><p><strong>Do you have a question for us?</strong></p><p>I just want you all to know that I’m sorry I had to leave you. It was not a case of me feeling like I’d outgrown the space or anything. Just became impossible to protect it as such.</p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedWikimedia‘I Miss Blogging, Terribly’2017-01-13T11:00:00-05:002022-03-22T15:46:08-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-622626<p><em>Editor’s Note:</em> This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. <br /></p><p><em>(Editor’s note: These questions from </em>Atlantic<em> readers—in bold—and replies from Ta-Nehisi were compiled from an <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/01/on-trump-and-the-election/513017/?utm_source=feed">“Ask Me Anything” he did with the TAD group on 1/12</a>.)</em></p><p><strong>As someone who’s largely a DC [Comics] reader, Black Panther is effectively my first real introduction to the character. What immediately jumped out at me was the dialogue. It feels a bit different from most comic books (in a good way!), and I look forward to seeing what happens in it down the road. Is there any other comic book you’d love to write? Or do you think Black Panther might be it for you?</strong></p><p>I expect to be on Black Panther, or BP-related things, for a while.</p><p><strong>How would you like to see the Black Panther series (and world) grow and change? Any inclusion of other, missing characters? What would they be?</strong></p><p>Want it to get bigger. Much, much bigger.</p><p><strong>When discussing writing Black Panther, you’ve talked about the need to disregard fan opinion on some level to work toward the goal of creating work that will hold up five or 10 years from now. As the stories you’re writing have progressed, has the fan reception of your work changed that outlook for you or confirmed it?</strong></p><p>Still believe it. I don’t want artists making work that they think I want to see. I want them to pull from their heart, and if I love it, I love it. If I don’t, oh well.</p><p><strong>Where does feminism intersect with your work? Does it at all?</strong></p><p>Right now, it’s most prominently in my comic books. I don’t want to blow the story, but basically one of the main threads is a revolution launched against the main character. The facts of sexual plunder, a society ignoring that plunder, and the fact of resistance to it, basically runs through every issue.</p><p>And that is how it’s manifest in its least subtle ways. I think in a lot of other ways, it’s much more subtle, but there. Snuck in an Audre Lorde citation in the last issue.</p><p>I don’t expect everyone to read comic books, so if folks aren’t seeing this, it’s cool. But it is there. <a href="http://fusion.net/story/289077/dora-milajie-black-panther-coates/">Here’s a good summary</a> of the early stuff and the most obvious aspects of it.</p><p><strong>Any specific female writers that you’re engaging with right now? (I so vividly remember the days you were reading Southern Confederate female writers.) Who are the female voices that, I dunno, really speak to you and influence the work you’re doing on the comics? I know that Roxane Gay was tapped to work on the prequels.</strong></p><p>Yeah, I mean, because of the kind of work I’m doing write now it’s mostly in comics. Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Bitch Planet is a huge inspiration. Chelsea Cain’s Mockingbird was a book far from my own, but I adored it. Yona Harvey and I are cooking up some stuff. And obviously Roxane, who is just a force of nature.</p><p>Also, I think the new She-Hulk book looks really, really, really good.</p><p><strong>There’s actually been some criticism of the new She-Hulk book, in that a lot of women don’t particularly want every female Marvel character to be defined by trauma and violence. Especially as you’re dealing with violence against women in BP, do you have any thoughts on that?</strong></p><p>I always answer this sort of question by the argument that there should be more characters. I think there are some options here, though—Moongirl, Ms. Marvel, Captain Marvel, Silk, Gwenpool. There are female leads in several of the team books like Inhumans and X-Men. I think the current IvX series is basically led by two women.</p><p>In this specific case though, I’m not sure what you do. I mean, her cousin really was killed. They were close. That probably would be traumatic. Marvel brought in a woman to write the book and (I think) draw it also. I’m not sure what else they should have done here. I like the book. I think it’s quiet and subtle.</p><p>Beyond that, I’d say that superhero comics, themselves, are largely a response to trauma. Spider-Man is responding to the death of his Uncle Ben (among other deaths). The X-Men are responding to the trauma of discrimination and visions of genocide. Captain America is responding to the death of almost everyone he ever loved. Mockingbird was responding to rape in the recent series. Black Panther is responding to the trauma of the destruction of his kingdom.</p><p>And so on ...</p><p><strong>What motivated this particular engagement with feminism in your comic books? Why there and not somewhere else? What prompted the collaboration with Roxane Gay?</strong></p><p>I don’t know. It was the next thing I was doing. It’s not really a conscious thing, like that. Comic books have a long, fraught history with sexism. And so I felt, like, that was part of my inheritance as a comic-book writer. The debates are so much a part of the culture. And then there were some things about Black Panther, specifically, that made it the space to do it—the Dora Milajae’s position, the fact that most of the men around him were dead, the fact that in wars, rape is so often used as a weapon.</p><p><strong>Who are your interlocutors with respect to feminism and womanism? Who are you in conversation with who will push back against the sexism in your own thinking and writing?</strong></p><p>I don’t know. The only people who usually have input on my writing are my wife and my editor. I’m not in conversation with anyone, except the people I report on and the people I work with.</p><p>The pushback is everywhere. People review my comic books. People review every article I write—<em>The Atlantic </em>even publishes them. A great deal of the critique of <em>Between the World and Me</em> was from a feminist perspective. bell hooks pushed back, among others.</p><p>Some of that has value. Some of it does not. I try my best to separate the wheat from the chaff.</p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedMarvel‘Superhero Comics Are Largely a Response to Trauma’2017-01-13T10:00:00-05:002022-03-22T15:46:09-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2016:50-511586<p><em>In “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/?utm_source=feed">My President Was Black</a>,” </em>The Atlantic<em>’s Ta-Nehisi Coates examined Barack Obama’s tenure in office, and his legacy. The story was built, in part, around a series of conversations he had with the president. This is a transcript of the final of those four encounters, which took place by phone after the election, on November 17, 2016</em><em>. You can find the other interviews, as well as responses to the story and to these conversations, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/the-obama-era/?utm_source=feed">here</a>.</em></p><hr><p><strong>Ta-Nehisi Coates:</strong> Hello.</p><p><strong>Barack Obama:</strong> Hey, man, how are you doing?</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> I’m okay. How are you, Mr. President?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Well, I’m doing fine. I’m in Germany, so this is how I roll this week, I guess. I guess I’ve got some business back home in between doing my business out here.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Yeah, I guess it’s about 10 o’clock at night over there.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="special-report"></aside><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Yeah, but it’s all right. I’m a night owl. And I didn’t think this needed to be a long conversation. I just figured that after all our conversation before the election, and then in the wake of the election, that you might need a very brief follow-up question. And I wanted to make sure that you had a chance because I know that you had to finish that story.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Yeah, I appreciate that, and I did not think of this as a very long conversation, either. If you don’t mind, I have three questions. Is that okay?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> It may be. It depends on what they are.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Okay. All right.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> If they’re too long or difficult, then I’ll pretend that we got cut off.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> All right, well, I’ll try to get through this. I’ll see what I can do here. The first thing I would ask is, we had this conversation very early in our session, and you talked about the belief that what the American people most want from a candidate is an optimistic vision. And I believe you were referencing Donald Trump at the time, and it was your thought that it was hard to get elected with a gloom-and-doom message. And I just wonder what you take from this election given what happened, and how your theory reconciles with that.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Well, look, I think I am absolutely, you know, surprised like everybody else with the outcome. So, you know, I don’t want to pretend like I was anticipating the results. I do think, though, that when you look at the specifics of this race, it is hard to, I think, draw a grand theory from it, because there were just some very unusual circumstances. We ended up having a situation in which both candidates had very high negatives. I think the caricature of Hillary Clinton that developed as a consequence of all kinds of stuff, compounded in that last week with more news about emails, meant that people never really got to hear a positive, optimistic message. Hillary Clinton had all kinds of terrific policies, but that was just not the focus of coverage. And as a consequence, you ended up having not just a polarized electorate, but a fairly dispirited electorate. It meant that a lot of the people who voted for me didn’t turn out to vote—that a lot of people who, if the surveys are correct, approve of my work and my presidency didn’t vote or decided, <em>You know what, let’s just shake it up this time</em>. And you know, it’s just an indication of the structural challenges that progressive politics have always faced in this country.</p><p>You know, we are a country that makes it harder to vote than most countries. We are a country in which the campaigns are so long and so expensive that by the time you get to the end of it, negative campaigning dominates as opposed to a proactive set of proposals. We have an electoral college that mirrors, you know, the states’ power that was preserved in the design of the Senate, where, you know, small states, or more rural states, or states with, you know, large rural or less diverse populations have significantly more influence in some cases than massive states like California. And so, you know, you add all that up and you ended up getting the specific result that we got.</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="640" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/12/AP_363334264596/60e9e46b7.jpg" width="960">
<figcaption class="caption">Hillary Clinton testifies before the House Select Committee on Benghazi on October 22, 2015. (Evan Vucci / AP)</figcaption>
</figure><p>But as I have said publicly in all the interviews that I’ve conducted since the election, to be optimistic about the long-term trends of the United States doesn’t mean that everything is going to go in a smooth, direct, straight line. It, you know, goes forward sometimes, sometimes it goes back, sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it zigs and zags. And, you know, the important thing that I’m hoping everybody draws from this is anybody who thinks that opting out of the system is a smart protest move, anybody who thinks that disengaging from the political process because “both parties are the same” or “both candidates are the same” or “none of them are getting at the structural issues that are ultimately going to make the biggest difference”—you know, those approaches can result in Donald Trump being elected president.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> I’m going to skip to my third question, because it’s important I get to it. I don’t want to get accidentally cut off here.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> I was teasing. I wouldn’t actually—but I appreciate that you took it seriously.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> I did. One of the things I wanted to ask you—and this really comes personally from my own concerns—we have this history in our country where national-security policy is directed at a certain foe—for instance, earlier in the 20th century at communism during the Cold War—and sometimes, when in the wrong hands, it expands out. And in the ’60s it expanded out into the civil-rights movement. In the post-9/11 world, the office of the presidency has accumulated quite a bit of powers in terms of national security. Are you concerned at all about that stuff—now that there’s somebody else—being directed at activists, at Black Lives Matter, people like that? Are you worried about that?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Yeah, I have to say that this is an argument that I know was made in a <em>New York Times</em> article and you’ve heard in some progressive circles, and it’s just not accurate. Keep in mind that the capacity of the [National Security Agency] or other surveillance tools are specifically prohibited from being applied to U.S. citizens or U.S. persons without specific evidence of links to terrorist activity or other foreign-related activity. And those laws have been in place and have been strengthened, and the capacities that have been developed over the last eight years of my presidency mainly derive from changes in technology, not because we’ve somehow weakened oversight or expanded executive power. It just has to do with the fact that everybody is using a cellphone, everybody is using emails.</p><p>In terms of domestic surveillance of any sort, it’s probably harder to surveil or use these tools with a smartphone than it was getting a wiretap for a land phone. And both would be illegal without probable cause. So you know, I think this whole story line that somehow Big Brother has massively expanded and now that a new president is in place it’s this loaded gun ready to be used on domestic dissent is just not accurate. It doesn’t match up with how these things are organized. Now, I think it’s absolutely important to be concerned that our criminal-justice system, the FBI, the Justice Department, law enforcement take seriously civil liberties. Because the possibility of abuse by government officials always exists. The issue is not going to be that there are new tools available; the issue is making sure that the incoming administration, like my administration, takes the constraints on how we deal with U.S. citizens and persons seriously. And that’s not a technical issue; that’s the degree to which we abide by the law.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Right. Right. Okay, third, final question. In one of your speeches you made this very explicit appeal to black voters, and you mentioned if we didn’t come out, this would be an insult to your legacy. And at least in the early numbers, it looks like we did not—we certainly did not come out in the numbers that we came out in in 2008 or 2012.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Right.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> How are you feeling? Is this campaign right? Do you feel insulted? Or what are you left with?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> No, you know, I mean, I think that I was trying to make a very specific point, which is that you can’t rely on inspiration to take care of your business. If you were a strong supporter of me, and loved Michelle, and believed in everything we were doing, and stood in line for four hours to vote for us in ’08, and put up with some more lines in ’12, then you can’t stay at home in ’16 because we’re not on the ballot. That there’s a direct line between the work we did and the handoff we needed to make to the next administration to ensure that that progress was sustained. And ultimately, I’m not entirely surprised that there was some slippage. That wasn’t just among African American voters. It was among young voters, and, you know, those were costly in the places where it really mattered in some of the swing states. It just reflects the nature of our political process, where we do not think of voting and political participation as a routine responsibility and duty, but rather think of it as something we do when it’s exciting. Now, look, I don’t want to make generalizations across the board, because the truth is, the African American vote actually exceeded the white vote in terms of percentage—not absolute numbers, obviously, but the percentage who voted—in 2012. And that was probably not entirely sustainable.</p><p>On the other hand, we’ve got more ground to make up. We’ve got more schools that are underfunded. We’ve got more youth that are unemployed. We’ve got more people who are struggling to pay the bills. And, you know, one of the difficult truths of democracy is that the people who would benefit most from progressive policies like raising the minimum wage, and investment in infrastructure, and strengthening unions, and affordable child care, and help on college access and affordability—those are the folks also that, for a whole variety of reasons, are less likely to vote. And it requires an enormous amount of energy to overcome that historical fact. We were able to do it in 2008 and 2012, but it’s hard to sustain. And then one of things that I’ll be spending a lot of time thinking about once I’m out of office is: How do we change those habits? How do we make our engagement and involvement and interest an everyday thing rather than an every-four-years thing or an every-eight-years thing?</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Okay.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> All right?</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> That’s it. Thank you so much, Mr. President. I appreciate you taking this time.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> All right, man. Take care.</p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedIan Allen‘Surprised Like Everybody Else’: Obama on the Election of Donald Trump2016-12-23T04:50:00-05:002016-12-23T21:11:57-05:00The fourth in a series of conversations between the president and Ta-Nehisi Coatestag:theatlantic.com,2016:50-511475<p><em>In “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/?utm_source=feed">My President Was Black</a>,” </em>The Atlantic<em>’s Ta-Nehisi Coates examined Barack Obama’s tenure in office, and his legacy. The story was built, in part, around a series of conversations he had with the president. This is a transcript of the third of those four encounters, which took place on October 28, 2016, aboard </em>Air Force One<em>. You can find the other interviews, as well as responses to the story and to these conversations, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/the-obama-era/?utm_source=feed">here</a>.</em></p><hr><p><strong>Ta-Nehisi Coates:</strong> I’m going to put out a perception I’ve always had of you, and if I’m wrong you can riff off it. You being born in Hawaii, and the ancestry that you’ve had, and beyond that you having a cosmopolitan experience very early on living elsewhere—this is a blunt way to say it, but it occurs to me you had an opportunity to just check out. I never perceived myself as having much choice about being black, and I’ve always wondered why you’ve made the choice. And I don’t know if you perceived it as a choice—maybe you felt the same way, like you didn’t have one. But it seemed like you could have been anybody. You could have been one of these rootless cosmopolitans working on some other issues.</p><p><strong>Barack Obama:</strong> Right.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> I wonder how you came to think of yourself as black and why.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="special-report"></aside><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Well, part of my understanding of race is that it’s more of a social construct than a biological reality. And in that sense, if you are perceived as African American, then you’re African American. Now, you can—that can mean a whole lot of things. And one of the things I cured myself of fairly early on, and I think the African American community has moved away from, is this notion that there’s one way to be black. And so you are right that I could have been an African American who worked for an international organization and was not engaged in the day-to-day struggles, politically or culturally, that the African American community faces. There are a lot of African Americans who may make those decisions, and they’re still African American, but they’re just living their lives in a different way.</p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p>I think for me, first and foremost, I always felt as if being black was cool. That it was not something to run away from, but something to embrace. Why that is, I think, is complicated. Part of it is, I think, that my mother thought black folks were cool, and if your mother loves you and is praising you—and says you look good, are smart—as you are, then you don’t kind of think in terms of <em>How can I avoid this?</em> You feel pretty good about it. By the time I was cognizant of race, American culture had gone through enough changes that as a child, I wasn’t just receiving constant negative messages about being black. It is true that I did not have the role models that Malia and Sasha have, but I could look at a Dr. J, or a Marvin Gaye, or a Thurgood Marshall and feel as if the embrace of African American culture was not going to hold me back but rather propel me forward, that it was exciting to be part of a group that had struggles but also had a huge potential.</p><p>I think it was not until I was in high school that I started seeing complications around it, and I started to think about it explicitly. I wrote about this in my first book, but even when I started perceiving discrimination, or racism, or just the disadvantages of being a minority, that felt more like a challenge than something to fear. I think probably the final element of this is, when I moved to the mainland, that was the first time where I confronted what at that time, and to some degree to this day, was the segregation of communities. And I did have to make, I think, a conscious choice to root myself physically and professionally in the African American community. And, again, this is something I’ve written about. I never wanted to be somebody who looked like I was avoiding who I saw in the mirror.<strong> </strong>I never thought that it would be a healthy thing. And disconnected from race, and more connected to the nature of me growing up, I didn’t like the idea of being rootless.</p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><strong>Coates:</strong> You didn’t like the idea of being rootless.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Michelle and I always joke—but it’s not really a joke, I think it’s an insight<strong>—</strong>that, in some ways, we saw in each other elements that we hadn’t had growing up. In Michelle I saw roots. I saw a nuclear family, neighborhood, community, continuity<strong>. </strong>In me she saw adventure, cosmopolitanism. And so the fact that I had not grown up with a stable family, that I hadn’t grown up with a father in the house or a community of which I was a part on a continuing basis—I had great friends, I had loving family members, but I didn’t have a place<em>—</em>that, I think, warned me off of the kind of life you described of just floating around and enjoying life but never being fully invested in it. That element, I think, is not simply a racial decision. You can imagine me as an Irishman deciding to want to live in a neighborhood with some Irish folks and embracing that side of myself.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> That’s interesting. As somebody who began to travel relatively later, I had this moment when I was at this town in Switzerland and had to switch trains to get to a larger town. And I had started my life and thought in that moment I could get on a train and go anywhere. Nobody would know me. I’m free.</p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><strong>Obama:</strong> It’s liberating but it’s also—that can get old. In some ways I saw that in my mother, as somebody who had lived an expatriate life. She loved Indonesia—really found meaningful work there, made great friends—but at the end of the day didn’t have a place that was solidly hers. And I think there were elements of that I saw as a kid as being lonely or a loss. There are always trade-offs in life.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Right. You know, certainly not the majority of the African American community, but certainly a privileged few of us are now raising children who are growing up—I’m thinking of my own son—with all these different experiences—</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> And options.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> And options.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> They’re unconstrained.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Unconstrained. Is that need for home still there? Is that still important in the same way?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> I think it is. It’s interesting watching Malia and Sasha, who have obviously lived in as strange and unreal an environment as any kids do. They feel very strongly about their African American roots. They don’t feel that they have to choose. And that, I think, is a great gift to bequeath them, where they know they’ve got a home, they know they’ve got a base, they know who they are. But they don’t think that in any way constrains them. And certainly they are not burdened by the sorts of doubts that previous generations—and even our generation—might have felt in what it means to be black. They think being black and being free are not contradictory<strong>. </strong>It’s interesting, when we went to visit the museum, Smithsonian [National Museum of African American History and Culture], just watching them soak it in. And they’re well-informed young people, so they knew most of the history, and I forget which one of them just said, “I can’t wait to bring my friends here.” And I think she was not just referring to African American friends but her white friends. She said, “Because face it, our stuff’s cool.” We’ve got Michael Jordan, Beyoncé, Dr. King. What you got?</p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p>So there’s a confidence that they project, which doesn’t mean they’re not mindful that there’re still struggles. You hear them talking about what black women have to go through with hair and they’ll go on a long rant<strong>—</strong>just the inconvenience and expense that they still feel is forced upon them, not just by the white community but the black community<strong>. </strong>They’ll still notice a certain obliviousness of even their best friends on certain issues. But they don’t feel trapped by that. They don’t feel as if that’s determinative of their possibilities. And I think they would say that the upsides really outweigh the downsides. They really like who we are. They like the community.</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="634" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/12/GettyImages_610174976/3af45a729.jpg" width="960">
<figcaption class="caption">People watch U.S. President Barack Obama speak on a jumbotron at the opening ceremony of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture on September 24, 2016, in Washington, D.C. (Paul Morigi / Getty)</figcaption>
</figure><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Do you recall the first time you were aware of folks saying, “Barack, you’re not really black”?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> You know, it’s interesting. When I look back—and I kept journals during this time, I was really in my own head—but from the age of, say, 18 to 25, when I first moved from Hawaii and I’m living in L.A. and New York and ultimately Chicago, what strikes me is less the lack of acceptance and more just my own self-consciousness. That one of the wonderful things, I believe, about the African American community is the degree to which we embrace whoever it is that we’re with. So, socially, I never experienced being rebuffed. The friends I made in my first year in college who were African American, there was never that “You’re not black enough. You’re from Hawaii. Your mom is white.” There just wasn’t any of that. There were times where you’d feel it in terms of friendships and groups, right? Because you went to Howard, you’re in an all-black environment, that doesn’t come up<strong>. </strong></p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p>I think I felt some tensions around: You’ve got your white friends, or you’ve got black friends, and they don’t necessarily hang together in the same ways. So you’re kind of doing shuttle diplomacy sometimes. Which is why I think some of my closest friends during those early years in college were Pakistani, or French, or people who themselves didn’t neatly fit in categories<strong>. </strong>But by the time I get to Chicago—and I’m still a young man at that point, I’m 25 years old—and I’m in the middle of the South Side of Chicago, there was a degree of familiarity, and love, and comfort that I guess in retrospect you might be puzzled by it. But it just fit<strong>. </strong></p><p>Now, there were times as an organizer, and certainly when I ran for office, where that stuff got brought in tactically or strategically by folks who I was dealing with. So you got some pastor, some alderman, who didn’t like what we were trying to do, who says, “You know what? That guy, he’s got Jewish backing,” or “He’s working with this Catholic church,” or “He’s from Hawaii.” When I ran against Bobby Rush: “He’s got that Harvard degree, and he’s from Hyde Park.” And so those themes would arise. But I always experienced those as just tactics being deployed by somebody who was pushing back on something I was trying to do.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Were you hurt, though? Personally hurt? Did it bother you on any level?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Again, it didn’t. Because of the experiences I had had in the neighborhoods, and communities, and with regular folks<strong>. </strong>Because that’s not how regular black folks think. They’re not sort of measuring on a day-to-day basis, <em>Okay, is what you’re doing a white thing, or is it a black thing?</em> Folks weren’t doing stuff like that. And in fact, among working-class black folks, you doing things that weren’t typical oftentimes was a source of pride. So I remember my first job out of college was working for this business magazine—subscription magazine—and I was the only African American there who wasn’t a delivery man or some tech-support guy. Most of the African Americans in the office were secretaries and, you know, they were proud that I was walking in there and working. So I think that gave me a base and a sense of confidence. So if somebody was playing a game later on, I know that <em>Well, they’re not speaking for, quote-unquote, “the authentic black experiences,” because I live with folks who are at least as authentic as you</em>. Sometimes it’s like these rappers who grew up in the suburbs and suddenly they’re all—</p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Gangsta.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Gangsta. It’s like, “Come on, man, I know you. I know who you are. Don’t pretend.”</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> I talked to quite a few people who knew you after that Bobby Rush race, and there were people who—Valerie [Jarrett] told me this—did not want you to run for the Senate. How personally—maybe you weren’t, I don’t know, maybe this doesn’t get to you—were you personally injured after that? Was it just like, <em>Oh my God, I don’t know if I can</em>—</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> No. I was upset about losing as bad as I did in that congressional race, and there’s no doubt it shook my confidence. But it wasn’t because of race. I remember campaigning in the congressional race, and it was a shoestring operation. I’d go meet people and I’d knock on doors and stuff, and some of the grandmothers who were the folks I’d been organizing and working with doing community stuff, they weren’t parroting back some notion of “You’re too Harvard,” or “You’re too Hyde Park,” or what have you. They’d say, “You’re a wonderful young man, you’re going to do great things. You just have to be patient.” So I didn’t feel the loss as a rejection by black people. I felt the loss as “politics anywhere is tough.” Politics in Chicago is especially tough. 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 a while. Look at Marion Barry in D.C.—or you can come up with all kinds of stories. Generally, we are pretty loyal voters.</p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p>And so I think that the loss made me question my career choice not because of racial issues, but rather because it made me question whether, in fact, there was a path for me to be able to break through and have a platform to get the kind of things done that I wanted to get done<strong>. </strong>Or was I destined to just slog away in the state legislature until I’m 55, and then some congressional race comes up, and now I’m a backbencher in Congress—and is that how I wanted to spend the next 20 years? So those were the kinds of questions that I was asking myself.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> One of the things you’ve done, that you do very, very successfully—one thing I don’t think I’ve seen anybody really do—is speak about your roots, your ancestry, your family, and speak about your blackness without a sense of rejection of any of it: “I’m an African American and my grandfather was this and my mother was this,” and you’d be very clear about it. Is that a story you always told yourself? Did you decide, <em>I have to figure out something and</em>—</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> No. By the time I was running for office, I think, I was sort of formed. That stretch that I described—maybe you want to stretch it out from the age of 18 to 27, when I go to law school—I was wrestling with myself and trying to game this out, and to figure this out, and it wasn’t a smooth passage. When I look back at journal entries, when I read biographies of me that talk about that stretch, I’m full of confusion and turmoil and doubts. The degree to which my organizing work in Chicago, I think, solved a puzzle for me, I can’t overstate.</p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p>And I’ve said this before: I didn’t set the world on fire when I was doing that work. We had some small victories, and a whole lot of failures. The people I worked with and the communities I was serving gave so much more to me than I think I gave to them. It’s hard to think how I could repay them. I still think about them in the Oval Office. It was a great gift they gave me, understanding who I was, or at least who I aspired to be. So that by the time I’m off to law school, I’m pretty formed at that point.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> What was it that it gave you? What is the relationship between that and sorting out who you were? What happens there?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> For me, and this may be different for other people, part of becoming an adult is linking your personal ambitions and striving to something bigger. And when I started doing that work, my story merges with a larger story. That happens naturally for a John Lewis. That happens more naturally for you. It was less obvious to me. <em>How do I pull all these different strains together: Kenya and Hawaii and Kansas, and white and black and Asian—how does that fit?</em> 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, and 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.</p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p>So I’m in a position to understand those essential parts of me not as separate and apart from any particular community but connected to every community<strong>. </strong>And I can fit the African American struggle for freedom and justice in the context of the universal aspiration for freedom and justice.</p><p>Which is why I’ve always said, and I continue to believe that, the struggle for racial equality in America has been the essential catalyst for America’s growth and development. As painful as it is, as ugly as that history has often been, as hard as it’s been on black folks themselves, it’s the driver of the expanded moral commitment. And it continues. And because of it, we better understand other struggles. It helps stretch our moral imaginations to embrace the Latino farmworker, or the LGBT kid who is feeling ostracized, or the woman who is hitting the glass ceiling. So the work helped me form an integrated vision of the world and my place in it in a way that would not have happened if I had been a professor reading about it or writing about it, but they would just be intellectual exercises.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Did your mother ever get to see you working in Chicago?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> She never went along with me. She was doing her own thing. When we visited it was typically in Hawaii. That stretch of time when I was organizing was a particularly busy time for her. So she always expressed pride about the work, and interestingly, it wasn’t all that different from some of the work she was doing. She was out in poor villages trying to help people leverage microloans into a better life. Probably the moment where things most intersected in a way that she sees it is at our wedding, which is why I end the book at the wedding. Because I’ve got some South Side folks there, I’ve got my boys from Hawaii there, I’ve got Pakistani friends there, I’ve got my Kenyan family there. And to see my mom talking to my mother-in-law, or my Kenyan sister; to have some folks from Altgeld<em> </em>come up to my mother and say, “You should be so proud of your son”; to see my grandmother, a little old Kansas white lady, interacting with some of Michelle’s older relatives, little old black ladies, and they basically had the same tastes and attitudes—it was, I think, a moment where, in a very personal way, everything I talked about was made manifest. We still have the old video from our wedding, and when I watch it, it reminds me of how lucky I’ve been.</p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><strong>Coates:</strong> How difficult was it, thinking about that, when you had to sever your relationship with Reverend Wright during the campaign?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> It was hard. Reverend Wright was an embodiment of so many positive trends that I saw in the black Church: strong, somebody who embraced learning, somebody who was socially conscious and taught black folks to respect themselves and the culture. He’s somebody who was sophisticated enough to be pro-black without being antiwhite. The church itself was an amazing, and continues to be an amazing, institution. And he was a friend, somebody who I was very fond of. And there was and continues to be a translation problem between somebody like Reverend Wright and the larger society.</p><p>In a way that’s true, I think, for all subcultures that are not part of the majority culture. There are things that are said in the barber shop, the beauty salon, or folks are just talking stuff, and there’s a certain tolerance for exaggerations, for saying things for effect, for smack talking, that are complicated. They’re not always meant literally as much as they are expressing emotions or making a point.</p><p>As I said in my speech in Philadelphia, the blind spots that he possessed are the blind spots that that generation of African American men at some moments all have possessed, it would be impossible not to possess. He grew up—he was 15 years older than me—if you’re coming of age in the late ’40s, early ’50s, early ’60s, or the ’70s in Philadelphia, or Alabama, or Oakland, or Baltimore, it would be superhuman not to have some vestiges of anger, not to have internalized some conspiracy theorizing, to not have blind spots. I may have said this to you in the interview that we had, but I was rewatching Spike Lee’s <em>Malcolm X</em>. Did I say that to you?</p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><strong>Coates:</strong> No.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> It just happened to be on a few weeks ago, and I was watching it. It was just a reminder: As crazy as Elijah Muhammad’s philosophies were, if you went through what Malcolm Little goes through—</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> It all makes sense.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> There’s a plausibility to those theories as a way of you just explaining what is happening to you. And so Reverend Wright is part of that transition from a black community, in which its men and its women are trapped in a vicious social construction, to an environment that you and I grew up in, in which suddenly there’s openings and spaces are cleared, in part because of the work that they did, in part because of the struggles, and fights, and the sharp edges, and the elbows, and mistakes—but ultimately victories and triumphs—of our parents and our grandparents.</p><p>To try to explain all that in a sound bite is impossible. To expect the broader American society to absorb that in the course of a political campaign was not possible. I did my best in my speech in Philadelphia. But recall that I’m not severing the relationship until the Press Club interview in which Reverend Wright, I think feeling hurt, feeling misunderstood, showing his age, doubled down in ways that actually I had not seen out of him in church or in my previous interactions.</p><figure><img alt="" height="844" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/12/GettyImages_80289704/ca4d96bed.jpg" width="630">
<figcaption class="caption">Obama delivers his “A More Perfect Union” speech on race and politics during his 2008 campaign in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008. In the speech, Obama rejected controversial statements made by his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and distanced himself from Wright. (William Thomas Cain / Getty)</figcaption>
</figure><p><strong>Coates:</strong> From the outside, it looked like you didn’t want to sever the relationship.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> No. My hope was, after the Philadelphia speech, which wasn’t clear to me was going to work and involved some risk, my hope was that that would contextualize what had happened. And look, the fact was that some of the quotes that he had that I hadn’t heard—frankly, I wasn’t in church every Sunday—were things I would have to reject, they were just wrong. The same way that, even after his trip to Mecca, Malcolm would still be saying some stuff that I said, “Well, that's just not right.” So that saddened me. And anybody who has sat in Trinity, as I wrote about—his father is the amazing pastor who actually gave me the idea for the Joshua speech that I made the first time I went to Selma—anybody who has gone to Trinity and sat there would say it’s a magnificent community that Reverend Wright built, and it’s doing a lot of good.</p><p>But this is always one of the challenges of politics: It can never capture all the complexity and contradictions in life. So you end up having to try to be true in a way that can be consumed for a mass audience, but you're always missing some elements of it. You're always leaving some things out.</p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p>And that’s part of the reason why race is such a difficult thing to deal with in politics, because the evolution of racial identity, racial relationships, institutional racism, is never similar. The trajectory, I believe, has been positive. But anything you say on the topic of race, there’s a counterargument, there’s an exception, there’s a nuance. There’s a, <em>Wait, hold on a minute, how about that? </em>And that’s part of the reason why, I think, it creates frustration. It’s also why it’s easy to demagogue. It’s also why situations that look ambiguous can lead to people dividing into camps very quickly.</p><p>We think of the two episodes of me running for president, or being president, that on their face, should not have been as charged as they were. The first is when I say at the end of a long day, towards the end of a long campaign, that part of the reason that you had a lot of working-class whites supporting a Republican agenda that on its face doesn’t seem to be serving their interest is because they’ve given up hope that the system is going to look out for them. They feel it’s rigged. So their attitude is that, <em>If you’re not going to help me get a job, if you’re not going do anything concrete for me, then at least I’m going to cling onto my religion and my Second Amendment rights</em>.</p><p>And I said that not from an unsympathetic perspective. I was saying something that every writer now who’s writing about Trump voters is saying: that these communities feel ignored, and so it’s much easier for them to think in terms of those constants in their identity. But just by saying, “They cling to their guns and Bibles” made it, as David Axelrod said right after I said it, anthropological, made it sound patronizing, and to this day is the primary proof point that is used to argue that I am not sympathetic towards those communities, that I’m sort of this elitist, coastal liberal, and in part responsible for the backlash to my presidency. And if I had been a white person saying the exact same thing, it wouldn’t have played the same way. If I had said it the way I meant it or felt it, it would have been absorbed differently. But because there was a racial component to it, immediately it becomes a permanent talking point.</p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p>And then you’ve got Skip Gates being arrested, which, to me, I was saying something pretty obvious. They ended up handcuffing this middle-aged, elderly man on his own porch. No matter how much he cursed you out, you overreacted, and it probably would not have happened had there not been some assumptions about who he was based on his race. Again, immediately folks ignored the discussion.</p><p>So this is part of the reason why when I hear people say we need a dialogue about race, or we need commissions on race, or this or that, I’m always somewhat skeptical, because trying to engineer those kinds of conversations on a national level in a way that could actually capture reality is very hard. What can happen, I think, is for us to act in ways that show mutual regard, propose policies that safeguard against obvious discrimination, extend ourselves in our personal lives and in our political lives in ways that lead us to see the other person as a human worthy of respect. It’s what we do more than what we say, I ultimately think, that saves us. All right?</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> All right.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> You got a lot, man. You should be able to write something.</p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedIan Allen'It’s What We Do More Than What We Say': Obama on Race, Identity, and the Way Forward2016-12-22T10:51:29-05:002016-12-22T17:48:10-05:00The third in a series of conversations between the president and Ta-Nehisi Coatestag:theatlantic.com,2016:50-511133<p><em>In “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/?utm_source=feed">My President Was Black</a>,” </em>The Atlantic<em>’s Ta-Nehisi Coates examined Barack Obama’s tenure in office, and his legacy. The story was built, in part, around a series of conversations he had with the president. This is a transcript of the second of those four encounters, which took place on October 19, 2016. Valerie Jarrett, the senior adviser to the president, was also present. You can find the other interviews, as well as responses to the story and to these conversations, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/the-obama-era/?utm_source=feed">here</a>.</em></p><hr><p><strong>Ta-Nehisi Coates:</strong> I’ve talked to Marty [Nesbitt], I talked to Mama Kaye [Wilson], I talked to Eric Holder, so I’ve been making the rounds. I’ve got all the goods.</p><p><strong>Barack Obama:</strong> You’ve got all the goods.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> I’ve got all the goods. Talked to [David] Axelrod, talked to [David] Plouffe.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> I’m ready to just fill in the gaps.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> I thought we’d talk about policy today. I wanted to start by getting a sense of your mind-set coming into the job, and as I’ve understood you—and you can reject this—your perspective is that a mixture of universalist policies, in combination with an increased level of personal responsibility and communal responsibility among African Americans, when we talk about these gaps that we see between black and white America, that that really is the way forward. Is that a correct summation?</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="special-report"></aside><p><strong>Obama:</strong> I think it’s a three-legged stool and you left out one, which is vigorous enforcement of antidiscrimination laws. So the way we thought about it when we came in is that—and obviously we came in during crisis, so how we might have structured our policy sequencing if, when we came in, the economy was okay, and we weren’t potentially going into a great recession, and folks weren’t all losing their homes, might have been different. But as a general matter, my view would be that if you want to get at African American poverty, the income gap, wealth gap, achievement gap, that the most important thing is to make sure that the society as a whole does right by people who are poor, are working class, are aspiring to a better life for their kids. Higher minimum wages, full-employment programs, early-childhood education: Those kinds of programs are, by design, universal, but by definition, because they are helping folks who are in the worst economic situations, are most likely to disproportionately impact and benefit African Americans. They also have the benefit of being sellable to a majority of the body politic.</p><p>Step No. 2, and this is where I think policies do need to be somewhat race-specific, is making sure that institutions are not discriminatory. So you’ve got something like the FHA [Federal Housing Administration], which was on its face a universal program that involved a huge mechanism for wealth accumulation and people entering into the middle class. But if, in its application, black folks were excluded from it, then you have to override that by going after those discriminatory practices. The same would be true for something like Social Security, where historically, if you just read the law and the fact that it excluded domestic workers or agricultural workers, you might not see race in it, unless you knew that that covered a huge chunk of African Americans, particularly in the South. So reinvigorating the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, making sure that in our Department of Education, where we see evidence of black boys being suspended at substantially higher rates than white boys for the same behavior, in the absence of that kind of rigorous enforcement of the nondiscrimination principle, then the long-standing biases that I believe have weakened, but are still clearly present in our society, assert themselves in ways that usually disadvantage African Americans.</p><p>If you’ve got those two things right—if those two things are happening—then a third leg of the stool is, how do we in the African American community build a culture in which we are saying to our kids, “Here’s what it takes to succeed. Here’s the sacrifices you need to make to be able to get ahead. Here’s how we support each other. Here’s how we look out for each other.” And it is my view that if society was doing the right thing with respect to you, [and there were] programs targeted at helping people rise into the middle class and have a good income and be able to save and send their kids to school, and you’ve got a vigorous enforcement of antidiscrimination laws, then I have confidence in the black community’s capabilities to then move forward.</p><p>Now, does that mean that all vestiges of past discrimination would be eliminated, that the income gap or the wealth gap or the education gap would be erased in five years or 10 years? Probably not, and so this is obviously a discussion we’ve had before when you talk about something like reparations. Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps. That those were wrongs done to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it’s not in the form of individual reparations checks, but in the form of a Marshall Plan, in order to close those gaps. It is easy to make that theoretical argument. But as a practical matter, it is hard to think of any society in human history in which a majority population has said that as a consequence of historic wrongs, we are now going to take a big chunk of the nation’s resources over a long period of time to make that right. You can look at examples like postwar Germany, where reparations were paid to Holocaust victims and families, but—</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> They lost the war.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> They lost the war. Small population, finite amount of money that it was going to cost. Not multiple generations but people, in some cases, who are still alive, who can point to, “That was my house. Those were my paintings. Those were my mother’s family jewels.” If you look at countries like South Africa, where you had a black majority, there have been efforts to tax and help that black majority, but it hasn’t come in the form of a formal reparations program. You have countries like India that have tried to help untouchables, with essentially affirmative-action programs, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed the structure of their societies.</p><p>So the bottom line is that it’s hard to find a model in which you can practically administer and sustain political support for those kinds of efforts. And what makes America complicated as well is the degree to which this is not just a black/white society, and it is becoming less so every year. So how do Latinos feel if there’s a big investment just in the African American community, and they’re looking around and saying, “We’re poor as well. What kind of help are we getting?” Or Asian Americans who say, “Look, I’m a first-generation immigrant, and clearly I didn’t have anything to do with what was taking place.” And now you start getting into trying to calibrate—</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Isn’t there just—not to cut you off—isn’t there, and this is out of the role of U.S. president, I’m almost speaking to you as a law professor now, an intellectual, in fact—</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Well, that’s how I was answering the question, because if you want me to talk about politics, I’ll be much more blunt about it.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> I figured that. I thought that was what I was getting.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> I was giving the benefit of playing out, theoretically, how you could think about that.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> And I appreciate that. And the question I would ask is in that situation, to the immigrant who comes here, first generation, and says, “I didn’t do any of this,” but the country is largely here because of that. In other words, many of the benefits that you will actually enjoy are, in fact, in part—I won’t say largely—in part here because of the past. So when you want the benefits, when you invoke the past, that thus you inherit the debt, too—</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess, here’s the way—probably the best way of saying it is that you can make a theoretical, abstract argument in favor of something like reparations. And maybe I’m just not being sufficiently optimistic or imaginative enough—</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> You’re supposed to be optimistic!</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Well, I thought I was, but I’m not so optimistic as to think that you would ever be able to garner a majority of an American Congress that would make those kinds of investments above and beyond the kinds of investments that could be made in a progressive program for lifting up all people. So to restate it: I have much more confidence in my ability, or any president or any leader’s ability, to mobilize the American people around a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment to help every child in poverty in this country than I am in being able to mobilize the country around providing a benefit specific to African Americans as a consequence of slavery and Jim Crow. Now, we can debate the justness of that. But I feel pretty confident in that assessment politically. And, you know, I think that part of my optimism comes from the belief that we as a people could actually, regardless of all the disadvantage of the past, regardless of the fact that a lot of other folks got a head start in the race, if we were able to make the race fair right now, and—</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> You think we could catch up?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> We were able to make sure that it stayed fair for a long time and that children going forward were not encumbered by some of that same bias of the past, I think it would not take long at all, because we are a talented, resourceful people. Just play this out as a thought experiment: Imagine if you had genuine, high-quality early-childhood education for every child, and suddenly every black child in America—but also every poor white child or Latino [child], but just stick with every black child in America—is getting a really good education. And they’re graduating from high school at the same rates that whites are, and they are going to college at the same rates that whites are, and they are able to afford college at the same rates because the government has universal programs that say that you’re not going to be barred from school just because of how much money your parents have. So now they’re all graduating. And let’s also say that the Justice Department and the courts are making sure, as I’ve said in a speech before, that when Jamal sends his résumé in, he’s getting treated the same as when Johnny sends his résumé in.</p><p>Now, are we going to have suddenly the same number of CEOs, billionaires, etc., as the white community? In 10 years? Probably not, maybe not even in 20 years. But I guarantee you that we would be thriving, we would be succeeding. We wouldn’t have huge numbers of young African American men in jail. We’d have more family formation as college-graduated girls are meeting boys who are their peers, which then in turn means the next generation of kids are growing up that much better. And suddenly you’ve got a whole generation that’s in a position to start using the incredible creativity that we see in music, and sports, and frankly even on the streets, channeled into starting all kinds of businesses. I feel pretty good about our odds in that situation.</p><p>And my point has always been: We’re so far from that. Why are we even having the abstract conversation when we’ve got a big fight on our hands just to get strong, universal antipoverty programs and social programs in place, and we’re still fighting to make sure that basic antidiscrimination laws are enforced, not just at the federal level, by the way, but throughout government and throughout the private sector? And those are fights that we can win because—and this is where I do believe America has changed—the majority, not by any means 100 percent, but the majority of Americans believe in the idea of nondiscrimination. They believe in the idea that Jamal and Johnny should be treated equally. They believe in the idea that a child shouldn’t be consigned to poverty just because of circumstances of their birth. Now, in practice, in daily social interactions, etc., there may be all kinds of biases and prejudices that are unspoken, that people aren’t aware of, that affect who’s hired, and who gets loans, and how kids are treated in school. But it’s a powerful thing if you have on your side an idea that the overwhelming majority of people believe in because that’s how you can build a consensus that’s lasting. And that’s how you avoid an argument that “I’m being treated unfairly because you are treating somebody differently than me.” Everybody potentially can make the claim that we should all be treated fairly. As opposed to getting into arguments about, well, these folks have been treated fairly so now we’re going to be doing things that, very easily in the minds of a lot Americans feel like, “Now I’m being treated unfairly.”</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="605" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/12/GettyImages_475347661/775a155da.jpg" width="960">
<figcaption class="caption">Barack Obama signs an executive memorandum following remarks on the “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative in the East Room of the White House on February 27, 2014. (Win McNamee / Getty)</figcaption>
</figure><p><strong>Coates:</strong> One of the things I would say—the first thing I want to say is—I don’t want to draw this into an either-or argument, that if you make the reparations argument, you therefore don’t support everything else that you said.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> I’m well aware of that.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Okay. The second part, you’re talking about how the country has changed, and the consciousness, and I think we both agree that 150 years ago that wasn’t true. And I wonder, is it the work, perhaps maybe not of presidents but certainly of people outside of government, to change that mind-set? And if one can come to see, for instance, that, yeah, it is true that nondiscrimination should be a basic value that we share, that, as I would put it, responsibility for our history is one, too?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Right. And I think that it is. I want my children—I want Malia and Sasha—to understand that they’ve got responsibilities beyond just what they themselves have done. That they have a responsibility to the larger community and the larger nation, that they should be sensitive to and extra thoughtful about the plight of people who have been oppressed in the past, are oppressed currently. So that’s a wisdom that I want to transmit to my kids. And it may be that we found an area where you’re more optimistic than me. But I would say that’s a high level of enlightenment that you’re looking to have from a majority of the society. And it may be something that future generations are more open to, but I am pretty confident that for the foreseeable future, using the argument of nondiscrimination, and “Let’s get it right for the kids who are here right now,” and giving them the best chance possible, is going to be a more persuasive argument.</p><p>One of the things you learn as president is, as powerful as this office is, you have limited bandwidth. And the time goes by really quickly and you’re constantly making choices, and there are pressures on you from all different directions—pressures on your attention, not just pressures from different constituencies. And so you have to be pretty focused about where can you have the biggest, quickest impact. And I always tell my staff, “Better is good.” I’ll take better every time, because better is hard. Better may not be as good as the best, but better is surprisingly hard to obtain. And better is actually harder than worse. [Laughter]</p><p>It requires enormous energy for us to cut the African American uninsured rate by a third. A lot of scars. Bernie Sanders would say, “You still have millions of African Americans who aren’t insured, and if we had a single-payer system, that wouldn’t be the case.” And that’s true. But it is my judgment that had I spent the first two years trying to get a single-payer system, all those folks who now have health insurance that didn’t have it would still be uninsured. And those are millions of people whose lives are impacted right now. I get letters from them right now. “You saved my child’s life.” “I did not have to sell my home when my wife got sick.” And that is what, as a policy maker, I’m trying to achieve during the short period of time that I’m here.</p><p>Now, you as a thinker, you as a writer, you as a philosopher, you want to stretch the boundaries of thinking, because you’re not constrained by trying to move the levers of power right now. And so I think that these are all worthy topics of conversation. Sometimes I wonder how much of these debates have to do with the desire, the legitimate desire, for that history to be recognized. Because there is a psychic power to the recognition that is not satisfied with a universal program, it’s not satisfied by the Affordable Care Act, or an expansion of Pell grants, or an expansion of the earned-income tax credit. It doesn’t speak to the hurt, and the sense of injustice, and the self-doubt that arises out of the fact that we’re behind now, and it makes us sometimes feel as if there must be something wrong with us, unless you’re able to see the history and say, “It’s amazing we got this far given what we went through.” So part of, I think, the argument sometimes that I’ve had with folks who are much more interested in sort of race-specific programs is less an argument about what is practically achievable and sometimes maybe more an argument of “We want society to see what’s happened, and internalize it, and answer it in demonstrable ways.” And those impulses I very much understand, but my hope would be 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. And your son thriving at some United Nations model conference, and me seeing Malia and Sasha doing amazing things. And some of the mentees that I was talking to at A and T overcome incredible disadvantages and starting to gain confidence in what they can do in the world. And I’ll stop there.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> You know, Mr. President, I think largely what a lot of us fear, everything you described—Pell grants, health care, all the programs—that’s the world—let me speak for myself, not for anybody—that’s a world I’d want to live in whether black or not. That just speaks to society’s commitment to its citizens. What we fear is that the gap will never close. Or let me rephrase that: The gap will close, but it will never actually be equal. There will always be carrying this. That without some sort of specific acknowledgment—you know, when I was working on this piece about race, the theory—fine. Going to a 90-year-old’s house in Lawndale in Chicago, and I’m not supposing you don’t have more experience with this, because you read letters and travel and you see, but as a journalist to sit there and see somebody who fought in World War II, and to hear him talk about how they had done everything right—basically obeyed their side of the social contract—and to hear them basically say, “And what I got was ripped off.” And then to have in my city in Baltimore, right now about 10 years ago during the housing crisis, to see Wells Fargo going to these black folks who just want to buy homes, who just want to be part of the basic American dream, social contract, and to see them being ripped off, not in the same fashion but the same idea—taking from them. We fear without any sort of direct engagement of that question, it won’t stop.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Well, this is why the antidiscrimination principle being enforced is important. Because it won’t stop if some of the underlying biases aren’t challenged and surfaced. And that in and of itself creates backlash and denial. This is what I mean when I say better is hard. Just making sure that right now folks aren’t being ripped off—that’s a challenge. I remember when I was in Chicago and data started coming out that when black folks walk into an auto dealership, and women, too, to some degree, they are automatically given higher quotes, worse deals. And this was just documented extensively across auto dealerships around the country. There was a tax being imposed on black folks. By collecting that data, you can construct policies to combat that. And that’s potentially thousands of dollars in people’s pockets that are being taken away right now. But it’s hard to do. It requires an effective government agency, and data collection, and pushing, and shoving, and litigation until finally you start getting new norms and new practices.</p><p>And my argument—it’s not even an argument—my conviction is that those fights need to be fought right now and can be won. And if in fact we have finite political capital, energy, resources, we need to win those fights. And if we win all those fights, and now let’s say the income gap, and the wealth gap, and the education gap have for the most part been closed—let’s say hypothetically, knowing what we know now about public policy, that we could close the education gap so that it was only a couple percentage points, and we could make sure that hiring barriers and educational barriers had been leveled down, and unemployment among African Americans right now instead of being double was only 10 percent higher than white unemployment—if we got to that point, first of all, America as a whole would be a lot richer. Second of all, the African American community would not just be wealthier, but it would actually also be more politically empowered by virtue of having more resources. Third, I actually believe that some residue of discrimination would lessen, because it’s my view that there is a certain percentage of the white population that stereotypes and makes assumptions about African Americans because they don’t inject the history of slavery and Jim Crow into current incarceration rates, or crime rates, or poverty rates, or what have you—but if they started having more middle-class black kids who are friends with their kids, eating Cheerios in their kitchen, their attitudes start changing. If we achieve all that and there’s still a gap, at worst we’re much better positioned to pursue strategies to close that final gap. And at best we might surprise ourselves in terms of how well we’re doing.</p><p>So there’s going to—as I said before, it’s a generational project just to get America to live up fully to its ideals and to have the kind of society where everybody has a shot, and every kid is getting a good education, and people are getting living wages, and they have decent retirement. And if we got there and we looked up and we said, “You know what? Black folks are still doing a little bit worse off than whites, but it’s not like it was 20 years ago,” then we can have a discussion about how do we get that last little bit. But that’s a high-class problem to have. And to me the question right now is: How do I close that first three-quarters of the achievement gap, education gap, wealth gap? What gives me the best chance to do that? And<strong> </strong>I’m pretty darn sure that if America is a just society and treating people well right now, irrespective of past wrongs, that I’m going to close a big chunk of that gap<strong>.</strong> I’ve seen it.</p><p>This is what I always take away from something like My Brother’s Keeper—it’s almost an analogy. I look at some of the kids that I interact with, and they were born with so many disadvantages. And you could start off in your first interaction with them saying, “Unless they get a lot of compensatory help, they’re not going to be able to compete; they’re just so far behind, and they’re wounded and they’re hurt.” Think about that young man we were talking to: His mother was a drug addict, and his dad is in prison, and he has no sense of direction. And there’s no doubt that the more you did for him, probably the better he would do, but what’s always striking to me is he just got a little bit. He just had a few adults paying attention and telling him he was worth something while he’s in juvee, he’s just got somebody who is willing to pay his community-college fees, and suddenly you’ve got this young man sitting there who is so self-aware that to the president of the United States he can say, “Look even though I look like I’ve got my act together, I’ve still got pains, wounds, there’re issues I still have, and yet I’m going to be a teacher and I can tell my story, and here’s how I’m thinking about social change in the community.” And I’m thinking to myself, <em>Wow</em>. I believe he can close that gap, and my conclusion is that five years from now, if you ask me who has a better shot of being a great teacher in a school, that guy or some kid who grew up in an upper-middle-class community who out of all kinds of good-hearted impulses wants to be a teacher, I’m betting he ends up being the better teacher. That gap has been closed, even though you would think it wouldn’t be.</p><p>Now, I don’t want to exaggerate; having as many African American men as we’ve had in the criminal-justice system, and the amount of time it takes for the damage done by that to wash through our society and our communities, the disadvantages born out of kids being undiagnosed with mental-health problems early, or not getting the kind of exposure to reading and math when they’re 4 or 5 or 6 years old, that carries a cost. But I know that those gaps can be closed. And they can be closed substantially, more than I think we believe. So I guess maybe we can agree that in some ways you’re more optimistic than me, and in some ways I’m more optimistic than you. You’re maybe more optimistic than me in terms of the ability to persuade a society to make up for past injustices; but maybe I’m more optimistic than you about the ability to persuade a society to make up for current injustices and the capacity of the victims of those injustices to catch up pretty quickly.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Were you surprised relatively early on in your presidency when people criticized you for not having a quote-unquote “black agenda”?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> No. I mean, I think if you worked at the community level in Chicago and then a politician on the South Side of Chicago, and worked at the state level, then you’re pretty familiar with all the variations of politics in the African American community and criticisms you may get. If you’re not familiar with those or you don’t have a thick enough skin to take it, then you probably wouldn’t have gotten here.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> So it didn’t surprise you at all?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> No. I think, and look, Ta-Nehisi, I don’t want to discount those criticisms, but offsetting those criticisms is that I have 90 percent or 95 percent support in the African American community and it’s not sort of “Well, he’s black, so it’s okay. We’re not going to say anything even though we’re seething.” And I hang out with a lot of middle-aged black women, and they’re not casual in their support of me. There’s a lot of love forthcoming. Partly because they understand the constraints of this society. They know that this is hard. And they also, I think, see me and Michelle trying. It’s one thing if they were watching and we were not working on poverty issues, and we weren’t working on education issues, and we weren’t working on health-care issues. You know, they’re pretty sophisticated; they understand that I’m trying to move an aircraft carrier here, I’m not just steering the speedboat. And so part of it is, I think, intellectual, and part of it is obviously emotional as well. But that support has been so constant and gracious and loving. Michelle and I have never felt as if, at any stage, folks didn’t have our backs. And as a consequence, I think that just spurred us on that much more to make us want to do the right thing, and do our best in the positions that we have.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> So perhaps more substantive than that early-on critique, for instance—and Valerie [Jarrett] and I talked a little bit about this—when you attempted to bring in some of the Black Lives Matter activists and folks refused. And I heard you address this at Howard, too. What I would say—did you understand why some of them refused? Could you comprehend it?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Oh, I absolutely could comprehend it. A couple of them refused because they’re 20, or 21. I mean, that’s why they refused. It’s the same as when we were working on immigration reform and there was a young Latino man, young immigration activist here who, in the Roosevelt Room, refused to shake my hand.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Are you serious?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Absolutely. And I’m going around the table shaking everybody’s hand. And he made a point of saying, “I can’t shake your hand; you’re deporting too many people.” And I just said to him, “Young man, I’m glad that you feel so passionately about this issue, but you’re with the president right now in the White House. You’ve got to think about what’s going to be most effective in getting what you need, what you’re trying to accomplish. Because this may not be your best strategy.”</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> How did he respond?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Like a 21-year-old would, which is sort of a mixture of defiance and uncertainty and embarrassment. Which is fine. Look, so I guess I don’t—one of the things you understand, and it’s hard to do, but you—and I’m not saying I’m impervious to criticism—but one of the things that you come pretty early on to understand in this job, and you start figuring out even during the course of the campaign, is that there’s Barack Obama the person and there’s Barack Obama the symbol, or the office holder, or what people are seeing on television, or just a representative of power. And so when people criticize or respond negatively to me, usually they’re responding to this character that they’re seeing on TV called Barack Obama, or to the office of the presidency and the White House and what that represents. And so you don’t take it personally. You understand that if people are angry that somehow the government is failing, then they are going to look to the guy who represents government. And that applies, by the way, even to some of the folks who are now Trump supporters. They’re responding to a fictional character named Barack Obama who they see on Fox News or who they hear about through Rush Limbaugh.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> What I’m trying to get at is a theory—you’re very unique in the sense that you are the president but you’ve also been an activist. You’ve actually occupied both roles. So what I’m getting at is, can you see how—</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Is there utility—</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> In not being so close to power?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Yeah. And my argument would be: Yes, and it’s the reason why I am always interested in engaging in people who are pushing us and pushing against the status quo. But having been an activist, the only thing that I’m always encouraging activists to do is, once you have raised the issue, and even through controversial means, you have to come behind it with an agenda and the possibility of reconciliation if power meets your demands. And that was true during the civil-rights movement, that was true during the union movement, that’s always been true. And so the only time I get frustrated with activist criticism is if I have recognized them, and invited them to work with me to figure out how we solve this problem that they’re concerned about, and either they don’t engage out of the sense of purity—“I’m not going to shake his hand”—or you’re not sufficiently prepared so you don’t even know what to ask for, or you’re not being strategic as an activist and trying to figure out how the process has to work in order for you to get what you want.</p><p>So I’ll give you some specific examples just so that this isn’t too abstract: I thought Brittany Packnett, who was one of the Ferguson activists, really interesting, smart young lady, really impressive—you might want to talk with her. So she was one of the organizers of the Ferguson movement, ended up joining our task force. She came in here and she just knew her stuff. And I don’t think at any point backed off, even in our first meeting, saying, “Here’s what we’re concerned about; here’s where we’re disappointed in the Justice Department’s response; here’s what we need.” But she was sufficiently well-informed and engaged that it was very easy then to say, “You are right about this, you’re wrong I think about that, but I’m not sure, let’s sit down and see if we can hammer out a strategy that we agree with. And by the way, I want you talking to that police chief over there and that sheriff, because I think you might be able to persuade them if we break this down into its component parts.”</p><p>Now, in contrast, there have been times where, let’s say on LGBT issues, when we were trying to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and I got the Pentagon and Bob Gates, a Republican holdover from the Bush administration, to authorize a study of how you might end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, headed up by Jeh Johnson, who at that time was a council to the Justice Department. And it was going to take a year to conduct that study, issue a report, and figure out how it might be implemented, what effect it would have on unit cohesion and military effectiveness. And I had laid out this strategy because if I could get the Pentagon’s imprimatur on this thing, then I knew that we could end up getting legislation passed to reverse the policy, and we could get the branches of all the military to implement it. But during the course of that year, probably every speech I gave, I’d have gay activists just screaming at me during rallies. And you just say, “Come on, man. Not only do I agree with you, but I’ve actually got a strategy to execute, we are executing it, and in what sense do you think that you yelling at me here is going to advance your cause?”</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="645" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/12/AP16300826288170/0f17ae30f.jpg" width="960">
<figcaption class="caption">Brittany Packnett (<em>left</em>), a co-founder of We the Protestors and Campaign Zero, sits with Obama and Representative John Lewis during a meeting with civil-rights leaders in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on February 18, 2016. (Carolyn Kaster / AP)</figcaption>
</figure><p><strong>Coates:</strong> They don’t want you to forget.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Well, the theory was they didn’t want us to forget. But the problem was, and we saw some of this in the immigration-reform issues as well, was they hadn’t done sufficient homework to know that I didn’t have all the capacity they thought I did in order to just execute this through the stroke of a pen. So I think that where I’ve gotten frustrated during the course of my presidency has never been because I was getting pushed too hard by activists to see the justness of a cause or the essence of an issue; I think where I get frustrated at times was the belief that the president can do anything if he just decides he wants to do it. 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. Yeah, usually I’d just smile. [Laughter] No, and the reason I say that is because those are the times where sometimes you feel actually a little bit hurt. Because you feel like saying to these folks, “[Don’t] you think if I could do it, I [would] have just done it. Do you think that the only problem is that I don’t care enough about the plight of poor people, or gay people, or immigrants, or …?”</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> But don’t they have some level of distrust towards you? I mean, that’s what I’m hearing: They don’t trust you to ultimately follow through. And isn’t that kind of the mind-set that the activist has to have?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Well, I think, yes. Which is why I don’t get too hurt. I mean, I think there is a benefit to wanting to hold power’s feet to the fire until you actually see the goods. I get that. And I think it is important. And frankly, sometimes it’s useful for activists just to be out there to keep you mindful and not get complacent, even if ultimately you think some of their criticism is misguided.</p><p>I’ll give you an example that’s outside the issues of social justice, but the criticism that some on the left consistently have given us around drone strikes. The truth is that this technology really began to take off right at the beginning of my presidency. And it wasn’t until about a year, year and a half in where I began to realize that the Pentagon and our national-security apparatus and the CIA were all getting too comfortable with the technology as a tool to fight terrorism, and not being mindful enough about how that technology is being used and the dangers of a form of warfare that is so detached from what is actually happening on the ground. And so we initiated this big process to try to get it in a box, and checks and balances, and much higher standards about when they’re used. But the truth is that, in trying to get at terrorists who are in countries that either are unwilling or unable to capture those terrorists or disable them themselves, there are a lot of situations where the use of a drone is going to result in much fewer civilian casualties and much less collateral damage than if I send in a battalion of marines. And I think right now we probably have the balance about right.</p><p>Now, you wouldn’t know that if you talked to Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International or some of the international activist organizations. Certainly you wouldn’t know that if you were talking to some of the writers who criticize our drone policy. But I’ve actually told my staff it’s probably good that they stay critical of this policy, even though I think right now we’re doing the best that we can in a dangerous world with terrorists who would gladly blow up a school bus full of American kids if they could. We probably have got it about right. But if suddenly all those organizations said, “Okay, the Obama administration’s got it right, and we don’t have a problem here,” the instinct towards starting to use it more, and then some of those checks and balances that we’ve built up starting to decay—that’s probably what would happen. So there’s an example of where I think, even if the criticism is not always perfectly informed and in some cases I would deem unfair, just the noise, attention, fuss probably keeps powerful officials or agencies on their toes. And they should be on their toes when it comes to the use of deadly force.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> This actually ties right back in. I wanted to ask you about it, so I’m glad you brought that up. You know, you’re a great—and I don’t want this to come of as a “gotcha” question, I want to have a discussion here about this to the extent that we have time, a discussion about this—</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Oh we better, I mean, we have time, we’ve spent a lot of time—</p><p><strong>Valerie Jarrett (senior adviser to Obama)</strong>: We have around 15.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> You know you’ve talked quite a bit about your admiration for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which is sincere and heartfelt. Have you thought much about how you reconcile that, not just with you yourself, but actually with the office of being president, which does involve killing—it’s part of it as commander in chief—do you think much about reconciling those two things?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Yeah. Absolutely. When you take on the position of president, you are committing yourself to, first and foremost, protecting the American people. You are accepting an institutional role that requires you to make hard decisions and hard choices, and as a consequence you have to take your moral sense and not put it aside, but rather take that moral sense and apply it to the particulars of a job that is going to test those ethical and moral precepts differently than if you’re a professor, or a business person, or a dad. And if I were not comfortable with the judicious use of our military to protect the American people, than I shouldn’t have run for president. And having said that, I do think that the wisdom of a King or a Gandhi can inform my decisions. I may not be able to follow their beliefs to their logical conclusions, but I can think about what Gandhi said or King said about violence begetting violence, and still be true to my job by asking myself the question whenever we’re confronted with a situation where some may be arguing for military action: Will this actually result in America being safer, or the most lives being saved?</p><p>But these kinds of questions arise not just in the military sphere. Going back to the discussion we were having about immigration reform, some of the most challenging discussions I’ve had are with activists who essentially would argue that any immigrant from Central America, let’s say, who gets here to this country should be allowed to stay because their country is dangerous, their country is poor, and the opportunities for that mom and that kid are much greater here, and why would you send them back? And I remember—I think you were sitting in this discussion, Valerie—when I said to one young activist who herself was the daughter of an undocumented worker, and so could speak from a very personal and legitimate perspective—I remember saying to her: I agree with you, from a moral perspective, that a child from Honduras is worth the same as my daughter. God is not a respecter of boundaries; he’s not saying that American kids deserve a better life than Honduran kids. But I’m the president of the United States, and the nation-state by definition means that boundaries mean something and borders mean something. And I have to be able to implement a policy that doesn’t completely erase borders and boundaries. Not because I think that Honduran child who’s gotten here is less worthy of love, attention, opportunity than my child, but because I’m the president of the United States of America and I’m not speaking as a religious leader. I’ve got certain responsibilities that I have to carry out in a very specific institution and in a specific moment in time.</p><p>So why don’t you ask one last question? And then we can decide how much more you’ve got.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Okay. I wonder if part of this is the fact, as we talked about last time, that the idea of a black president was so remote to everybody that if it happened, it must mean that all these other things would be true about the world—the world would change. I don’t want to use the word <em>postracial</em> or anything like that. But the expectation of the idea of a black president was almost abstract to people.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Right.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> And I wonder—I heard you talk about this very early in your presidency, but there was so much fervor, the crowds that you were getting—at what point did it occur to you: <em>Oh, I’ve got to tamp this down a little bit. People are going to expect me to split the seas</em>?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Well, we used to talk about this in the middle of the campaign. It’s interesting when you go back. I told this to Valerie: We had to get out of Chicago so quick. Election night happens, suddenly I’m talking to Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson and trying to figure out whether the world’s going to fly apart, and Michelle is trying to figure out where the girls are going to go to school. And we pack up and leave and basically our house in Chicago just became like a time capsule. My desk in my home office still had stacks of articles and bills and stuff from 2008. And probably last year I went back, maybe it was earlier this year, and I just start going through some stuff and there was an article—it was the [<em>Time</em> magazine “Person of the Year” issue], and this was at the height of Obama Hype, I mean I’d just been elected—</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Were you tired of it? Were you like, “Please stop”?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Oh yeah. But I read the—there’s an interview of me in there—and I read through it, and what’s interesting was, I was pretty realistic to people about what we could get done, and the situation we were in, and trying to tamp down expectations. If you listen to my stump speeches, if you listen to what I said at Grant Park, I kept on saying, “Look, this is not just about me, this is not going to happen in one year, or one term, or even one presidency.” And we tried to layer into everything we were saying a sense of hope, but also realism. I don’t regret the excitement, because I do think that it helped us accomplish as much as we did. I don’t regret the fervor, because I do believe, in the African American community but also for other communities, and I know from talking to people, for communities around the world, the election of an African American to the most powerful office on Earth meant things had changed, and not just in superficial ways. That in some irreversible way the world was different.</p><p>But I can say with confidence that I never bought into the hype, and I made sure that the people around me didn’t buy into the hype, and I did not surround myself with people who fed me the hype. And I’m glad of that as well. Because I think we would have made a lot more mistakes and would have accomplished a lot less had we not been grounded in some basic truths.</p><p>And I would say this, I’ll go back to those black ladies I was talking about who love them some Barack and love Michelle even more—and by the way, they are not middle-aged anymore, because I’m now middle-aged. So they’re a little bit older. As fervent as they were, as excited and happy as they were when I was elected, they had to go to work the next morning. They still had trouble paying those bills. They might have still had a son who was in trouble with the law or couldn’t get a job because of a felony record. They didn’t stop being grounded. And in many ways they’re my touchstone, because they are what I meant when I talked about the audacity of hope. If you read that passage, it talks about not blind optimism, but it’s hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty—that’s what makes it audacious. Those are the ladies sitting in church. And in the same way that they might feel a joy and release on Sunday, they are still going to work on Monday. And that’s who I was listening to during this process. And if at the end of my presidency they feel like I did a pretty good job, then I’ll feel pretty good.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Okay.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> All right.</p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedIan Allen ‘Better Is Good’: Obama on Reparations, Civil Rights, and the Art of the Possible2016-12-21T13:26:45-05:002017-02-03T15:59:05-05:00The second in a series of interviews between Ta-Nehisi Coates and the presidenttag:theatlantic.com,2016:50-510965<p><em>In “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/?utm_source=feed">My President Was Black</a>,” </em>The Atlantic<em>’s Ta-Nehisi Coates examined Barack Obama’s tenure in office, and his legacy. The story was built, in part, around a series of conversations he had with the president. This is a transcript of the first of those four encounters, which took place on September 27, 2016. Valerie Jarrett, the senior adviser to the president, was also present. You can find responses to the story, and to these conversations, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/the-obama-era/?utm_source=feed">here</a>.</em></p><hr><p><strong>Barack Obama:</strong> All right, where do you want to start?</p><p><strong>Ta-Nehisi Coates:</strong> You know, I was thinking about something today that I heard, and I wanted to see if you could confirm it, and if you could, whether you could talk about it. I was told that the night of the inauguration it was a huge, huge party here. Is that correct?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> [Chuckles] That would be correct.</p><p><strong>Valerie Jarrett:</strong> The second inauguration …</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> You’re talking about the second inauguration?</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Was it the second? Celebrities, maybe Stevie Wonder and Usher?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> First inauguration we had—you know, this is a good example of when you first arrive, you don’t know what you’re supposed to do. So there are all these state balls that take place, and we sort of assumed—we were told—well, you should go to all the balls. So …</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Did you try that? Did you try to go to all of them?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> We went to all of them. And you do a dance at each one.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="special-report"></aside><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Fifty?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> No, no, not every state has one, but we went to 10 or 12. And by the time we were done, it was like 1 o’clock, so we had Wynton Marsalis here playing, and people had been hanging out, but by the time we got back Michelle’s feet were all hurting and swollen up, and I was exhausted, and we hung out here probably for half an hour, and went to bed. Now, the second inauguration, we had it a little more figured out. So we did, like, three balls and then got back here and had a DJ and, yeah, Usher and Stevie.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> How late did you go?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Three-thirty? Four o’clock?</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Was the second one more joyous for you—</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Yes.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> It’s one thing you’re the first black president, but it’s like “Wow, this really—”</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Yeah. I think the way to think about it is the first inauguration is like your wedding in the sense that it is a joyous moment and occasion, but you’re so busy and kind of stressed making sure that Aunt Such-and-Such and Uncle So-and-So and cousins are getting tickets that it ends up going by without you even really knowing what’s happening. The second one you could savor. But partly, as you indicated, for political reasons as well. Because we had gone through four of the toughest years this country has gone through since the ’30s. And to be able to win a majority of the vote the second time indicated that we had worked with a broad cross section of the country and they trusted what we were trying to do. And it wasn’t just a singular feel-good moment; it was an affirmation that people thought we had done a good job.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> I think for those of us—and I certainly threw myself in this camp—I was telling Valerie the other day, the idea of a black president was a joke, in every black stand-up comic routine everywhere—</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Right. A friend of mine gave me <em>Head of State</em>—remember [Chris Rock] and Bernie Mac?—when we were still running. Said, “Man, you got to see <em>Head of State</em>.” [Laughter]</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Yeah, this was like a laugh-fest. But I think one of the things that did distinguish you was the ability to see it and to have the vision that, yes, this could happen, and then to have it again. I’m speaking specifically in terms of race … There were those of us who said, “It’s no way.” And to see it the first and second time must have really reaffirmed a lot of what you thought.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> As I said, the second time, people had seen me work. They had seen me have victories, they had seen me have defeats, they had seen me make mistakes, they had seen me at some high moments but also some low moments. So they knew me, at that point, in the round. I wasn’t just a projection of whatever they hoped for. You know, we always cautioned each other, in the ’08 race, that people were projecting so much onto my campaign—you know, that this would solve every racial problem, or that this indicated that we were beyond race, or that we were going to magically usher in a new era of progressive politics, and that we had vanquished all the backward-looking politics of the past.</p><p>And for us to then be able to grind it out, to figure out how do we get out of this Great Recession, and what’s the process where we can finally get health care done even if it’s not pretty, and how do we deal with winding down two wars, and how do we clean up after an administration to reinvigorate things like the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. People had seen all that, and then had to make a judgment: Do we want to continue on this course, and do we continue to have faith in this person? And so it is true that, for me at least, in some ways the first race was lightning in a bottle. I saw it, I envisioned the possibility of it, but everything converged in a way that you couldn’t duplicate. The second race as a consequence felt more solid, because it was harder. And you know we didn’t have tailwinds, we had a lot more headwinds.</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="626" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/12/GettyImages_526085852/4a2d01c09.jpg" width="960">
<figcaption class="caption">United States Senator Barack Obama campaigns with New York Democratic mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer in Manhattan on Monday, November 7, 2005. (Ramin Talaie / Getty)</figcaption>
</figure><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Yeah, I have my own theories about this, and I wonder what yours are. Why were you able to see it?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> The first time?</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Yeah. You said you were able to envision the possibility. Why? I mean, when you think about yourself—because obviously, as you know, a lot of African Americans could not—what’s the difference?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Yeah. I’d say a couple things. The first was that I had been elected as the senator of Illinois, and Illinois is the most demographically representative state in the country. If you took all the percentages of black, white, Latino, rural, urban, agricultural, manufacturing—[if] you took that cross section across the country, and you shrank it, it would be Illinois. So when I ran for the Senate I had to go into southern Illinois, downstate Illinois, farming communities—some with very tough racial histories, some areas where there just were no African Americans of any number, and I had seen my ability to connect with those communities and those people against some pretty formidable opponents.</p><p>When I ran for the Senate, I was one of seven candidates. One of them, Dan Hynes, was already the state comptroller, was the son of the former Senate president and chair of the Democratic Party, a well-established Irish family in the state, who got the endorsement, I think, of 100 out of 103 county chairs as well as the AFL-CIO endorsement. And you had a multimillionaire hedge-fund manager who was spending huge amounts of money. And when we won that race, not just an African American from Chicago, but an African American with an exotic history and a name Barack Hussein Obama, could connect with and appeal to a much broader audience.</p><p>And then, keep in mind, that the response of the 2004 convention speech was admittedly over the top, and so I had for two years seen the response I would get when we traveled all around the country. I had campaigned on behalf of other Democrats. Ben Nelson, one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, from Nebraska, would only bring in one national Democrat to campaign for him, because typically he tried to distance himself from Democrats—and it was me. And so part of the reason I was willing to run and saw the possibility 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. They weren’t just big cities or they weren’t just liberal enclaves. So what that told me was, it was possible.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Did you have doubts?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Yes.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> You did have doubts?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Look, I think Valerie remembers us sitting around our kitchen table—a group of friends of mine, some political advisers, Michelle—and I think our basic assessment was maybe we had a 20, 25 percent chance of winning.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> The presidency?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> The presidency, yeah. Because I did think given the problems President Bush had had, that whoever won the Democratic nomination would win the presidency. And so the issue really was, could I get the nomination, particularly with a formidable candidate like Hillary Clinton already preparing to run? And my view was not that this was a sure thing, but what I never doubted was my ability to get white support.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> You never doubted that?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> No. And I think that in addition to the proof of my Senate race, if you want to go a little deeper, there is no doubt that as a mixed child, as the child of an African and a white woman, who was very close to white grandparents who came from Kansas, that I think the working assumption of discrimination, the working assumption that white people would not treat me right or give me an opportunity, or judge me on the basis of merit—that kind of working assumption is less embedded in my psyche than it is, say, with Michelle. There is a little bit of a biographical element to this. I had as a child seen at least a small cross section of white people, but the people who were closest to me loved me more than anything. And so even as an adult, even by the time I’m 40, 45, 50, that set of memories meant that if I walked into a room and it’s a bunch of white farmers, trade unionists, middle age—I’m not walking in thinking, <em>Man, I’ve got to show them that I’m normal</em>. I walk in there, I think, with a set of assumptions: like, these people look just like my grandparents. And I see the same the same Jell-O mold that my grandmother served, and they’ve got the same, you know, little stuff on their mantelpieces. And so I am maybe disarming them by just assuming that we’re okay. And if anything, my concern had more to do with<em> I’m really young</em>. I mean, when I look back at the pictures of me running in ’08, I look like a kid. And so my insecurities going into the race had more to do with the fact I had only been in the Senate two years. Three, four years earlier I had been a state legislator, and I was now running for the highest office in the land.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> I want to stay with this for a second. You know, to prepare for this piece I’ve been going back and reading some of your writings. And one of the things I noticed going through <em>Dreams From My Father</em>, which I read a long time ago—it’s very different reading it.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> The second time?</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Yeah, and then after eight years. Yeah, and then—</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> After seeing how things played out.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Right. And one of the things I saw in there: Your grandfather has this black dude come over who’s interested in his daughter, and he’s accepting.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Yeah, listen, I’m always kind of surprised by that. Like I said, it wasn’t Harry Belafonte. This was like an <em>African</em> African. And he was like a blue-black brother. Nilotic. [Laughter] And so, yeah, I will always give my grandparents credit for that. I’m not saying they were happy about it. I’m not saying that they were not, after the guy leaves, looking at each other like, ‘What the heck?’ But whatever misgivings they had, they never expressed to me, never spilled over into how they interacted with me.</p><p>Now, part of it, as I say in my book, was we were in this unique environment in Hawaii where I think it was much easier. I don’t know if it would have been as easy for them if they were living in Chicago at the time, because the lines just weren’t as sharply drawn in Hawaii as they were on the mainland. But I do think that at the end of the day, some of my confidence that people are people and that the very specific historical experience and sociological reality of racism in this country has made for significant differences between black and white populations, but that people’s basic human impulses are the same. I mean, that just grows out of who I am. It’s a biological necessity for me to believe that, right? And so my politics ultimately would reflect that.</p><p>There’s one last point about this, though, that then bears on my presidency that I think I should point out in terms of both my confidence that I could win in ’08 but also the fact that I was lucky and maybe a little bit naive: In 2008 I was never subjected to the kind of concentrated vilification of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the whole conservative-media ecosystem, and so as a consequence, even for my first two years as a senator I was polling at 70 percent. And it was because people basically saw me unfiltered. I was at a town-hall meeting, or I was talking to people directly, or they had met me, or I would speak at a university or go to a VFW hall. But they weren’t seeing some image of me as trying to take away their stuff and give it to black people, and coddle criminals, and all the stereotypes of not just African American politicians but liberal politicians. You started to see that kind of prism being established towards the end of the 2008 race, particularly once Sarah Palin was the nominee. And obviously almost immediately after I was elected, it was deployed in full force. And it had an impact in terms of how a large portion of white voters would see me.</p><p>And what that speaks to—and this is something I still strongly believe—is that the suspicion between races, the way it can manifest itself in politics, in part comes out of people’s daily interactions and the fact that we’re segregated by communities, and by schools, and our churches, and people’s memories passed down through generations. But some of it is constructed on a constant basis; it’s being created all the time. And I think what I did not fully appreciate when I first came into this office was the degree to which that reality would be the only thing that a large chunk of the electorate, particularly the white electorate, would see.</p><p>You know, Bill Clinton told me an interesting story. He went back to Arkansas with a former aide of his when he was governor and when he was running, who ended up running for Congress and was about to retire from Congress. This was one of the last blue dogs. And as they were traveling around ,this former member of Congress said to Bill, “You know, I don’t think you could win Arkansas today.” And he said, “Well, why not?” He says, “You know, when we used to run, you and I would drive around to these small towns and communities out there, and you’d meet with the publisher and editor of the little small-town paper, and you’d have a conversation with them. And they were fairly knowledgeable about some of the issues, and they had their quirks and blind spots, but basically you as a Democrat could talk about civil rights and the need to invest in communities and they understood that. Except now those papers are all gone and if you go into any bar, you go into any barbershop, the only thing that’s on is Fox News.” And it has shaped an entire generation of voters and tapped into their deepest anxieties …</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Just as a counterpoint to that, I wonder about another argument one might make—that you were more likable to these folks before you had power. In other words, once you literally became a black president, that was a real thing. And that activated their fears—</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Yeah, yeah. Look, I think that the— [long pause]</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Like, that they needed Fox News.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Yeah, but what I would argue would be that the folks for whom that is true—they hadn’t voted for me in the first place. I mean, what I’m arguing is not that the concerns or suspicions or fears around changing demographics and increased diversity aren’t right there on the surface for a lot of voters. They are. But what I’m saying is that they are shaped and influenced depending on what they see day to day. And they are more malleable, and they can go in a better direction or a worse direction. And if what they are seeing and what they are taking as truth is that this black president is trying to hurt you or take something from you and looking out for “his own,” then they will respond differently than if they hear that this president is trying to help you. But it’s hard. And here are the issues involved and here are the choices that he’s having to make.</p><p>There’s no better example of that than the whole debate around Obamacare, where the whole way in which it got framed as ‘He’s trying to take something from you to give free stuff’—in this case free health care but it could also be free phones, or free cheese, or whatever—ended up dominating the debate even in those communities that stood to benefit most from this program. But part of that was the story, the narrative that they were receiving. And people don’t have the ability to fact-check and, you know, sort through what’s true and what’s not, especially on a complicated social program like this.</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="638" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/12/ObamaWGrandparents/276a6e276.jpg" width="960">
<figcaption class="caption">A young Barack Obama poses with his maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham. (Reuters)</figcaption>
</figure><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Do you think that holds true even in an era right now when we have so much access to information?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Yeah. You know, in some ways the access to all this information has made it easier to set up narratives that are entirely separate from fact. I mean witness the current election and what Trump is doing. There is no grounding in fact. But because, with all the proliferation of websites, and blogs, and digital content, you can just create your own hermetically sealed world where people are never going outside of their existing assumptions, I think it’s a bigger problem, not a worse problem. I guess the point being that: Was there always a certain quotient of people who, even if it was hard for them to admit, would not vote for me because I was African American? Absolutely. That was true when I was running for the U.S. Senate and that would be true if I was trying to catch a cab. Do I believe that’s the majority of white Americans? Absolutely not. And I think my elections proved that.</p><p>Do I think that good people who are not instinctively afraid or concerned about an African American in authority can be made afraid, and suspicious, and fearful, because of what they are seeing, hearing, and reading if it’s not attached to the facts, and evidence, and reality? I think that can have a big impact.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> One of the things that I think also is here is not just your ability to envision the presidency, just the optimism for the country you have in general. I think, at this kind of young age you really saw—if I may say so—the best of white America in a very sort of direct way—</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Right.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Which I think is very different than most African Americans. I didn’t really grow up around white people, but even the abstract construction was as a malignant force in my life, which I had to make my way out of much, much later in life, in my 20s, when I had intimate contact. And I wonder how much of that general optimism you think emanates from your biography. The exposure too, the cosmopolitan nature of all you’ve seen.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Yeah. I mean, look, I think all of the above. I think I was deeply loved by my mom and my grandparents. I felt that, and I carried that with me. I spent time outside of the United States, which gives you a perspective on how people of all kinds of different races, and ethnicities, and religions, and backgrounds can figure out ways to divide themselves and try to be superior to others. So that I ended up looking at race in America as one example of a broader human problem, rather than something that was unique and I was trapped in. Right? But I also, I think, benefited from the very particular era that I was growing up in, because in some ways, the last 55 years—the years I’ve been on this Earth—have a very particular trajectory of progress that is incomplete, is partial, that middle-class African Americans enjoy in ways that really impoverished African Americans do not yet feel. But that trend would feed my optimism as well.</p><p>Now, you know, what’s interesting is the work that I did as an organizer in Chicago would help to temper that optimism and ground it so that it wasn’t just a bunch of happy talk. And it’s one of the reasons why, for the generation just ahead of me, I would learn of the anger, frustration, bitterness of my elders and respect it and understand it even if I ultimately did not agree with it.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Did you right off the bat, when you first encountered it?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Yeah. And part of it was just because, you know, I had sort of steeped myself in it, although as still an intellectual exercise. I remember reading <em>The Autobiography of Malcolm X</em>, and I remember reading it, even as a young person, and saying to myself, <em>Now, if this had happened to me, I’d have a very different attitude</em>. Right? And that’s part of what I tried to explain in my race speech in Philadelphia when the Reverend Wright controversies came out. He’s of a different generation. He had different experiences. And that sense of being trapped and caged and witnessing brilliant people broken by an unjust system—family members beaten or jailed, or just harassed, or unable to realize their potential—could drive you crazy. And so I think I not only was mindful enough of it by the time I had moved to Chicago, but even in my relatively sheltered and unique circumstances, I had the experiences that every African American has. Which is somebody in front of a restaurant will hand you the keys, thinking you’re there to park their car.</p><p>Or—I write about this in <em>Dreams From My Father</em>—being in a tennis tournament and the tennis coach, who is supposed to look out for all the kids, telling me, ‘Don’t put your finger on the draw that’s been posted about who’s playing who, because you might make it dirty.’ And when you’re 12 years old and look up at some guy, you think: <em>What? </em>Or walking into an elevator and having some woman who you know lives on your floor or above you walk out of the elevator because she’s worried about riding with you even though you’re a kid. So, you know, you have enough there to have a sense of how anger could pool and well up and, in some cases, consume you.</p><p>But I also, I think, by that point would have benefited from enough circumstances in which assuming the best in people had paid off—where there had been a teacher who had really been helpful and looked out for me even when I didn’t completely deserve it. Or, you know, just witnessing the example of a Dr. King, or an Arthur Ashe. And so I’m coming of age at a time where you’ve got the strength and defiance of a Malcolm or an Ali, and you’ve also got the soulfulness and the moral strength of a King. And those things are speaking to each other. They’re in a conversation. And you’re saying to yourself, <em>I can draw from both of those traditions</em>. And there may be times where it is right to be angry and defiant. And there may be times where you’ve got to give the country and white people the benefit of the doubt. And if you’re so eager to give them the benefit of the doubt that they slap you down and you don’t know it, that’s a problem. But if you’re so invested in the anger that you don’t seen when somebody is putting out their hand in a sincere gesture of friendship, then you’ve now become your own jailer. It’s not just someone else jailing you.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Right. It occurs to me, obviously, to have our first black president a product of the times, a product of certain things going around, a product in some part of the administration before—but have you ever thought you needed to be a certain person who had not had this sort of trauma at a young age? Who was capable of giving that sort of optimism—that it couldn’t just be, okay now the country’s ready, Joe Blow Black Dude steps up, and wins, with political gifts, obviously—but I think that optimism sticks out.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Yeah. Look, I have no doubt that the first African American president had to be somebody who could speak the way I did in the 2004 convention speech about the ideal of what America is. As opposed to—</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> What it isn’t. What it hadn’t done.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Right. But that’s true of just running for president generally. Very rarely has somebody won the presidency based on a dark, grim vision of what America is.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Well, we’re getting close.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Right. Well, we’ll see my proposition tested in this election cycle. Maybe the closest is Nixon, who employed the southern strategy and surfed the backlash coming out of both the antiwar movement and the civil-rights movement. But as a general proposition, it’s hard to run for president by telling people how terrible things are. Because at some level what the people want to feel is that the person leading them sees the best in them. And so, did the innate optimism that I carried with me both because of my upbringing and maybe just temperament help? Absolutely. But I’m not sure it had to be me. I’ve said before that Deval Patrick could have been the person who broke that particular barrier back in 2008. And it so happened that he had just run for governor and felt committed to finishing up his term. But he has the gifts and I think the persona that would have appealed at that time to the American public. And there are probably some other figures as well who might have pulled it off.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> How did you feel when that optimism was directly challenged? I was telling Valerie this the other day: We’re at home watching the State of the Union and some guy stands up and yells, “You lie.”</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> [Laughing] Yeah, that was something.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> And this is a guy from South Carolina—we know about South Carolina, he’s confirming everything we feel—</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Yeah, that was something. I still remember looking at him like, <em>Really? what are you doing? Sit down.</em></p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Were you angry?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> You know, I’ve got to say, I wasn’t angry so much as I was just stunned. It was just so unexpected and raw that I didn’t—and to me just kind of ridiculous—that I couldn’t really generate anger.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> And you didn’t feel insulted or … ?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Well … look. There is no doubt that there have been occasions during my presidency when I’ve said, ‘Y’all just would not do this with anybody else.’ Now, obviously the whole birth-certificate thing is the most salient example. I mean, there’ve been 43 other presidents. I don’t remember the issue of where somebody was born ever coming up before. And so there have been other instances like that. There was one time where I was making a statement out here. And in the middle of my statement, somebody just started yelling. It was a reporter—</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> It was a reporter from <em>The</em> <em>Daily Caller</em>. I remember this.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> From <em>The</em> <em>Daily Caller</em>. And I was probably more mad on that one. Because—whereas Joe Wilson, you got a sense of just this weird impulsive action on his part—this felt orchestrated and showed a lack of respect for the office that I think was unprecedented in a Rose Garden statement. Part of what’s been difficult, though, during my presidency, is untangling the degree to which some of these issues are because of race and some of these issues being reflective of just a coarsening of the political culture and a sharpening of the political divides. Because I do remember watching Bill Clinton get impeached and Hillary Clinton being accused of killing Vince Foster. 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.’ And right around the beginning of Bill Clinton’s presidency and what corresponds with the rise of right-wing media, a lot of the old boundaries and rules of civility just broke down.</p><p>Now, one way to think about this is that issues of race and issues of political philosophy have always been entangled, and it’s hard to draw them out. Right? So when I think about the Tea Party or conservatives who’ve opposed my agenda, I have no doubt that there are those who oppose my agenda because they have a coherent and sincere view about the role of the federal government relative to the state governments; they believe that an overreaching federal power that is taxing, regulating, redistributing is contrary to the vision of freedom that the Founders intended—and they can believe those things independent of race.</p><p>Having said that, a 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. And so I’m careful not to attribute any particular resistance or slight or opposition to race. But what I do believe is that if somebody didn’t have a problem with their daddy being employed by the federal government, and didn’t have a problem with the Tennessee Valley Authority electrifying certain communities, and didn’t have a problem with the interstate highway system being built, and didn’t have a problem with the GI Bill, and didn’t have a problem with the [Federal Housing Administration] subsidizing the suburbanization of America, and that all helped you build wealth and create a middle class—and then suddenly as soon as African Americans or Latinos are interested in availing themselves of those same mechanisms as ladders into the middle class, you now have a violent opposition to them, then I think you at least have to ask yourself the question of how consistent you are and what’s different, what’s changed.</p><p>You know, I always talk about when I was doing civil-rights law and people would talk about the dearth of African Americans in police departments and fire departments around the country. And they would say, ‘Well, this should be a meritocracy, and everybody needs to take a test, and that’s objective, and anything else is affirmative action and unfair.’ And I’m thinking, <em>Well, when Officer O’Malley or Officer Krupke was walking the beat, nobody said it was a meritocracy then. </em>What happened? We’re suddenly now of the notion that somebody who’s a police officer or firefighter having some affinity and familiarity with the community they are serving is completely out of bounds. What changed? So I think that one of the things I’m always trying to do is to just promote a consistent philosophy and ethic about how government can help everybody and try to show that what worked for the majority community in previous generations would be likely to work now, too. And the burden is on those who oppose investments in these things to explain what’s changed.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> I was caught because you said that you were the only person that Ben Nelson brought in to campaign for him. And maybe my memory is wrong, but I believe he was one of the harder folks to negotiate with in terms of getting the [Affordable Care Act] passed. You can correct me if I’m wrong, but as I recall, I heard in 2008 from your campaign that there was room to work across party lines, there was room for people who disagree to come together. If we just put forth intelligent proposals, folks would be able to come together. When did you realize it wasn’t quite going to go that way?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> In the first two weeks. Mitch McConnell’s statement about how our No. 1 goal was to make sure Obama was a one-term president. That hadn’t surfaced publicly yet, but—</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Did that surprise you when that got to you?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> No, because by that time we had seen the behavior. But, and I’ve told this story before, the economy was in a free fall. And the one thing I anticipated was that we could get some bipartisan cooperation early on, at least to stop the bleeding, before normal politics kicked in. I mean, we were losing hundreds of thousands of jobs, folks were losing their homes everywhere, the financial system was locked up, the auto industry was melting down. And the risks of us going into 15 percent unemployment and a real catastrophic situation were reasonably high. And so speed was of the essence. And we put together this package, called the Recovery Act, which was basically a big stimulus package, and we designed it in such a way that we thought it would have some appeal to Republicans. Because we had infrastructure spending, and we had spending going directly to states to make sure they weren’t laying off teachers and police and firefighters, and we had a big tax cut for ordinary families, as well as spending for clean energy and education and a whole host of other things.</p><p>And I still remember the day that I’m scheduled to meet with the House Republican caucus, and I get into the car and we’re driving up, and I forget who it was, but one of my staff tells me that John Boehner has just announced that they are opposed to the Recovery Act. Before they had even seen it, before I had made a presentation, before I had had a conversation with them. This was going to be sort of the opening round of negotiations where I’m explaining to them the dire situation and asking for a bipartisan effort to help the American people. And they had shut it down. And that, I think, gave me an inkling of a different political environment than the one that we had seen in the past.</p><p>Now, again, I think it’s really important to understand that had there been a white president—had Hillary Clinton been president, or Joe Biden been president—it is entirely possible that they would have pursued the same strategy. Because the way politics had been structured at that point, where there was so much political gerrymandering, and the media has increasingly become so balkanized, there was an understandable political incentive for them not to cooperate.</p><p>You know, the genius of Mitch McConnell—and to some degree John Boehner—was a recognition that if we were about to go into a bad recession and the president had come in on this wave of good feeling, Democrats control the House, they control the Senate—if he’s completely successful in yanking us out of this and cleaning up a mess a Republican president had left behind, that we might lock in Democratic majorities for a very long time. But on the other hand, if Republicans didn’t cooperate, and there was not a portrait of bipartisan cooperation and a functional federal government, then the party in power would pay the price and that they could win back the Senate and/or the House. That wasn’t an inaccurate political calculation. And they executed well, and we got clobbered in 2010. So the lesson I drew there was a political lesson. It was not a racial lesson.</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="672" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/12/GettyImages_461484978/6e6fd3072.jpg" width="960">
<figcaption class="caption">Barack Obama speaks alongside Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell prior to a meeting of the bipartisan, bicameral leadership of Congress in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., January 13, 2015. (Saul Loab / AFP / Getty)</figcaption>
</figure><p><strong>Coates:</strong> I just want to push this a little bit more. What about the idea that it’s not so much you as a black man as president, but the fact that we’re at a point in history where the Democratic Party, especially locally—the states—has become very racialized?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Well, I think what is true is that when the southern Democrats all flipped, and over the course of successive elections, dating back to ’68, you have a process whereby 90 percent African Americans are voting in the Democratic Party, and southern and many rural and western whites are increasingly voting Republican, and cultural issues become more prominent, that it helped to accelerate what has been called this great sorting. And when you combine that with political gerrymandering, when you combine that with the impact of the media, it makes it easier for Republicans not to cooperate, because there’s nobody in their districts that will punish them for not cooperating with a Democratic president. There is no doubt that that’s true.</p><p>Now, I leave it at this, and maybe we can pick it up in our next conversation: I think what was more of an early lesson around race was the Skip Gates incident. And the reason that was interesting to me was because I didn’t think it was that big of a deal, and I didn’t think my statement was particularly controversial. I don’t know if you know Skip, but Skip is a little guy who uses a cane and has a limp and is late 60s. And if he’s on his porch and he ends up being handcuffed, then my working assumption was, everybody would kind of think that was kind of an overreaction.</p><p>Now, Skip can be, you know, salty, so I have no doubt that—I wasn’t there, but I would not be surprised if Skip used some inappropriate language with the officer when the officer came up to question him. And, you know, this wasn’t some great civil-rights injustice. But it was interesting to see how what I thought was sort of an offhanded and fairly innocuous statement, which was, look, you know, this probably wasn’t—I think I said this: The Cambridge police probably handled this a little stupidly. And the fact of the matter is that part of the reason this becomes news is because there’s this underlying feeling on the part of a lot of African Americans that interaction with police is not always evenhanded.</p><p>To see the cultural reaction, and in retrospect to see how my poll numbers with white voters dropped really significantly off this one tempest in a teapot, that was instructive. Now, there are some who say that’s when Obama started trimming his sails on racial issues. That’s not accurate. That’s not accurate. The truth is that I wanted to make sure that we did not have a bunch of distractions at a time where I’m just putting out fires everywhere. I mean, I’ve got two wars, I’ve got an economic crisis of a proportion we haven’t seen since the Great Depression, and that was not the time, from my perspective, to just open up a big floodgate of conversation around race, which I did not think was going to be productive. What I did learn from that, though, were two things. One was—that was one lesson among many, in those first six months—about the magnification of my words. So if I look at the statement that I made at the time that I thought was pretty innocuous, using the word <em>stupid</em> would be a word I’d never use now, just because I’m president and everything gets magnified. So I could have made the same point in a way that would not have, I think, felt as visceral.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> You think you could have got that across about it?</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> I think I could have got it across better. So that’s point No. 1. Point No. 2, though, is: What it also showed me was the degree to which the filter that I discussed earlier can completely shape a narrative in a way that will just run until you get some sort of circuit breaker going. And part of what I had to start teaching my staff was: not to overreact to that. Because what is absolutely true is that, you know, my press office freaked out around that in a way that I was not that freaked out about. There was a part of me that was like, ‘Okay, so the Cambridge police isn’t happy with me, but this really isn’t a big deal, we’ve got other stuff we’ve got to worry about.’ They were channeling what they were seeing coming at them suddenly in the press room and through news reports.</p><p>And what that meant then was that, on issues of race, certainly on issues of race as it relates to law enforcement, what I wanted to make sure of is that when we said something that was precise, that we were choosing those moments where we had the best chance of driving home the point and extracting real progress. And that we needed to think about how the narrative would be shaped in a way that was constructive rather than us just being on the defense all the time. You know, so it’s interesting for me to think about that moment and then all the subsequent issues that have come up.</p><p><strong>Coates:</strong> Yeah, it got a lot worse than that, than being arrested on your porch.</p><p><strong>Obama:</strong> Well, exactly. Right. But the dynamic around which everybody went to their respective corners on what was such a small incident, it foreshadowed the response that I would get later. And to this day, it does not matter how many times I will say, “You know what? Our police have a tough job and 99 percent of them are doing a great job,” etc., and I will get letters afterwards: “Why are you always throwing cops under the bus? Why do you hate police?” [Laughing] And I literally made my press office sort of put together a packet of something like 30 statements that I’ve made, highlighted in yellow, that I will send to constituents—because oftentimes, you know, these are the wives of police officers who are scared for their husbands, and I don’t want to ignore them. But it tells me what they’re seeing. It tells me what they’re hearing. The filter through which they are receiving information is powerful. And that was an early lesson about how powerful that filter was.</p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedIan Allen'The Filter ... Is Powerful': Obama on Race, Media, and What It Took to Win2016-12-20T13:22:00-05:002016-12-22T11:13:05-05:00The first in a series of interviews between Ta-Nehisi Coates and the presidenttag:theatlantic.com,2016:178-510443<iframe width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" src="https://www.theatlantic.com/video/iframe/510443/"></iframe>
<p>In his January/Febrary 2017 cover story, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores President Barack Obama’s journey to the White House. This short animation uses recordings from Coates’s conversations with Obama to illustrate the young president’s doubts and convictions along the way. "I think our basic assessment was maybe we had a 20-25 percent chance of winning,” Obama says of his run for president. “But what I never doubted was my ability to get white support.” <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/">Read the full story here</a>.</p>
Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedJackie Layhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/jackie-lay/?utm_source=feedThe Making of a Black President2016-12-13T09:29:10-05:002017-05-15T16:37:53-04:00In a short animation, Barack Obama speaks with Ta-Nehisi Coates about his road to the White House.tag:theatlantic.com,2016:39-508793<link href="//cdn.theatlantic.com/media/interactives/2015/05/host/annotations.0dbe5afa88e5.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"><script type="text/javascript" src="//cdn.theatlantic.com/media/interactives/2015/05/host/annotations.c6f5fb4df987.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p style="text-align: center; margin-left:20%;margin-right:20%"><em>“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”</em></p><p style="text-align: center;margin-left:25%;margin-right:25%"><em>— F. Scott Fitzgerald, </em>The Great Gatsby</p><hr><h3 id="I" style="text-align: center;"><b>I.</b><br>
“Love Will Make You Do Wrong”</h3><p class="dropcap"><span><span class="smallcaps">In the waning days</span> of President Barack Obama’s administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party, the full import of which no one could then grasp. It was late October, Friday the 21st, and the president had spent many of the previous weeks, as he would spend the two subsequent weeks, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. Things were looking up. Polls in the crucial states of Virginia and Pennsylvania showed Clinton with solid advantages. The formidable GOP strongholds of Georgia and Texas were said to be under threat. The moment seemed to buoy Obama. He had been light on his feet in these last few weeks, cracking jokes at the expense of Republican opponents and laughing off hecklers. At a rally in Orlando on October 28, he greeted a student who would be introducing him by dancing toward her and then noting that the song playing over the loudspeakers—the Gap Band’s “Outstanding”—was older than she was. “This is classic!” he said. Then he flashed the smile that had launched America’s first black presidency, and started dancing again. Three months still remained before Inauguration Day, but staffers had already begun to count down the days. They did this with a mix of pride and longing—like college seniors in early May. They had no sense of the world they were graduating into. None of us did. </span></p><aside class="callout">
<h4>Chapters</h4>
<ol type="I">
<li><a href="#I">“Love Will Make You Do Wrong”</a></li>
<li><a href="#II">He Walked on Ice but Never Fell</a></li>
<li><a href="#III">“I Decided to Become Part of That World”</a></li>
<li><a href="#IV">“You Still Gotta Go Back to the Hood”</a></li>
<li><a href="#V">"They Rode the Tiger”</a></li>
<li><a href="#VI">“When You Left, You Took All of Me With You”</a></li>
</ol>
</aside><p><span>The farewell party, presented by BET (Black Entertainment Television), was the last in a series of concerts the first couple had hosted at the White House. Guests were asked to arrive at 5:30 p.m. By 6, two long lines stretched behind the Treasury Building, where the Secret Service was checking names. The people in these lines were, in the main, black, and their humor reflected it. The brisker queue was dubbed the “good-hair line” by one guest, and there was laughter at the prospect of the Secret Service subjecting us all to a “brown-paper-bag test.” This did not come to pass, but security was tight. Several guests were told to stand in a makeshift pen and wait to have their backgrounds checked a second time. </span></p><p class="letter-intro">Listen to the audio version of this article:<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/298877530&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%"></iframe> <em class="letter-writer-info"><a href="https://goo.gl/u6MhFC">Download the Audm</a> app for your iPhone to listen to more titles.</em></p><p><span>Dave Chappelle was there. He coolly explained the peril and promise of comedy in what was then still only a remotely potential Donald Trump presidency: “I mean, we never had a guy have his own pussygate scandal.” Everyone laughed. A few weeks later, he would be roundly criticized for telling a crowd at the Cutting Room, in New York, that he had voted for Clinton but did not feel good about it. “She’s going to be on a coin someday,” Chappelle said. “And her behavior has not been coinworthy.” But on this crisp October night, everything felt inevitable and grand. There was a slight wind. It had been in the 80s for much of that week. Now, as the sun set, the season remembered its name. Women shivered in their cocktail dresses. Gentlemen chivalrously handed over their suit coats. But when Naomi Campbell strolled past the security pen in a sleeveless number, she seemed as invulnerable as ever. </span></p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><span>Cellphones were confiscated to prevent surreptitious recordings from leaking out. (This effort was unsuccessful. The next day, a partygoer would tweet a video of the leader of the free world dancing to Drake’s “Hotline Bling.”) After withstanding the barrage of security, guests were welcomed into the East Wing of the White House, and then ushered back out into the night, where they boarded a succession of orange-and-green trolleys. The singer and actress Janelle Monáe, her famous and fantastic pompadour preceding her, stepped on board and joked with a companion about the historical import of “sitting in the back of the bus.” She took a seat three rows from the front and hummed into the night. The trolley dropped the guests on the South Lawn, in front of a giant tent. The South Lawn’s fountain was lit up with blue lights. The White House proper loomed like a ghost in the distance. I heard the band, inside, beginning to play Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” </span></p><p><span>“Well, you can tell what type of night this is,” Obama said from the stage, opening the event. “Not the usual ruffles and flourishes!”</span></p><p><span>The crowd roared. </span></p><p><span>“This must be a BET event!”</span></p><p><span>The crowd roared louder still.</span></p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="special-report"></aside><p><span>Obama placed the concert in the White House’s musical tradition, noting that guests of the Kennedys had once done the twist at the residence—“the twerking of their time,” he said, before adding, “There will be no twerking tonight. At least not by me.” </span></p><p><span>The Obamas are fervent and eclectic music fans. In the past eight years, they have hosted performances at the White House by everyone from Mavis Staples to Bob Dylan to Tony Bennett to the Blind Boys of Alabama. After the rapper Common was invited to perform in 2011, a small fracas ensued in the right-wing media. He performed anyway—and was invited back again this glorious fall evening and almost stole the show. The crowd sang along to the hook for his hit ballad “The Light.” And when he brought on the gospel singer Yolanda Adams to fill in for John Legend on the Oscar-winning song “Glory,” glee turned to rapture.</span></p><p><span>De La Soul was there. The hip-hop trio had come of age as boyish B-boys with Gumby-style high-top fades. Now they moved across the stage with a lovely mix of lethargy and grace, like your favorite uncle making his way down the </span><i>Soul Train</i><span> line, wary of throwing out a hip. I felt a sense of victory watching them rock the crowd, all while keeping it in the pocket. The victory belonged to hip-hop—an art form birthed in the burning Bronx and now standing full grown, at the White House, unbroken and unedited. Usher led the crowd in a call-and-response: “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud.” Jill Scott showed off her operatic chops. Bell Biv DeVoe, contemporaries of De La, made history with their performance by surely becoming the first group to suggest to a presidential audience that one should “never trust a big butt and a smile.”</span></p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="640" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/12/WEL_Coates_Obama2/b1669f6d6.jpg" width="960">
<figcaption class="caption">President Obama onstage at BET’s “Love & Happiness” event in October 2016, the last in a series of concerts the first couple hosted at the White House (Lawrence Jackson / White House)</figcaption>
</figure><p><span>The ties between the Obama White House and the hip-hop community are genuine. The Obamas are social with Beyoncé and Jay-Z. They hosted Chance the Rapper and Frank Ocean at a state dinner, and last year invited Swizz Beatz, Busta Rhymes, and Ludacris, among others, to discuss criminal-justice reform and other initiatives. Obama once stood in the Rose Garden passing large flash cards to the </span><i>Hamilton</i><span> creator and rapper Lin-Manuel Miranda, who then freestyled using each word on the cards. “Drop the beat,” Obama said, inaugurating the session. At 55, Obama is younger than pioneering hip-hop artists like Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Kool Herc, and Kurtis Blow. If Obama’s enormous symbolic power draws primarily from being the country’s first black president, it also draws from his membership in hip-hop’s foundational generation.</span></p><p><span>That night, the men were sharp in their gray or black suits and optional ties. Those who were not in suits had chosen to make a statement, like the dark-skinned young man who strolled in, sockless, with blue jeans cuffed so as to accentuate his gorgeous black-suede loafers. Everything in his ensemble seemed to say, “My fellow Americans, do not try this at home.” There were women in fur jackets and high heels; others with sculpted naturals, the sides shaved close, the tops blooming into curls; others still in gold bamboo earrings and long blond dreads. When the actor Jesse Williams took the stage, seemingly awed before such black excellence, before such black opulence, assembled just feet from where slaves had once toiled, he simply said, “Look where we are. Look where we are right now.”</span></p><p><span>This would not happen again, and everyone knew it. It was not just that there might never be another African American president of the United States. It was the feeling that this particular black family, the Obamas, represented the best of black people, the ultimate credit to the race, incomparable in elegance and bearing. “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.” This was the ideal—black and graceful under fire—saluted that evening. The president was lionized as “our crown jewel.” The first lady was praised as the woman “who put the </span><i>O</i><span> in </span><i>Obama</i><span>.”</span></p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><span>Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing “mere” about symbols. The power embedded in the word </span><i>nigger</i><span> is also symbolic. Burning crosses do not literally raise the black poverty rate, and the Confederate flag does not directly expand the wealth gap. </span></p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Much as the unbroken ranks of 43 white male presidents communicated that the highest office of government in the country—indeed, the most powerful political offices in the world—was off-limits to black individuals, the election of Barack Obama communicated that the prohibition had been lifted. It communicated much more. Before Obama triumphed in 2008, the most-famous depictions of black success tended to be entertainers or athletes. But Obama had shown that it was “possible to be smart and cool at the same damn time,” as Jesse Williams put it at the BET party. Moreover, he had not embarrassed his people with a string of scandals. Against the specter of black pathology, against the narrow images of welfare moms and deadbeat dads, his time in the White House had been an eight-year showcase of a healthy and successful black family spanning three generations, with two dogs to boot. In short, he became a symbol of black people’s everyday, extraordinary Americanness.</p><p>Whiteness in America is a different symbol—a badge of advantage. In a country of professed meritocratic competition, this badge has long ensured an unerring privilege, represented in a 220-year monopoly on the highest office in the land. For some not-insubstantial sector of the country, the elevation of Barack Obama communicated that the power of the badge had diminished. For eight long years, the badge-holders watched him. They saw footage of the president throwing bounce passes and shooting jumpers. They saw him enter a locker room, give a businesslike handshake to a white staffer, and then greet Kevin Durant with something more soulful. They saw his wife dancing with Jimmy Fallon and posing, resplendent, on the covers of magazines that had, only a decade earlier, been almost exclusively, if unofficially, reserved for ladies imbued with the great power of the badge.</p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p>For the preservation of the badge, insidious rumors were concocted to denigrate the first black White House. Obama gave free cellphones to disheveled welfare recipients. Obama went to Europe and complained that “ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs.” Obama had inscribed an Arabic saying on his wedding ring, then stopped wearing the ring, in observance of Ramadan. He canceled the National Day of Prayer; refused to sign certificates for Eagle Scouts; faked his attendance at Columbia University; and used a teleprompter to address a group of elementary-school students. The badge-holders fumed. They wanted their country back. And, though no one at the farewell party knew it, in a couple of weeks they would have it.</p><p>On this October night, though, the stage belonged to another America. At the end of the party, Obama looked out into the crowd, searching for Dave Chappelle. “Where’s Dave?” he cried. And then, finding him, the president referenced Chappelle’s legendary Brooklyn concert. “You got your block party. I got my block party.” Then the band struck up Al Green’s “Love and Happiness”—the evening’s theme. The president danced in a line next to Ronnie DeVoe. Together they mouthed the lyrics: “Make you do right. Love will make you do wrong.”</p><h3>Video: The Making of a Black President</h3><figure><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="360" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="https://www.theatlantic.com/video/iframe/510443/" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="640"></iframe></figure><hr><h3 id="II" style="text-align: center;"><b>II.</b><br>
He Walked on Ice but Never Fell</h3><p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps">Last spring</span>, I went to the White House to meet the president for lunch. I arrived slightly early and sat in the waiting area. I was introduced to a deaf woman who worked as the president’s receptionist, a black woman who worked in the press office, a Muslim woman in a head scarf who worked on the National Security Council, and an Iranian American woman who worked as a personal aide to the president. This receiving party represented a healthy cross section of the people Donald Trump had been mocking, and would continue to spend his campaign mocking. At the time, the president seemed untroubled by Trump. When I told Obama that I thought Trump’s candidacy was an explicit reaction to the fact of a black president, he said he could see that, but then enumerated other explanations. When assessing Trump’s chances, he was direct: He couldn’t win.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="magazine-issue"></aside><p>This assessment was born out of the president’s innate optimism and unwavering faith in the ultimate wisdom of the American people—the same traits that had propelled his unlikely five-year ascent from assemblyman in the Illinois state legislature to U.S. senator to leader of the free world. The speech that launched his rise, the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, emerged right from this logic. He addressed himself to his “fellow Americans, Democrats, Republicans, independents,” all of whom, he insisted, were more united than they had been led to believe. America was home to devout worshippers and Little League coaches in blue states, civil libertarians and “gay friends” in red states. The presumably white “counties around Chicago” did not want their taxes burned on welfare, but they didn’t want them wasted on a bloated Pentagon budget either. Inner-city black families, no matter their perils, 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.”</p><p>Perceived differences were the work of “spinmasters and negative-ad peddlers who embrace the politics of ‘anything goes.’ ” Real America had no use for such categorizations. 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.” All these disparate strands of the American experience were bound together by a common hope:</p><blockquote>It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; 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.</blockquote><p>This speech 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. That young naval lieutenant was an imperial agent for a failed, immoral war. American division was real. In 2004, John Kerry did not win a single southern state. But Obama appealed to a belief in innocence—in particular a white innocence—that ascribed the country’s historical errors more to misunderstanding and the work of a small cabal than to any deliberate malevolence or widespread racism. America was good. America was great.</p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p>Over the next 12 years, I came to regard Obama as a skilled politician, a deeply moral human being, and one of the greatest presidents in American history. He was phenomenal—the most agile interpreter and navigator of the color line I had ever seen. 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. This was the core of his 2004 keynote, and it marked his historic race speech during the 2008 campaign at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center—and blinded him to the appeal of Trump. (“As a general proposition, it’s hard to run for president by telling people how terrible things are,” Obama once said to me.)</p><p><span>But if the president’s inability to cement his legacy in the form of Hillary Clinton proved the limits of his optimism, it also revealed the exceptional nature of his presidential victories. For eight years Barack Obama walked on ice and never fell. Nothing in that time suggested that straight talk on the facts of racism in American life would have given him surer footing. </span></p><figure><img alt="" height="896" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/12/WEL_Coates_Obama3/effd92adb.jpg" width="630">
<figcaption class="caption">Obama’s keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention launched his rise from Illinois state senator to president of the United States. (David L. Ryan / <em>The Boston Globe</em> / Getty)</figcaption>
</figure><p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps">I had met the president </span>a few times before. In his second term, I’d written articles criticizing him for his overriding trust in color-blind policy and his embrace of “personal responsibility” rhetoric when speaking to African Americans. I saw him as playing both sides. He would invoke his identity as a president of all people to decline to advocate for black policy—and then invoke his black identity to lecture black people for continuing to “make bad choices.” In response, Obama had invited me, along with other journalists, to the White House for off-the-record conversations. I attempted to press my points in these sessions. My efforts were laughable and ineffective. I was always inappropriately dressed, and inappropriately calibrated in tone: In one instance, I was too deferential; in another, too bellicose. I was discombobulated by fear—not by fear of the power of his office (though that is a fearsome and impressive thing) but by fear of his obvious brilliance. It is said that Obama speaks “professorially,” a fact that understates the quickness and agility of his mind. These were not like press conferences—the president would speak in depth and with great familiarity about a range of subjects. Once, I watched him effortlessly reply to queries covering everything from electoral politics to the American economy to environmental policy. And then he turned to me. I thought of George Foreman, who once booked an exhibition with multiple opponents in which he pounded five straight journeymen—and I suddenly had some idea of how it felt to be the last of them.</p><p><span>Last spring, we had a light lunch. We talked casually and candidly. 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 had heard the kind of “straighten up” talk he had been giving to black youth, for instance in his 2013 Morehouse commencement address, all my life. 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. He seemed to concede this point, but I couldn’t tell whether it mattered to him. Nonetheless, he agreed to a series of more formal conversations on this and other topics.</span></p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><span>The improbability of a black president had once been so strong that its most vivid representations were comedic. Witness Dave Chappelle’s profane Black Bush from the early 2000s (“This nigger very possibly has weapons of mass destruction! I can’t sleep on that!”) or Richard Pryor’s black president in the 1970s promising black astronauts and black quarterbacks (“Ever since the Rams got rid of James Harris, my jaw’s been uptight!”). 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. </span></p><p><span>Obama’s DNC speech is the key. It does not belong to the literature of “the struggle”; it belongs to the literature of prospective presidents—men (as it turns out) who speak not to gravity and reality, but to aspirations and dreams. When Lincoln invoked the dream of a nation “conceived in liberty” and pledged to the ideal that “all men are created equal,” he erased the near-extermination of one people and the enslavement of another. When Roosevelt told the country that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he invoked the dream of American omnipotence and boundless capability. 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. The dream Ronald Reagan invoked in 1984—that “it’s morning again in America”—meant nothing to the inner cities, besieged as they were by decades of redlining policies, not to mention crack and Saturday-night specials. Likewise, Obama’s keynote address conflated the slave and the nation of immigrants who profited from him. To reinforce the majoritarian dream, the nightmare endured by the minority is erased. That is the tradition to which the “skinny kid with a funny name” who would be president belonged. It is also the only tradition in existence that could have possibly put a black person in the White House.</span></p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p>Obama’s embrace of white innocence was demonstrably necessary as a matter of political survival. Whenever he attempted to buck this directive, he was disciplined. His mild objection to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 2009 contributed to his declining favorability numbers among whites—still a majority of voters. His comments after the killing of Trayvon Martin—“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”—helped make that tragedy a rallying point for people who did not care about Martin’s killer as much as they cared<span> about finding ways to oppose the president. Michael Tesler, a political-science professor at UC Irvine, has studied the effect of Obama’s race on the American electorate. “No other factor, in fact, came close to dividing the Democratic primary electorate as powerfully as their feelings about African Americans,” he and his co-author, David O. Sears, concluded in their book, </span><i>Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America</i>.<span> “The impact of racial attitudes on individual vote decisions … was so strong that it appears to have even outstripped the substantive impact of racial attitudes on Jesse Jackson’s more racially charged campaign for the nomination in 1988.” When Tesler looked at the 2012 campaign in his second book,</span><i> Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era</i><span>, very little had improved. Analyzing the extent to which racial attitudes affected people associated with Obama during the 2012 election, Tesler concluded that “racial attitudes spilled over from Barack Obama into mass assessments of Mitt Romney, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Charlie Crist, and even the Obama family’s dog Bo.”</span></p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="640" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/12/WEL_Coates_Obama4/55bff0d18.jpg" width="960">
<figcaption class="caption">This photograph of a 5-year-old boy patting the president’s hair in 2009 became an icon of the Obama White House. (Pete Souza / White House)</figcaption>
</figure><p><span>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 remade the nation’s health-care system. 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.S. military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, thus honoring the civil-rights tradition that had inspired him. And if his very existence inflamed America’s racist conscience, it also expanded the country’s anti-racist imagination. Millions of young people now know their only president to have been an African American. Writing for </span><i>The New Yorker</i><span>, Jelani Cobb once noted that “until there was a black Presidency it was impossible to conceive of the limitations of one.” This is just as true of the possibilities. In 2014, 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 10,000 prisoners. As of November, the president had commuted only 944 sentences. By any measure, Obama’s effort fell woefully short, except for this small one: the measure of almost every other modern president who preceded him. Obama’s 944 commutations are the most in nearly a century—and more than the past 11 presidents’ combined. </span></p><p><span>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. </span></p><hr><h3 id="III" style="text-align: center;"><b>III.</b><br>
“I Decided to Become Part of That World”</h3><p class="dropcap"><span><span class="smallcaps">When Barack Obama</span> was 10, his father gave him a basketball, a gift that connected the two directly. Obama was born in 1961 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. When Obama’s mother had begun dating his father, the news had not been greeted with the threat of lynching (as it might have been in various parts of the continental United States), and Obama’s grandparents always spoke positively of his father. This biography makes Obama nearly unique among black people of his era.</span></p><p><span>In the president’s memoir, </span><i>Dreams From My Father</i><span>, he says he was not an especially talented basketball player, but he played with a consuming passion. That passion was directed at something more than just the mastering of the pick-and-roll or the perfecting of his jump shot. Obama came of age during the time of the University of Hawaii basketball team’s “Fabulous Five”—a name given to its all-black starting five, two decades before it would be resurrected at the University of Michigan by the likes of Chris Webber and Jalen Rose. In his memoir, Obama writes that he would watch the University of Hawaii players laughing at “some inside joke,” winking “at the girls on the sidelines,” or “casually flipping lay-ups.” What Obama saw in the Fabulous Five was not just game, but a culture he found attractive: </span></p><blockquote>By the time I reached high school, I was playing on Punahou’s teams, and could take my game to the university courts, where a handful of black men, mostly gym rats and has-beens, would teach me an attitude that didn’t just have to do with the sport. That respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was. That you could talk stuff to rattle an opponent, but that you should shut the hell up if you couldn’t back it up. That you didn’t let anyone sneak up behind you to see emotions—like hurt or fear—you didn’t want them to see.</blockquote><p><span>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. Assessing his own thought process at the time, Obama writes, “I decided to become part of that world.” This is one of the most incredible sentences ever written in the long, decorated history of black memoir, if only because very few black people have ever enjoyed enough power to write it.</span></p><p><span>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. After telling his teacher he wants to be a lawyer, Malcolm X is told that the job isn’t for “niggers.” Black culture often serves as the balm for such traumas, or even the means to resist them. Douglass finds the courage to face the “slave-breaker” Edward Covey after being given an allegedly enchanted root by “a genuine African” possessing powers from “the eastern nations.” Malcolm X’s dancing connects him to his “long-suppressed African instincts.” If black racial identity speaks to all the things done to people of recent African ancestry, black cultural identity was created in response to them. 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. </span></p><p><span>Obama is somewhat different. He writes of bloodying the nose of a white kid who called him a “coon,” and of chafing at racist remarks from a tennis coach, and of feeling offended after a white woman in his apartment building told the manager that he was following her. 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. </span></p><p><span>Instead, he decided to enter this world.</span></p><p><span>“I always felt as if being black was cool,” Obama told me while traveling to a campaign event. He was sitting on </span><i>Air Force One</i><span>, his tie loosened, his shirtsleeves rolled up. “[Being black] was not something to run away from but something to embrace. Why that is, I think, is complicated. Part of it is I think that my mother thought black folks were cool, and if your mother loves you and is praising you—and says you look good, are smart—as you are, then you don’t kind of think in terms of </span><i>How can I avoid this?</i><span> You feel pretty good about it.” </span></p><p><span>As a child, Obama’s embrace of blackness was facilitated, not impeded, by white people. Obama’s mother pointed him toward the history and culture of African Americans. 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. Obama recalls watching his grandfather at those black bars and understanding that “most of the people in the bar weren’t there out of choice,” and that “our presence there felt forced.” From his mother’s life of extensive travel, he learned to value the significance of having a home.</span></p><p><span>That suspicion of rootlessness extends throughout </span><i>Dreams From My Father</i><span>. He describes integration as a “one-way street” on which black people are asked to abandon themselves to fully experience America’s benefits. Confronted with a woman named Joyce, a mixed-race, green-eyed college classmate who insists that she is not “black” but “multiracial,” Obama is scornful. “That was the problem with people like Joyce,” he writes. “They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people.” Later in the memoir, Obama tells the story of falling in love with a white woman. During a visit to her family’s country house, he found himself in the library, which was filled with pictures of the woman’s illustrious relations. But instead of being in awe, Obama realized that he and the woman lived in different worlds. “And I knew that if we stayed together, I’d eventually live in hers,” he writes. “Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.”</span></p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><span>After college, Obama found a home, as well as a sense of himself, 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,” he told me, referring to the civil-rights hero and Democratic congressman. “That happens more naturally for you. It was less obvious to me. </span><i>How do I pull all these different strains together: </i><span><em>Kenya and Hawaii and Kansas, and white and black and Asian—how does that fit?</em> 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. So I’m in a position to understand those essential parts of me not as separate and apart from any particular community but connected to every community. And I can fit the African American struggle for freedom and justice in the context of the universal aspiration for freedom and justice.” </span></p><p><span>Throughout Obama’s 2008 campaign and into his presidency, this attitude proved key to his deep support in the black community. African Americans, weary of high achievers who distanced themselves from their black roots, understood that Obama had paid a price for checking “black” on his census form, and for living black, for hosting Common, for brushing dirt off his shoulder during the primaries, for marrying a woman who looked like Michelle Obama. 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. </span></p><p><span>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. 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; 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. Harold Washington served as an inspiration to Obama and looms heavily over the Chicago section of </span><i>Dreams From My Father</i><span>. </span></p><p><span>Washington forged the kind of broad coalition that Obama would later assemble nationally. But Washington did this in the mid-1980s in segregated Chicago, and he had not had the luxury, as Obama did, of becoming black with minimal trauma. “There was an edge to Harold that frightened some white voters,” David Axelrod, who worked for both Washington and Obama, told me recently. Axelrod recalled sitting around a conference table with Washington after he had won the Democratic primary for his reelection in 1987, just as the mayor was about to hold a press conference. Washington asked what percentage of Chicago’s white vote he’d received. “And someone said, ‘Well, you got 21 percent. And that’s really good because last time’ ”—in his successful 1983 mayoral campaign—“ ‘you only got 8,’ ” Axelrod recalled. “And he kind of smiled, sadly, and said, ‘You know, I probably spent 70 percent of my time in those white neighborhoods, and I think I’ve been a good mayor for everybody, and I got 21 percent of the white vote and we think it’s good.’ And he just kind of shook his head and said, ‘Ain’t it a bitch to be a black man in the land of the free and the home of the brave?’ </span></p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><span>“That was Harold. 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.” During his 1983 mayoral campaign, Washington was loudly booed outside a church in northwest Chicago by middle-class Poles, Italians, and Irish, who feared blacks would uproot them. “It was as vicious and ugly as anything you would have seen in the old South,” Axelrod said. </span></p><p><span>Obama’s ties to the South Side tradition that Washington represented were complicated. 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. “They were a bit skeptical of him,” says Salim Muwakkil, a journalist who has covered Obama since before his days in the Illinois state Senate. “Chicago is a very insular community, and he came from nowhere, seemingly.” </span></p><p><span>Obama compounded people’s suspicions by refusing to humble himself and go along with the political currents of the South Side. “A lot of the politicians, especially the black ones, were just leery of him,” Kaye Wilson, the godmother to Obama’s children and one of the president’s earliest political supporters, told me recently. </span></p><p><span>But even as many in the black political community were skeptical of Obama, others encouraged him—sometimes when they voted against him. When Obama lost the 2000 Democratic-primary race against Bobby Rush, the African American incumbent congressman representing Illinois’ First Congressional District, the then-still-obscure future president experienced the defeat as having to do more with his age than his exoticism. “I’d go meet people and I’d knock on doors and stuff, and some of the grandmothers who were the folks I’d been organizing and working with doing community stuff, they weren’t parroting back some notion of ‘You’re too Harvard,’ or ‘You’re too Hyde Park,’ or what have you,” Obama told me. “They’d say, ‘You’re a wonderful young man, you’re going to do great things. You just have to be patient.’ So I didn’t feel the loss as a rejection by black people. I felt the loss as ‘politics anywhere is tough.’ Politics in Chicago is especially tough. 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.”</span></p><p><span>There was no one around to compete for loyalty when Obama ran for Senate in 2004, or for president in 2008. He was no longer competing against other African Americans; he was representing them. “He had that hybridity which told the ‘do-gooders’—in Chicago they call the reformers the do-gooders—that he was acceptable,” Muwakkil told me. </span></p><p><span>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 carried, against seven candidates for the Senate, almost the entire northwest side and that precinct,” he said. “And I told him, ‘Harold’s smiling down on us tonight.’ ”</span></p><figure><img alt="" height="896" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/12/WEL_Coates_Obama5/4cd3b7c49.jpg" width="630">
<figcaption class="credit">Ian Allen</figcaption>
</figure><p><span>Obama believes that his statewide victory for the Illinois Senate seat held particular portent for the events of 2008. “Illinois is the most demographically representative state in the country,” he told me. “If you took all the percentages of black, white, Latino; rural, urban; agricultural, manufacturing—[if] you took that cross section across the country and you shrank it, it would be Illinois.” </span></p><p><span>Illinois effectively allowed Obama to play a scrimmage before the big national game in 2008. “When I ran for the Senate I had to go into southern Illinois, downstate Illinois, farming communities—some with very tough racial histories, some areas where there just were no African Americans of any number,” Obama told me. “And when we won that race, not just an African American from Chicago, but an African American with an exotic history and [the] name Barack Hussein Obama, [it showed that I] could connect with and appeal to a much broader audience.” </span></p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><span>The mix of Obama’s “hybridity” and the changing times allowed him to extend his appeal beyond the white ethnic corners of Chicago, past the downstate portions of Illinois, and out into the country at large. “Ben Nelson, one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, from Nebraska, would only bring in one national Democrat to campaign for him,” Obama recalls. “And it was me. And so part of the reason I was willing to run [for president in 2008] 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. They weren’t just big cities or they weren’t just liberal enclaves. So what that told me was, it was possible.”</span></p><p><span>What those crowds saw was a black candidate unlike any other before him. To simply point to Obama’s white mother, or to his African father, or even to his rearing in Hawaii, is to miss the point. 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 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. </span></p><p><span>I asked Obama what he made of his grandparents’ impressively civilized reception of his father. “It wasn’t Harry Belafonte,” Obama said laughingly of his father. “This was like an </span><i>African</i><span> African. And he was like a blue-black brother. Nilotic. And so, yeah, I will always give my grandparents credit for that. I’m not saying they were happy about it. I’m not saying that they were not, after the guy leaves, looking at each other like, ‘What the heck?’ But whatever misgivings they had, they never expressed to me, never spilled over into how they interacted with me.</span></p><p><span>“Now, part of it, as I say in my book, was we were in this unique environment in Hawaii where I think it was much easier. I don’t know if it would have been as easy for them if they were living in Chicago at the time, because the lines just weren’t as sharply drawn in Hawaii as they were on the mainland.”</span></p><p><span>Obama’s early positive interactions with his white family members gave him a fundamentally different outlook toward the wider world than most blacks of the 1960s had. Obama told me he rarely had “the working assumption of discrimination, the working assumption that white people would not treat me right or give me an opportunity or judge me [other than] on the basis of merit.” 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.” </span></p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><span>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. The need for that defense is, more often than not, reinforced either directly by actual encounters or indirectly by observing the vast differences between one’s own experience and those across the color line. Marty Nesbitt, the president’s longtime best friend, who, like Obama, had positive interactions with whites at a relatively early age, told me that when he and his wife went to buy their first car, she was insistent on buying from a black salesperson. “I’m like, ‘We’ve got to find a salesman,’ ” Nesbitt said. “She’s like, ‘No, no, no. We’re waiting for the brother.’ And I’m like, ‘He’s with a customer.’ They were filling out documents and she was like, ‘We’re going to stay around.’ And a white guy came up to us. ‘Can I help you?’ ‘Nope.’ ” Nesbitt was not out to condemn anyone with this story. He was asserting that “the willingness of African Americans [in Chicago] to help lift each other up is powerful.”</span></p><p><span>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. “It’s just very different from ours,” she explained. “He’s got buddies that are white, and they’re his buddies, and they love him. And I don’t think they love him just because he’s the president. They love him because they’re his friends from Hawaii, some from college and all. </span></p><p><span>“So I think he’s got that, whereas I think growing up in the racist United States, we enter this thing with, you know, ‘I’m looking at you. I’m not trusting you to be one hundred with me.’ And I think he grew up in a way that he had to trust [white people]—how can you live under the roof with people and think that they don’t love you? He needs that frame of reference. He needs that lens. If he didn’t have it, it would be … a Jesse Jackson, you know? Or Al Sharpton. Different lens.”</span></p><p><span>That lens, born of literally relating to whites, allowed Obama to imagine that he could be the country’s first black president. “If I walked into a room and it’s a bunch of white farmers, trade unionists, middle age—I’m not walking in thinking, </span><i>Man, I’ve got to show them that I’m normal</i><span>,” Obama explained. “I walk in there, I think, with a set of assumptions: like, these people look just like my grandparents. And I see the same Jell‑O mold that my grandmother served, and they’ve got the same, you know, little stuff on their mantelpieces. And so I am maybe disarming them by just assuming that we’re okay.”</span></p><p><span>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. Obama isn’t shuffling before white power (Herman Cain’s “shucky ducky” act) or flattering white ego (O. J. Simpson’s listing not being seen as black as a great accomplishment). That, too, is defensive, and deep down, I suspect, white people know it. He stands firm in his own cultural traditions and says to the country something virtually no black person can, but every president must: “I believe you.”</span></p><hr><h3 id="IV" style="text-align: center;"><b>IV.</b><br>
“You Still Gotta Go Back to the Hood”</h3><p class="dropcap"><span><span class="smallcaps">Just after Columbus Day</span>, I accompanied the president and his formidable entourage on a visit to North Carolina A&T State University, in Greensboro. Four days earlier, </span><i>The Washington Post</i><span> had published an old audio clip that featured Donald Trump lamenting a failed sexual conquest and exhorting the virtues of sexual assault. The next day, Trump claimed that this was “locker room” talk. As we flew to North Carolina, the president was in a state of bemused disbelief. He plopped down in a chair in the staff cabin of </span><i>Air Force One</i><span> and said, “I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that one before.” He was casual and relaxed. A feeling of cautious inevitability emanated from his staff, and why not? Every day seemed to bring a new, more shocking revelation or piece of evidence showing Trump to be unfit for the presidency: He had lost nearly $1 billion in a single year. He had likely not paid taxes in 18 years. He was running a “university,” for which he was under formal legal investigation. He had trampled on his own campaign’s messaging by engaging in a Twitter crusade against a former beauty-pageant contestant. 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. </span></p><p><span>The president 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. Announcing My Brother’s Keeper—or MBK, as it’s come to be called—in 2014, the president had sought to avoid giving the program a partisan valence, noting that it was “not some big new government program.” Instead, it would involve the government in concert with the nonprofit and business sectors to intervene in the lives of young men of color who were “at risk.” 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. </span></p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><span>“It comes right out of his own life,” Broderick Johnson, the Cabinet secretary and an assistant to the president, who heads MBK, told me recently. “I have heard him say, ‘I don’t want us to have a bunch of forums on race.’ He reminds people, ‘Yeah, we can talk about this. But what are we going to </span><i>do</i><span>?’ ” On this afternoon in North Carolina, what Obama did was sit with a group of young men who’d turned their lives around in part because of MBK. 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. “It doesn’t take that much,” he told them. “It just takes someone laying hands on you and saying, ‘Hey, man, you count.’ ”</span></p><p><span>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.”</span></p><p><span>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 250-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. </span></p><p><span>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. Blacks disproportionately benefit from this effort, since they are disproportionately in need. The Affordable Care Act, which cut the uninsured rate in the black community by at least a third, was Obama’s most prominent example. Its full benefit has yet to be felt by African Americans, because several states in the South have declined to expand Medicaid. But when the president and I were meeting, the ACA’s advocates believed that pressure on state budgets would force expansion, and there was evidence to support this: Louisiana had expanded Medicaid earlier in 2016, and advocates were gearing up for wars to be waged in Georgia and Virginia.</span></p><p><span>Obama also emphasized the need for a strong Justice Department with a deep commitment to nondiscrimination. When Obama moved into the White House in 2009, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division “was in shambles,” former Attorney General Eric Holder told me recently. “I mean, I had been there for 12 years as a line guy. I started out in ’76, so I served under Republicans and Democrats. And what the [George W.] Bush administration, what the Bush DOJ did, was unlike anything that had ever happened before in terms of politicized hiring.” The career civil servants below the political appointees, Holder said, were not even invited to the meetings in which the key hiring and policy decisions were made. After Obama’s inauguration, Holder told me, “I remember going to tell all the folks at the Civil Rights Division, ‘The Civil Rights Division is open for business again.’ The president gave me additional funds to hire people.”</span></p><p><span>The political press developed a narrative that because Obama felt he had to modulate his rhetoric on race, Holder was the administration’s true, and thus blacker, conscience. Holder is certainly blunter, and this worried some of the White House staff. Early 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. 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. “Nope,” he said. Reflecting on his relationship with the president, Holder said, “We were also kind of different people, you know? He is the Zen guy. And I’m kind of the hot-blooded West Indian. And I thought we made a good team, but there’s nothing that I ever did or said that I don’t think he would have said, ‘I support him 100 percent.’ </span></p><p><span>“Now, the ‘nation of cowards’ speech, the president might have used a different phrase—maybe, probably. But he and I share a worldview, you know? And when I hear people say, ‘Well, you are blacker than him’ or something like that, I think, </span><i>What are you all talking about?</i>”</p><p><span>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. Obama would deliver this lecture to any black audience, regardless of context. It was bizarre, for instance, to see the president warning young men who’d just graduated from Morehouse College, one of the most storied black colleges in the country, about making “excuses” and blaming whites. </span></p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><span>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. But I’d also seen the same among white people. 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. </span></p><p><span>The mark of that system is visible at every level of American society, regardless of the quality of one’s choices. For instance, the 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). But that college degree is generally purchased at a higher price by blacks than by whites. 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. This is both the result and the perpetuator of a sprawling wealth gap between the races. White households, on average, hold seven times as much wealth as black households—a difference so large as to make comparing the “black middle class” and “white middle class” meaningless; they’re simply not comparable. 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. This gap didn’t just appear by magic; it’s the result of the government’s effort over many decades to create a pigmentocracy—one that will continue without explicit intervention. </span></p><p><span>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.</span></p><p><span>“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, referencing the gulf in education, wealth, and employment that separates black and white America. “That those were wrongs to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it’s not in the form of individual reparations checks but in the form of a Marshall Plan.”</span></p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><span>The political problems with turning the argument for reparations into reality are manifold, Obama said. “If you look at countries like South Africa, where you had a black majority, there have been efforts to tax and help that black majority, but it hasn’t come in the form of a formal reparations program. You have countries like India that have tried to help untouchables, with essentially affirmative-action programs, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed the structure of their societies. So the bottom line is that it’s hard to find a model in which you can practically administer and sustain political support for those kinds of efforts.”</span></p><p><span>Obama went on to say that it would be better, and more realistic, to get the country to rally behind a robust liberal agenda and build on the enormous progress that’s been made toward getting white Americans to accept nondiscrimination as a basic operating premise. 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. I asked him whether it wasn’t—despite the practical obstacles—worth arguing that the state has a collective responsibility not only for its achievements but for its sins. </span></p><p><span>“I want my children—I want Malia and Sasha—to understand that they’ve got responsibilities beyond just what they themselves have done,” Obama said. “That they have a responsibility to the larger community and the larger nation, that they should be sensitive to and extra thoughtful about the plight of people who have been oppressed in the past, are oppressed currently. So that’s a wisdom that I want to transmit to my kids … But I would say that’s a high level of enlightenment that you’re looking to have from a majority of the society. And it may be something that future generations are more open to, but I am pretty confident that for the foreseeable future, using the argument of nondiscrimination, and ‘Let’s get it right for the kids who are here right now,’ and giving them the best chance possible, is going to be a more persuasive argument.”</span></p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><span>Obama is unfailingly optimistic about the empathy and capabilities of the American people. His job necessitates this: “At some level what the people want to feel is that the person leading them sees the best in them,” he told me. But I found it interesting that that optimism does not extend to the possibility of the public’s accepting wisdoms—such as the moral logic of reparations—that the president, by his own account, has accepted for himself and is willing to teach his children. Obama says he always tells his staff that “better is good.” The notion that a president would attempt to achieve change within the boundaries of the accepted consensus is appropriate. But Obama is almost constitutionally skeptical of those who seek to achieve change outside that consensus.</span></p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="640" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/12/WEL_Coates_Obama6/bcb203fcc.jpg" width="960">
<figcaption class="caption">Obama visited North Carolina A&T State University in early October for a conversation about My Brother’s Keeper, his initiative for disadvantaged youth. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty)</figcaption>
</figure><p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps">Early in 2016,</span><span> 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 can’t refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position,” he said. “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. 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.”</span></p><p><span>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. So the founders asked its membership in Chicago, the president’s hometown, whether they should meet with Obama. “They felt—and I think many of our members felt—there wouldn’t be the depth of discussion that they wanted to have,” Tometi told me. “And if there wasn’t that space to have a real heart-to-heart, and if it was just surface level, that it would be more of a disservice to the movement.” </span></p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><span>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. Nevertheless, Black Lives Matter sees itself as engaged in a protest against the treatment of black people by the American state, and so Tometi and much of the group’s leadership, concerned about being used for a photo op by the very body they were protesting, opted not to go. </span></p><p><span>When I asked Obama about this perspective, he fluctuated between understanding where the activists were coming from and being hurt by such brush-offs. “I think that where I’ve gotten frustrated during the course of my presidency has never been because I was getting pushed too hard by activists to see the justness of a cause or the essence of an issue,” he said. “I think where I got frustrated at times was the belief that the president can do anything if he just decides he wants to do it. 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. Usually I’d just smile.”</span></p><p><span>He laughed, then continued, “The reason I say that is because those are the times where sometimes you feel actually a little bit hurt. Because you feel like saying to these folks, ‘[Don’t] you think if I could do it, I [would] have just done it? Do you think that the only problem is that I don’t care enough about the plight of poor people, or gay people?’ ”</span></p><p><span>I asked Obama whether he thought that perhaps protesters’ distrust of the powers that be could ultimately be healthy. “Yes,” he said. “Which is why I don’t get too hurt. I mean, I think there is a benefit to wanting to hold power’s feet to the fire until you actually see the goods. I get that. And I think it is important. And frankly, sometimes it’s useful for activists just to be out there to keep you mindful and not get complacent, even if ultimately you think some of their criticism is misguided.”</span></p><p><span>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. Regarding reparations, he said, “Sometimes I wonder how much of these debates have to do with the desire, the legitimate desire, for that history to be recognized. Because there is a psychic power to the recognition that is not satisfied with a universal program; it’s not satisfied by the Affordable Care Act, or an expansion of Pell Grants, or an expansion of the earned-income tax credit.” These kinds of programs, effective and disproportionately beneficial to black people though they may be, don’t “speak to the hurt, and the sense of injustice, and the self-doubt that arises out of the fact that [African Americans] are behind now, and it makes us sometimes feel as if there must be something wrong with us—unless you’re able to see the history and say, ‘It’s amazing we got this far given what we went through.’ </span></p><p><span>“So in part, I think the argument sometimes that I’ve had with folks who are much more interested in sort of race-specific programs is less an argument about what is practically achievable and sometimes maybe more an argument of ‘We want society to see what’s happened and internalize it and answer it in demonstrable ways.’ And those impulses I very much understand—but my hope would be 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.” </span></p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><span>Obama saw—at least at that moment, before the election of Donald Trump—a straight path to that world. “Just play this out as a thought experiment,” he said. “Imagine if you had genuine, high-quality early-childhood education for every child, and suddenly every black child in America—but also every poor white child or Latino [child], but just stick with every black child in America—is getting a really good education. And they’re graduating from high school at the same rates that whites are, and they are going to college at the same rates that whites are, and they are able to afford college at the same rates because the government has universal programs that say that you’re not going to be barred from school just because of how much money your parents have. </span></p><p><span>“So now they’re all graduating. And let’s also say that the Justice Department and the courts are making sure, as I’ve said in a speech before, that when Jamal sends his résumé in, he’s getting treated the same as when Johnny sends his résumé in. Now, are we going to have suddenly the same number of CEOs, billionaires, etc., as the white community? In 10 years? Probably not, maybe not even in 20 years. </span></p><p><span>“But I guarantee you that we would be thriving, we would be succeeding. We wouldn’t have huge numbers of young African American men in jail. We’d have more family formation as college-graduated girls are meeting boys who are their peers, which then in turn means the next generation of kids are growing up that much better. And suddenly you’ve got a whole generation that’s in a position to start using the incredible creativity that we see in music, and sports, and frankly even on the streets, channeled into starting all kinds of businesses. I feel pretty good about our odds in that situation.”</span></p><p><span>The thought experiment doesn’t hold up. 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. Obama’s solution relies on a goodwill that his own personal history tells him exists in the larger country. 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. </span></p><p>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’s accomplishments were real: 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. Obama was also the first sitting president to visit a federal prison. There was a feeling that he’d erected a foundation upon which further progressive policy could be built<span>. It’s tempting to say that foundation is now endangered. The truth is, it was never safe. </span></p><hr><h3 id="V" style="text-align: center;"><b>V.</b><br>
“They Rode the Tiger”</h3><p class="dropcap"><span><span class="smallcaps">Obama’s greatest misstep</span> was born directly out of his greatest insight. 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. 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. Joe Lieberman, whom Obama saved from retribution at the hands of Senate Democrats after Lieberman campaigned for Obama’s 2008 opponent, John McCain, similarly obstructed Obamacare. Among Republicans, senators who had seemed amenable to Obama’s agenda—Chuck Grassley, Susan Collins, Richard Lugar, Olympia Snowe—rebuffed him repeatedly. </span></p><p>The obstruction grew out of narrow political incentives. “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.”</p><p>Obama is not sure of the degree to which individual racism played into this calculation. “I do remember watching Bill Clinton get impeached and Hillary Clinton being accused of killing Vince Foster,” he said. “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.’ ”</p><p>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 138 members from the states that comprised the old Confederacy. Of the 101 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 2008 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 2012, 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. 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?”</p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p>In our conversations, Obama said he didn’t doubt that there was a sincerely nonracist states’-rights contingent of the GOP. And yet he suspected that there might be more to it. “A 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,” he said.</p><p>“And so I’m careful not to attribute any particular resistance or slight or opposition to race. But what I do believe is that if somebody didn’t have a problem with their daddy being employed by the federal government, and didn’t have a problem with the Tennessee Valley Authority electrifying certain communities, and didn’t have a problem with the interstate highway system being built, and didn’t have a problem with the GI Bill, and didn’t have a problem with the [Federal Housing Administration] subsidizing the suburbanization of America, and that all helped you build wealth and create a middle class—and then suddenly as soon as African Americans or Latinos are interested in availing themselves of those same mechanisms as ladders into the middle class, you now have a violent opposition to them—then I think you at least have to ask yourself the question of how consistent you are, and what’s different, and what’s changed.”</p><p>Racism greeted Obama in both his primary and general-election campaigns in 2008. Photos were circulated of him in Somali garb. 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.” Detractors circulated emails claiming that the future first lady had written a racist senior thesis while at Princeton. 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.</p><p>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. Mainstream conservative publications floated the notion that Obama’s memoir was too “stylish and penetrating” to have been written by the candidate, and found a plausible ghostwriter in the radical (and white) former Weatherman Bill Ayers. A Republican women’s club in California dispensed “Obama Bucks” featuring slices of watermelon, ribs, and fried chicken. At the Values Voter Summit that year, conventioneers hawked “Obama Waffles,” a waffle mix whose box featured a bug-eyed caricature of the candidate. Fake hip-hop lyrics were scrawled on the side (“Barry’s Bling Bling Waffle Ring”) and on the top, the same caricature was granted a turban and tagged with the instructions “Point box toward Mecca for tastier waffles.” The display was denounced by the summit’s sponsor, the Family Research Council. One would be forgiven for meeting this denunciation with guffaws: The council’s president, Tony Perkins, had once addressed the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens with a Confederate flag draped behind him. By 2015, Perkins had deemed the debate over Obama’s birth certificate “legitimate” and was saying that it “makes sense” to conclude that Obama was actually a Muslim.</p><p>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. In 2015, one poll found that 54 percent of GOP voters thought Obama was a Muslim. Only 29 percent believed he’d been born in America.</p><p>Still, in 2008, Obama had been elected. His supporters rejoiced. As Jay-Z commemorated the occasion:</p><blockquote>My president is black, in fact he’s half-white,<br>
So even in a racist mind, he’s half-right.</blockquote><p>Not quite. A month after Obama entered the White House, a CNBC personality named Rick Santelli took to the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and denounced the president’s efforts to help homeowners endangered by the housing crisis. “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?,” Santelli asked the assembled traders. He asserted that Obama should “reward people that could carry the water” as opposed to those who “drink the water,” and denounced those in danger of foreclosure as “losers.” Race was implicit in Santelli’s harangue—the housing crisis and predatory lending had devastated black communities and expanded the wealth gap—and it culminated with a call for a “Tea Party” to resist the Obama presidency. In fact, right-wing ideologues had been planning just such a resistance for decades. They would eagerly answer Santelli’s call.</p><p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps">One of the </span>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. Throughout the ’90s, he published a series of racist newsletters that referred to New York City as “Welfaria,” called Martin Luther King Jr. Day “Hate Whitey Day,” and asserted that 95 percent of black males in Washington, D.C., were either “semi-criminal or entirely criminal.” Paul’s apologists have claimed that he had no real connection to the newsletters, even though virtually all of them were published in his name (“The Ron Paul Survival Report,” “Ron Paul Political Report,” “Dr. Ron Paul’s Freedom Report”) and written in his voice. Either way, the views of the newsletters have found their expression in his ideological comrades. Throughout Obama’s first term, Tea Party activists voiced their complaints in racist terms. Activists brandished signs warning that Obama would implement “white slavery,” waved the Confederate flag, depicted Obama as a witch doctor, and issued calls for him to “go back to Kenya.” Tea Party supporters wrote “satirical” letters in the name of “We Colored People” and stoked the flames of birtherism. 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.” The Tea Party’s leading exponent, Andrew Breitbart, engineered the smearing of Shirley Sherrod, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s director of rural development for Georgia, publishing egregiously misleading videos that wrongly made her appear to be engaging in antiwhite racist invective, which led to her dismissal. (In a rare act of cowardice, the Obama administration cravenly submitted to this effort.)</p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p>In those rare moments when Obama made any sort of comment attacking racism, firestorms threatened to consume his governing agenda. When, in July 2009, the president objected to the arrest of the eminent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. while he was trying to get into his own house, pointing out that the officer had “acted stupidly,” a third of whites said the remark made them feel less favorably toward the president, and nearly two-thirds claimed that Obama had “acted stupidly” by commenting. 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. 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!” A Missouri congressman equated Obama with a monkey. A California GOP official took up the theme and emailed her friends an image depicting Obama as a chimp, with the accompanying text explaining, “Now you know why [there’s] no birth certificate!” Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin assessed the president’s foreign policy as a “shuck and jive shtick.” 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.</p><p>Yet in 2012, as in 2008, 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. An Idaho GOP official posted a photo on Facebook depicting a trap waiting for Obama. The bait was a slice of watermelon. The caption read, “Breaking: The secret service just uncovered a plot to kidnap the president. More details as we get them …” In 2014, conservatives assembled in support of Cliven Bundy’s armed protest against federal grazing fees. As reporters descended on the Bundy ranch in Nevada, Bundy offered his opinions on “the Negro.” “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.”</p><p>That same year, in the wake of Michael Brown’s death, the Justice Department opened an investigation into the police department in Ferguson, Missouri. 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.</p><p>Much ink has been spilled in an attempt to understand the Tea Party protests, and the 2016 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.</p><p>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. “Whites are less likely to be drawn to the Tea Party for material reasons, suggesting that, relative to other groups, it’s really more about social prestige,” they say. 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.</p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p>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. It was birtherism—not trade, not jobs, not isolationism—that launched Trump’s foray into electoral politics. 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, 2016, 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. But one needn’t stretch too far to conclude that an eight-year campaign of consistent and open racism aimed at the leader of the free world helped clear the way.</p><p>“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.</p><hr><h3 id="VI" style="text-align: center;"><b>VI.</b><br>
“When You Left, You Took All of Me With You”</h3><p class="dropcap"><span><span class="smallcaps">One Saturday morning</span> 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. 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. 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. in one breath and curse the white man, “the Great Deceiver,” in the next. 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. But as Obama’s motorcade approached its destination—Howard University, where he would give the commencement address—the complexion of the crowd darkened, and I understood that the love was specific, that even if it allowed Barack Obama, even if it allowed the luckiest of us, to defy the boundaries, then the masses of us, in cities like this one, would still enjoy no such feat. </span></p><p><span>These were our fitful, spasmodic years. </span></p><p><span>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. It originates in Oscar Stanton De Priest; continues through Congressman William Dawson, who, under Roosevelt, switched from the Republican to the Democratic Party; crescendos with the legendary Harold Washington; rises still with Jesse Jackson’s 1988 victory in Michigan’s Democratic caucuses; rises again with Carol Moseley Braun’s triumph; and reaches its recent apex with the election of Barack Obama. 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 </span><i>Brown v. Board of Education</i><span>, schools throughout much of this country remain segregated.</span></p><p><span>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. One thinks of Serena Williams, whose dominance and stunning achievements can’t, in and of themselves, ensure equal access to tennis facilities for young black girls. The gate is open and yet so very far away.</span></p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="640" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/12/WEL_Coates_Obama7/20f0c470f.jpg" width="960">
<figcaption class="caption">Obama campaigning in central Florida before the unthinkable—Donald Trump’s victory—happened (Ian Allen)</figcaption>
</figure><p><span>I felt a mix of pride and amazement walking onto Howard’s campus that day. 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. When Obama walked out, the audience exploded, and when the time came for the color guard to present arms, a chant arose: “O-Ba-Ma! O-Ba-Ma! O-Ba-Ma!” </span></p><p><span>He gave a good speech that day, paying heed to Howard’s rituals, calling out its famous alumni, shouting out the university’s various dormitories, and urging young people to vote. (His usual riff on respectability politics was missing.) But I think he could have stood before that crowd, smiled, and said “Good luck,” and they would have loved him anyway. He was their champion, and this was evident in the smallest of things. The national anthem was played first, but then came the black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” As the lyrics rang out over the crowd, 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. </span></p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><span>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. 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 400 years could be reduced to the irrational resentment of full lips. No. 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.</span></p><p><span>It was said that the Americans who’d supported Trump were victims of liberal condescension. The word </span><i>racist</i><span> would be dismissed as a profane slur put upon the common man, as opposed to an accurate description of actual men. “We simply don’t yet know how much racism or misogyny motivated Trump voters,” David Brooks would write in </span><i>The New York Times</i>.<span> “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.” This strikes me as perfectly logical. Indeed, it could apply just as well to Louis Farrakhan’s appeal to the black poor and working class. 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.</span></p><p><span>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. Surely these voters disproved racism as an explanatory force. It’s still not clear how many individual voters actually flipped. But the underlying presumption—that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could be swapped in for each other—exhibited a problem. Clinton was a candidate who’d won one competitive political race in her life, whose political instincts were questioned by her own advisers, who took more than half a million dollars in speaking fees from an investment bank because it was “what they offered,” who proposed to bring back to the White House a former president dogged by allegations of rape and sexual harassment. Obama was a candidate who’d become only the third black senator in the modern era; who’d twice been elected president, each time flipping red and purple states; who’d run one of the most scandal-free administrations in recent memory. Imagine an African American facsimile of Hillary Clinton: She would never be the nominee of a major political party and likely would not be in national politics at all.</span></p><p><span>Pointing to citizens who voted for both Obama and Trump does not disprove racism; it evinces it. To secure the White House, 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.</span></p><p><span>In the week after the election, I was a mess. I had not seen my wife in two weeks. I was on deadline for this article. My son was struggling in school. The house was in disarray. I played Marvin Gaye endlessly—“When you left, you took all of me with you.” Friends began to darkly recall the ghosts of post-Reconstruction. The election of Donald Trump confirmed everything I knew of my country and none of what I could accept. The idea that America would follow its first black president with Donald Trump accorded with its history. I was shocked at my own shock. I had wanted Obama to be right.</span></p><p><span>I still want Obama to be right. I still would like to fold myself into the dream. This will not be possible.</span></p><p><span>By some cosmic coincidence, a week after the election <a class="annotation-link" data-annotation="-1" href="#">I received a portion of my father’s FBI file</a><span class="annotation" data-annotation="-1" id="annotation-1" style="display: none;">I was made aware of the FBI file by the diligent work of researchers from the show <em>Finding Your Roots</em>. I was taping an episode on my family the day of my last interview with the president.</span>. My father had grown up poor in Philadelphia. His father was struck dead on the street. His grandfather was crushed to death in a meatpacking plant. He’d served his country in Vietnam, gotten radicalized there, and joined the Black Panther Party, which brought him to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover. A memo written to the FBI director was “submitted aimed at discrediting WILLIAM PAUL COATES, Acting Captain of the BPP, Baltimore.” The memo proposed that a fake letter be sent to the Panthers’ co-founder Huey P. Newton. The fake letter accused my father of being an informant and concluded, “I want somethin done with this bootlikin facist pig nigger and I want it done now.” The words </span><i>somethin done</i><span> need little interpretation. The Panthers were eventually consumed by an internecine war instigated by the FBI, one in which being labeled a police informant was a death sentence. </span></p><div class="ad-unit-placeholder"></div><p><span>A few hours after I saw this file, I had my last conversation with the president. I asked him how his optimism was holding up, given Trump’s victory. He confessed to being surprised at the outcome but said that it was tough to “draw a grand theory from it, because there were some very unusual circumstances.” He pointed to both candidates’ high negatives, the media coverage, and a “dispirited” electorate. But he said that his general optimism about the shape of American history remained unchanged. “To be optimistic about the long-term trends of the United States doesn’t mean that everything is going to go in a smooth, direct, straight line,” he said. “It goes forward sometimes, sometimes it goes back, sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it zigs and zags.”</span></p><p><span>I thought of Hoover’s FBI, which harassed three generations of black activists, from Marcus Garvey’s black nationalists to Martin Luther King Jr.’s integrationists to Huey Newton’s Black Panthers, including my father. And I thought of the enormous power accrued to the presidency in the post-9/11 era—the power to obtain American citizens’ phone records en masse, to access their emails, to detain them indefinitely. I asked the president whether it was all worth it. Whether this generation of black activists and their allies should be afraid.</span></p><p><span>“Keep in mind that the capacity of the NSA, or other surveillance tools, are specifically prohibited from being applied to U.S. citizens or U.S. persons without specific evidence of links to terrorist activity or, you know, other foreign-related activity,” he said. “So, you know, I think this whole story line that somehow Big Brother has massively expanded and now that a new president is in place it’s this loaded gun ready to be used on domestic dissent is just not accurate.”</span></p><p><span>He counseled vigilance, “because the possibility of abuse by government officials always exists. The issue is not going to be that there are new tools available; the issue is making sure that the incoming administration, like my administration, takes the constraints on how we deal with U.S. citizens and persons seriously.” This answer did not fill me with confidence. The next day, President-Elect 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. Last February, Flynn tweeted, “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL” and linked to a YouTube video that declared followers of Islam want “80 percent of humanity enslaved or exterminated.” Sessions had once been accused of calling a black lawyer “boy,” claiming that a white lawyer who represented black clients was a disgrace to his race, and joking that he thought the Ku Klux Klan “was okay until I found out they smoked pot.” I felt then that I knew what was coming—more Freddie Grays, more Rekia Boyds, more informants and undercover officers sent to infiltrate mosques. </span></p><p><span>And I also knew that the man who could not countenance such a thing in his America had been responsible for the only time in my life when I felt, as the first lady had once said, proud of my country, and I knew that it was his very lack of countenance, his incredible faith, his improbable trust in his countrymen, that had made that feeling possible. 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. </span></p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedIan AllenMy President Was Black2016-12-13T05:00:00-05:002018-08-21T11:57:40-04:00A history of the first African American White House—and of what came nexttag:theatlantic.com,2016:50-623086<p><em>Editor’s Note:</em> This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. <br /></p><p>Here’s <a href="http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/the-identity-of-a-famous-person-is-news-1787392847">an interesting piece</a> from Hamilton Nolan arguing for a rather expansive journalistic mission. The cause is the recent unmasking of celebrated novelist Elena Ferrante. As most of her fans know, “Elena Ferrante” is (or was) a pseudonym. Nolan believes that the revelation of Ferrante’s real name and identity, against her wishes, is at the core of what journalism is ultimately about:</p><blockquote>
<p><strong>The very general proposition of journalism is this: The public has a right to know true things that are important to the public.</strong> It is the job of journalists to supply the public with these true things. This broad idea applies in practice not just to the goings-on of government, but to crime, and business, and science, and sports, and the actions of all sorts of people who are famous and/or notorious, either temporarily or permanently.</p>
</blockquote><p>There’s a lot here that’s left vague in Nolan’s proposition, beginning with the imagined entity Nolan claims to be advocating for—the public. Nolan neither defines who this “public” is, nor proposes a means for assessing what it takes as important versus what it takes as trivial. How do we know, for instance, that “the public” really thought it was important for journalists to expose the facts of her life?</p><p>And yet on behalf of this vague entity, Nolan claims expansive powers—the public has the right to know anything it deems “important.” Essentially fame is the forfeiture of basic human and individual privileges in favor of an ill-defined public interest. It’s worth taking this logic to its conclusions. If “the public” wishes to know the identity of a whistle-blower who helped down a corrupt national official, then journalists should reveal it. If the public wishes to know the identity of the woman who accused Nate Parker of rape, then journalists should publish it. If “the public” decides, for instance, that it’s “important” to see the tape that a stalker took of Erin Andrews in her hotel room, then evidently journalists should offer this up too. Nolan offered no exemption for famous children either, so presumably all of their doings are also part of the pot of public knowledge.</p><p>It is certainly true that Ferrante’s identity is “newsworthy”—which is to say some demonstrable and significant number of people would like to know who she is. But “newsworthy,” a term that could be applied to everything from Watergate to sex tapes, lacks the moral force of claiming to act on behalf of the presumed rights of the public. “Newsworthy” describes how journalism works. But it doesn’t engage the complicated, constant ethical dilemmas which journalists face over what to report and what not to report. Nolan claims to be engaging that question, but what he’s actually doing is avoiding the hard work which it entails.</p><p><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/on-homecomings/481818/?utm_source=feed">Admittedly, I’m biased</a>. But I get nervous when I see journalists blithely and casually invoke the right of the public to know, without any attempt to define those terms, their limitations, and their history.</p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedAndrew Winning / ReutersOn the Right to Know Everything2016-10-04T22:20:52-04:002022-03-22T15:47:20-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2016:50-499511<p>In July of 2010, journalist and provocateur Andrew Breitbart posted a video excerpt of remarks on his site purporting to expose “evidence of racism coming from a federal appointee and NAACP award recipient.” This was an explosive charge. The Tea Party was ascendant then and racial grievance was one of its animating features.</p><p>In Obama’s America, “the white kids now get beat up, with the black kids cheering,” <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/16/rush-limbaugh-obamas-amer_n_288371.html">explained Rush Limbaugh</a>. “And of course everybody says the white kid deserved it—he was born a racist, he’s white.” Iowa Republican Representative Steve King <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-congress/2010/06/steve-king-obama-favors-the-black-person-027564">charged that Obama</a> has a “default mechanism” that “favors the black person.” Tea Party supporters <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/24/tea-party-racist_n_4158262.html">arrived at rallies charging</a> Obama with endorsing “white slavery.” Now Breitbart purported to have in his hands proof that would prove that it was the NAACP and its allies in the White House who were the real racists.</p><p>Breitbart’s “video evidence” was stunningly effective. The NAACP immediately denounced the remarks and the U.S. Department of Agriculture official who’d made them—Shirley Sherrod—was, in short order, forced to submit her resignation via Blackberry. “You’re going to be on Glenn Beck tonight,” she was <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/fear-of-a-black-president/309064/?utm_source=feed">told</a>. The remark was revealing. It was Beck who best channeled the Tea Party’s spirit of racial victimization. The president was a man with “a deep-seated hatred of white people,”<a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/michaelcalderone/0709/Foxs_Beck_Obama_is_a_racist.html"> claimed Beck</a>. “This guy is, I believe, a racist."</p><p>So frightened were the Obama administration officials and the NAACP that they did not bother to ask if Breitbart had honestly rendered Sherrod’s comments. They did not seek to understand their context or meaning. They did not even bother to see who Shirley Sherrod actually was and whether the charge accorded with her history. Instead they dispensed with any pursuit of the truth, allied themselves with fear, and humiliated Shirley Sherrod.</p><p>Later, when it was revealed that Breitbart had <a href="http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2015/09/shirley_sherrod_andrew_breitba.html">perpetrated a massive deception</a>, when no less than <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/glenn-beck-defends-shirley-sherrod-it-s-possible-this-woman-deserves-her-job-back-video">Glenn Beck defended Sherrod</a>, it was easy to think that Andrew Breitbart had, himself, endured a humiliating and disqualifying loss.</p><p>Events on Friday threw that thesis into doubt. Hillary Clinton made a claim—half of Donald Trump’s supporters are motivated by some form of bigotry. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it,” she said. “And unfortunately, there are people like that, and he has lifted them up.” Clinton went on to claim that there is another half—people disappointed in the government and economy who are desperate for change. The second part of this claim received very little attention, simply because much of media could not make its way past the first half. The resultant uproar challenges the idea that Breitbart lost.</p><p>Indeed, what Breitbart understood, what his spiritual heir Donald Trump has banked on, what Hillary Clinton’s recent pillorying has clarified, is that white grievance, no matter how ill-founded, can never be humiliating nor disqualifying. On the contrary, it is a right to be respected at every level of American society from the beer-hall to the penthouse to the newsroom.</p><p>The comment was “a self-inflicted wound” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clintons-deplorables-remark-sums-up-a-deplorable-election-season/2016/09/10/78977694-777b-11e6-be4f-3f42f2e5a49e_story.html">claimed the <em>Washington Post</em> reporter Dan Balz</a>. “It was very close to the dictionary definition of bigoted,” <a href="http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/09/11/bloomberg-s-john-heilemann-trump-s-claim-clinton-bigot-justified-basket-deplorables-comment/212988">asserted John Heilemann</a>. My <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/clinton-was-wrong-to-generalize-about-trumps-supporters/499499/?utm_source=feed">colleague Ron Fournier</a> and the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/10/republicans-think-hillary-clinton-just-made-her-own-47-percent-gaffe-did-she/"><em>Post</em>’s Aaron Blake</a> were both taken aback by the implicit math of Clinton’s statement. “Clinton appeared to be slapping the ‘racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic’ label on about 20 percent of the country,” wrote Blake in a post whose headline echoed that of the Trump <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/09/hillary-clintons-47-percent-moment-calls-trump-supporters-racist-sexist-homophobic-xenophobic-islamaphobic/">campaign manager’s website</a>. “That's no small thing.” Whether or not it was a <em>false</em> thing remained uninvestigated.</p><p>The media’s criticism of Clinton’s claim has been matched in vehemence only by their allergy to exploring it. “Candidates should not be sociologists,” <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-sept-11-2016-n646441">glibly asserted David Brooks on <em>Meet The Press</em></a>. I’m not sure why not, but certainly journalists who broadcast their opinions to the nation <span style="line-height: 1.66667;">should have to </span>evince<span style="line-height: 1.66667;"> something more than a superficial curiosity. It is easy enough to look into Clinton’s claim and verify it or falsify it. <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/basket-of-deplorables/499493/?utm_source=feed">The numbers are all around us</a>. And the story need not end there. A curious journalist might ask what those numbers mean, or even push further, and ask what it means that the ranks of the Democratic Party are not totally free of their own deplorables. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.66667;">Instead what followed was not journalism but, as Jamelle Bouie accurately dubbed it, “<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/09/trump_s_basket_of_deplorables_hillary_clinton_was_right.html">theater criticism</a>.”</span> Fournier and Blake’s revulsion at the thought that some 20 percent of the country, in some fashion, fit into that basket is illustrative. Neither made any apparent attempt to investigate the claim. No polling data appears in either piece and no reasons are given for why the estimate is untrue. It simply can’t be true—even if the data says <a href="http://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/poll-two-thirds-trump-supporters-think-obama-muslim">that it</a> <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-race-idUSKCN0ZE2SW">actually is</a>.</p><p>To understand how truly bizarre this method of opining is, consider the following: Had polling showed that relatively few Trump supporters believe black people are lazy and criminally-inclined, if only a tiny minority of Trump supporters believed that Muslims should be banned from the country, if birtherism carried no real weight among them, would journalists decline to point this out as they excoriated her? Of course not. But the case against Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” is a triumph of style over substance, of clamorous white grievance over knowable facts.</p><p>This is what Andrew Breitbart, and his progeny, ultimately understood. What Shirley Sherrod did or did not do really didn’t matter. White racial grievance enjoys automatic credibility, and even when disproven, it is never disqualifying of its bearers. It is very difficult to imagine, for instance, a 9/11 truther, who happened to be black, becoming even a governor. And yet we live in an era in which the country’s leading birther might well be president. This fact certainly horrifies some of the same journalists who attacked Clinton this weekend. But what they have yet to come to grips with is that Donald Trump is a democratic phenomenon, and that there are actual people—not trolls under a bridge—whom he, and his prejudices against Latinos, Muslims, and blacks, represent.</p><p>I do not believe that journalists are so powerful as to disabuse this group of their beliefs. But there is something to be said for not contributing to an opportunistic ignorance. For much of this campaign journalists have attacked Hillary Clinton for being evasive and avoiding hard questioning from their ranks. And then the second Clinton is forthright and says something revealing, she is attacked—not for the substance of what she’s said—but simply for having said it. This hypocrisy carries a chilling implicit message: Lie to me. Lie to the country. Lie to everyone. This weekend was not just another misanalysis, it was a shocking betrayal of the journalistic mission which should urge the revelation of truth as opposed to the propagation of hot takes, Washington jargon, and politics-speak.</p><p>The shame reflects an ugly and lethal trend in this country’s history—an ever-present impulse to ignore and minimize racism, an aversion to calling it by its name. For nearly a century and a half, this country deluded itself into thinking that its greatest calamity, the Civil War, had nothing to do with one of its greatest sins, enslavement. It deluded itself in this manner despite available evidence to the contrary. Lynchings, pogroms, and plunder proceeded from this fiction. Writers, journalists, and educators embroidered a national lie, and thus a safe space for the violent tempers of those who needed to be white was preserved.</p><p>The safe space for the act of being white endures today. This weekend, the media, an ostensibly great American institution, saw it challenged and—not for the first time—organized to preserve it. For speaking a truth, backed up by data, Clinton was <a href="https://twitter.com/woodruffbets/status/774968451618246656">accused of promoting bigotry</a>. No. The true crime was endangering white consciousness. So it was when the president asserted that it was stupid to arrest a man for breaking into his own home. So it was when the president said that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin. And so it is when reformers suggest police not stop citizens on so flimsy a pretext as <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/new-york-nypd-stop-frisk-lawsuit-trial-charts">furtive movements</a>. The need to be white is a sensitive matter—one which our institutions are inexorably and mindlessly bound to protect.</p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedBrian Snyder / Reuters How Breitbart Conquered the Media2016-09-12T11:18:46-04:002016-09-12T13:17:26-04:00Political reporters were taken aback by Hillary Clinton’s charge that half of Trump’s supporters are prejudiced. Few bothered to investigate the claim itself.tag:theatlantic.com,2016:39-497570<p class="dropcap"><b><span class="caps">M</span></b><span class="smallcaps">y reaction</span> <span class="smallcaps">to</span> O. J. Simpson’s arrest for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman was atypical. It was <span class="caps">1994</span>. I was a young black man attending a historically black university in the majority-black city of Washington, D.C., with zero sympathy for Simpson, zero understanding of the sympathy he elicited from my people, and zero appreciation for the defense team’s claim that Simpson had been targeted because he was black.</p><p>O. J. Simpson <i>wasn’t</i> black. He came of age in the 1960s—the era of Muhammad Ali’s opposition to the Vietnam War and John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s black-power salute at the 1968 Olympics. But the O. J. Simpson I knew, and the one poignantly depicted this year in Ezra Edelman’s epic documentary, <i>O.J.: Made in America</i>, recognized only one struggle—the struggle to advance O. J. Simpson. When the activist Harry Edwards attempted to enlist Simpson in the Olympic boycott, Simpson rebuffed him and later claimed that organizers like Edwards had tried to “use” him. Protest “hurt Tommie Smith, it hurt John Carlos,” Simpson said. Smith and Carlos were “standing on [Edwards’s] platform, [when] they should have been standing on their own platform.”</p><p>My view that Simpson existed beyond the borders of black America was based not merely on his narrow political consciousness, but on his own words. “My biggest accomplishment,” Simpson once told the journalist Robert Lipsyte, “is that people look at me like a man first, not a black man.” Simpson went on to tell the story of a wedding he’d attended with his first wife and a group of black friends. At some point he overheard a white guest remark, “Look, there’s O. J. Simpson and some niggers.” Simpson confessed that the remark hurt. But that wasn’t the point of the story. The point was not being seen as one of the “niggers.”</p><p>Simpson sought to be post-racial in a world that was not. His myriad achievements—becoming the premier running back in college football, the first NFL running back to rush for 2,000 yards in a season, one of the first black pitchmen for corporate America—did not mark the erosion of the great wall between black and white Americans. It marked Simpson’s individual success at hurdling that wall. Landing on the other side, Simpson, a product of public housing in inner-city San Francisco, found reinvention as a celebrity. He became wealthy. He courted the attentions and advice of affluent businessmen. And though he’d married Marguerite Whitley, who was black, the same year he arrived at the University of Southern California, he now courted white women. “What I’m doing is not for principles or black people,” Simpson told Lipsyte. “No, I’m dealing first for O. J. Simpson, his wife, and his babies.”</p><figure><img alt='Protesters outside the Los Angeles courthouse rallied in support of Simpson’s defense team. Community activists also backed Simpson, and black vendors sold "Run O.J." and "Free O. J. Simpson" T-shirts. ' height="505" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/08/WEL_Coates_OJProtesters_630-2/a4cc2d978.jpg" width="589">
<figcaption class="caption">Protesters outside the Los Angeles courthouse rallied in support of Simpson’s defense team. Community activists also backed Simpson, and black vendors sold "Run O.J." and "Free O. J. Simpson" T-shirts. (AFP / Getty)</figcaption>
</figure><p>And yet, during his trial, whenever I walked the streets of D.C., I saw black people broadcasting their support as though he were one of them. Vendors hawked <span class="smallcaps">run o.j.</span> and <span class="smallcaps">free o. j. simpson</span> T‑shirts. Community activists, for whom Simpson had previously had no use, offered fervent defenses of him. When the verdict was announced, national-news cameras came to Howard Law School to record what turned out to be a jubilant response to Simpson’s acquittal. I found all of this very frustrating. I was 19 years old. I was the kind of militant black kid who flirted with Louis Farrakhan, Frantz Fanon, and veganism and who believed “What should black people do?” was a question that could be asked in earnest. The answer, I was sure, would open a new era of black excellence. The support of Simpson was a step backward. It struck me as unintelligent, politically immature, and ill-advised.</p><p>Two things, it seemed to me, could be true at once: Simpson was a serial abuser who killed his ex-wife, and the Los Angeles Police Department was a brutal army of occupation. So why was it that the latter seemed to be all that mattered, and what did it have to do with Simpson, who lived a life far beyond the embattled ghettos of L.A.? I vented in the school newspaper. “Since Simpson’s practices show he clearly has no interest in the affairs of black people,” I wrote, “the question becomes why do blacks have any interest in him?” In those days, I conceived of African Americans as a kind of political party, which needed only, in unison, to select the correct strategy in order to make the scourge of racism disappear. Expending political capital on O. J. Simpson struck me as exactly the opposite of the correct strategy. Looking back, I realize what eluded me. I had lived among black people all my life, but somehow I had come to see them as abstractions, not as humans.</p><p>I had not yet read <i>Ragtime</i>, the E. L. Doctorow novel that Simpson claimed to love. After his retirement in 1979, he began doing some acting and dreamed of playing Coalhouse Walker in the film adaptation of the book. Simpson felt the role of Walker, a black ragtime piano player turned revolutionary, matched his life. The parallels are strained—and in any case Simpson lost the role to Howard Rollins. But Simpson does resemble another character in the book, one whose feats explain the strange bond between Simpson and the black community. Doctorow offers a fictionalized Harry Houdini, whose escapes from straitjackets, bank vaults, piano cases, and mailbags thrill the poor people of the nation. He is jailed in Boston, imprisoned on an English ship, tossed into the Seine in manacles. Each time, he escapes. Houdini’s act allows him to make the greatest escape of all—out of poverty—though he eventually discovers that no amount of money will buy him the respect of the elite. The poor are enthralled by Houdini not because he organizes on their behalf, but because his exploits resonate with them: They know that their lives are trapdoored and trip-wired, that they too have been jailed, imprisoned, chained, and tossed into the sea. A Houdini performance was their life in miniature, with one heroic difference—he escaped.</p><p class="dropcap"><span class="dropcap"><b>L</b></span><span class="smallcaps">ong before he led the police</span> on a chase through L.A., Simpson had been an escape artist. His rare athletic talent freed him from an impoverished childhood, and brought him to USC on a football scholarship in 1967. <i>Made in America</i>, deftly capturing his athleticism, is alert to symbolism too, replaying Simpson’s manifold escapes while at USC and later with the Buffalo Bills. They are dazzling to behold. Simpson’s speed was enhanced not by grace but by awkwardness. In one frame he leaps past a defender, lands seemingly off balance, and then cuts across the field at full velocity. At several junctures, you expect him to fall, and the one time he does, the defender falls with him—but then Simpson, in a matter of milliseconds, glides to his feet and races off. He would angle himself against the earth, his hips flying one way, his head another. He seemed to run too high, with his chest exposed, presenting what should have been an inviting target for the defense. And yet he escaped.</p><figure><img alt="For many black residents of Los Angeles in 1994, the idea that the LAPD might frame a black man was entirely plausible. The prosecution’s careless gathering of evidence only confirmed the distrust." height="462" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/08/WEL_Coates_OJGlove1_960/1f027e40b.jpg" width="630">
<figcaption class="caption">For many black residents of Los Angeles in 1994, the idea that the LAPD might frame a black man was entirely plausible. The prosecution’s careless gathering of evidence only confirmed the distrust. (Vince Bucci / Getty)</figcaption>
</figure><p>Simpson was a running back, a position dominated by African Americans for the past half century—a fact that has often been invoked to boost racist thinking about the innate athleticism of blacks. More pertinent, the job of the running back—to escape—is the most basic of vocations, one that a kid from the projects can begin practicing in that first game of tag. Running also holds a special significance to a people denied violent resistance as a viable option, if only because it has always been the most potent tool available. The runaway slave is a fixture in the American imagination. As the writer Isabel Wilkerson notes in her account of the Great Migration, the blacks who fled the South during the 20th century “did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.” There is also a less reputable history of fleeing among African Americans—the tradition of those blacks light enough to “pass” as white and disappear into the overclass.</p><p>Simpson’s great fortune was to reach the height of his powers in the 1970s, after the civil-rights movement, a time when one might enact the rituals of passing not by looking white, but by possessing qualities that white society envied. Simpson was a celebrity. He was handsome, articulate, and charming. He was identifiably black, but measured against the brashness of Muhammad Ali and the coiled rage of Jim Brown, his distinction was to radiate reassurance and respectability. In the successful series of ads he starred in for Hertz beginning in 1975, he was still running—only now through airports, an icon of social mobility, with white people cheering him on: “Go, O.J.”</p><p>An old friend of Simpson’s says in <i>Made in America </i>that Simpson was “seduced by white society.” Perhaps. But the seduction was mutual, and he used his football fame to gain access to white patrons eager to expose him to the finer things in life. “I took him places where I think very few black men had ever been,” Frank Olson, the former CEO of Hertz, says in the film. Simpson mingled with wealthy entrepreneurs at golf clubs where he was one of the few black members, or the first and only black member. He gave them the thrill of convening with a real sports hero at his mansion, Rockingham, nestled in the wealthy white suburb of Brentwood. Simpson’s social circle helped him amass a small fortune. By the 1990s, his net worth was estimated to be $10 million. He was the CEO of O. J. Simpson Enterprises, which owned stakes in hotels and restaurants, and he sat on four different corporate boards.</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="“My biggest accomplishment,” Simpson once told a journalist, “is that people look at me like a man first, not a black man.” After his acquittal, he read press coverage that treated him as a black icon. " height="719" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/09/WEL_Coates_OJBed_960_new2/cc70fd3d9.jpg" width="960">
<figcaption class="caption">“My biggest accomplishment,” Simpson once told a journalist, “is that people look at me like a man first, not a black man.” After his acquittal, he read press coverage that treated him as a black icon. (Lawrence Schiller / Getty)</figcaption>
</figure><p>His pursuit of white women was profligate. In a telling moment in the documentary, Joe Bell, a friend of Simpson’s since childhood, recalls them slowly cruising down Rodeo Drive in the 1970s and being awed by the response. “Women come up, throw their arms around O.J., and just lay it on him,” Bell says. “Not just women. <i>White </i>women. <i>Fine white</i> women.” In 1977, Simpson began an affair with a beautiful blond 18-year-old, Nicole Brown, who came home from their first date with her pants ripped. “Well, he was a little forceful,” she told a friend. Two years later, he left Marguerite to pursue a relationship with Nicole. But the affairs continued: Bond girls, <i>Playboy</i> playmates, models, actresses, most of them white. For Simpson, the women on his arm were not women but bodies, ornaments, evidence of conquests—an outlook he had seen taken to its most violent conclusions in the form of neighborhood pimps. “Man, they’d beat a ho down right there on the street,” Bell remembers, laughing. “So that all the women would know this is the kind of treatment you’re gonna get if you don’t bring me my money.” Those women were black, but the basic notion of women as property knows no racial boundaries. Nicole Brown was proof to the world that Simpson, among the millions of black men caught in the maze of American racism, had risen above it. What sort of abuse—verbal and physical—was going on behind the mansion gates, almost no one, black or white, guessed. Or much cared.</p><p>The goings-on in the ghettos of L.A. were both more knowable and better explored—but not by O. J. Simpson. He eschewed involvement in any sort of politics that might tarnish his brand, and thus his pursuit of wealth. If it was easy for Simpson to forget the world he came from, that was partly because the world he now belonged to was invested in forgetting. In an incredible moment early on in the documentary, Edelman, off camera, asks a white USC teammate of Simpson’s what he remembers about 1968. A montage of violent events flashes across the screen—Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, the raucous Democratic National Convention. Edelman then returns to the teammate, who says, “I think of winning all the games, getting O.J. famous, everybody on campus thinking it’s the greatest thing on Earth. That’s all we thought about. There was nothing else going on.”</p><p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps">B<span class="caps">ut</span> Edelman does not </span>allow us to forget, because the Simpson story turned out to be intimately enmeshed with the story of black Los Angeles and its relationship with the police. This was the community the Simpson jury was drawn from, and ultimately the one that held his life in the balance. For years, much of the country has wondered how Simpson could possibly have been found innocent. An unspoken assumption underlies this conjecture—that the jury understood the legal system to be credible. What the film makes clear in piecing together a parade of victims beaten, killed, and harassed by the LAPD is that the predominantly black jury—quite rightfully—understood no such thing.</p><p>Even I, college radical that I was, grasped the LAPD’s brutality only abstractly. The officers were brutal because my own politics, and my own experiences with the police, suggested they would be so. But brutality understates what the LAPD did in those years: It didn’t just brutalize black communities; it terrorized them. The terror emanated directly from the top. Police Chief Daryl Gates was a drug warrior who once said at a Senate hearing that casual drug users “ought to be taken out and shot.” In 1982, after numerous deaths of black people had resulted from police use of choke holds, Gates commented, “In some blacks when it is applied, the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do in normal people.” The intensifying sense of constant injustice came to a head when four officers were videotaped ruthlessly beating Rodney King in 1991, only to be acquitted when they went on trial. Two weeks after King’s beating, a Korean American grocer shot a black customer, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, in the back of the head. The grocer, convicted of voluntary manslaughter, received probation, a fine, and community service, but didn’t go to jail.</p><p>By the time Simpson came to trial, most of the black community in Los Angeles had ample reason to view law enforcement as lacking not just credibility but basic legitimacy. Victimization fed a loss of respect for law enforcement, and that loss of respect in turn transformed victims into victimizers. The footage of the protracted beating of a white man, Reginald Denny, who was pulled from his truck during the Los Angeles riots, is chilling. But when law enforcement becomes capricious, citizens are apt to resort to their own law, rooted in ancient impulses, tribal loyalties, and vengeance.</p><p>The beating of Reginald Denny was vengeance for the beating of Rodney King. And vengeance for King played a role in Simpson’s acquittal, according to one of the jurors, Carrie Bess. But revenge only partly explains Simpson’s last great escape. What I couldn’t fathom in 1994 was a reality that black people around me likely sensed and that <i>Made in America</i> brings into deeply discomfiting focus: that Simpson may well have murdered his ex-wife and her friend, and that the jury got it right in declaring him not guilty. When the LAPD collared O. J. Simpson, the police force had gotten its man. The evidence all looked so obvious to a lay observer: the vivid record of spousal abuse (“He’s going to kill me,” Nicole Brown Simpson yelled to an officer who responded to one of her many calls); the bloody shoe print, which matched shoes Simpson owned; the bloody glove found at the murder scene, which matched the glove at Simpson’s home; the blood on Simpson’s car and his socks and in his bathroom.</p><figure><img alt="For Johnnie Cochran, Simpson’s lead lawyer, rage against police brutality had personal roots. About his experience of being pulled over by LAPD officers who then drew their guns, he said, “I never made an issue of it. But I never forgot it.”" height="461" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/09/WEL_Coates_OJJohnny_630/f71687f72.jpg" width="557">
<figcaption class="caption">For Johnnie Cochran, Simpson’s lead lawyer, rage against police brutality had personal roots. About his experience of being pulled over by LAPD officers who then drew their guns, he said, “I never made an issue of it. But I never forgot it.” (Lee Celano / Getty)</figcaption>
</figure><p>But juries are not merely lay observers, and the defense needed to neither wholly exonerate Simpson nor completely contradict all the evidence. His lawyers simply needed to instill reasonable doubt. The LAPD had spent decades seeding that doubt in the minds of people like those on the jury, the majority of whom were black women. To make sure the doubt was harvested, Simpson leaned on the kind of activist he’d long spurned. These days Johnnie Cochran is remembered almost in caricature, mocked on <i>Seinfeld</i> and derided as a race hustler. Back then, even my view of Cochran was shaped in part by the satirization of him on <i>Saturday Night Live</i>. Edelman resurrects a lesser-known Cochran, a hero to the black lawyers who’d been the prominent legal advocates in the fight against police brutality since the late 1960s. <i>The New York Times</i> called Cochran’s rage at police misconduct “all consuming.” Contrary to the portrayals of him in popular culture, that rage was genuine and directly acquired. In 1980, Cochran was pulled over by LAPD officers and instructed to get out of his car. His daughter and son were in the backseat. When Cochran stepped out, the officers had their guns drawn. The tension was defused only when the officers searched the car and found a badge—Cochran was then the third-highest-ranking official in the district attorney’s office. Cochran received a personal apology from the chief of police. “I never made an issue of it,” Cochran later wrote. “But I never forgot it.”</p><p>Simpson, who had turned his back on race men while making millions selling himself as inoffensive to middle-class white people, didn’t hesitate to empower one of them now that his life was on the line. Thus the Simpson defense team presented an ironic alchemy—an activist tradition that Simpson had rejected, fueled by funds that he’d garnered rejecting it. “O.J. had money to spend and a willingness to spend it on his own defense,” one of Simpson’s lawyers, Carl Douglas, says to Edelman. “This was a first for me.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="magazine-issue"></aside><p>Whether I saw Simpson as black or not, racism pervaded his case. The role it played went beyond the evidence on display. Racism was not just blatantly revealed in the tapes of the LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman bragging about, among other things, beating black suspects, whom he identified as “niggers,” and explaining how he disregarded their constitutional rights. (“You don’t need probable cause,” Fuhrman said. “You’re God.”) And racism was not just confirmed by Fuhrman’s exposure as a perjurer who was then maneuvered into pleading the Fifth in response to grilling by the defense—including the pivotal question of whether he’d planted any evidence. Racism formed the substrate of the defense’s case: The notion that the LAPD might frame a black man was completely within the realm of possibility for black people in Los Angeles. Simpson’s legal team worked those preconceptions the way a boxer might work an opponent’s wound, relentlessly attacking the numerous flaws in an investigation and an evidence-collection process that were egregiously careless: the blanket thrown over Nicole Brown Simpson’s body, exposing it to fibers and the DNA of others in the house; the sensitive material collected bare-handed; the sample of Simpson’s blood stored in an envelope in an officer’s care and brought to Simpson’s house.</p><p>Errors that to white viewers could look like technicalities in what they presumed to be an abstractly “fair” trial tapped into fundamental questions of trust for black viewers, who saw up close a machine operated by humans striving for an ideal standard, but often falling woefully short. How many black men had the LAPD arrested and convicted under a similarly lax application of standards? “If you can railroad O. J. Simpson with his millions of dollars and his dream team of legal experts,” the activist Danny Bakewell told an assembled crowd in L.A. after the Fuhrman tapes were made public, “we know what you can do to the average African American and other decent citizens in this country.”</p><p>The claim was prophetic. Four years after Simpson was acquitted, an elite antigang unit of the LAPD’s Rampart division was implicated in a campaign of terror that ranged from torture and planting evidence to drug theft and bank robbery—“the worst corruption scandal in LAPD history,” according to the <i>Los Angeles Times</i>. The city was forced to vacate more than 100 convictions and pay out $78 million in settlements.</p><p>The Simpson jury, as it turned out, understood the LAPD all too well. And its conclusions about the department’s inept handling of evidence were confirmed not long after the trial, when the city’s crime lab was overhauled. “If your mission is to sweep the streets of bad people … and you can’t prosecute them successfully because you’re incompetent,” Mike Williamson, a retired LAPD officer, remarked years later about the trial, “you’ve defeated your primary mission.”</p><p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps">O. J. Simpson’s great escape </span>still sticks in the craw of much of the country. Simpson’s lawyers are not praised as adept defense attorneys, but disparaged as unscrupulous flouters of the rules who played the “race card” in a case that should have been about science—no matter how poorly that science was deployed. Resentment continues to fester that Simpson was afforded the best defense money could buy, in the form of Cochran. “It offended me,” Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor, says to Edelman, “because he was using a very serious, for-real issue—racial injustice—in defense of a man who wanted nothing to do with the black community.”</p><p>It offended me, too. Simpson should have been the last person in the world to reap a reward from the struggle waged against the LAPD. Months after he was acquitted, I watched him give a speech at a black church in D.C., where he was embraced by the local community. He was presented with traditional African garb. The black nationalist Malik Zulu Shabazz greeted Simpson as if he were the reincarnation of Malcolm X. I have not, in my life, ever felt much shame in being black. That was a moment when I felt it deeply.</p><p>I hadn’t yet learned that black people are not a computer program but a community of humans, varied, brilliant, and fallible, filled with the mixed motives and vices one finds in any broad collection of humanity. More important, I did not understand the ties that united Simpson and the black community. When O. J. Simpson ran from justice, returned to it, was tried for murder, and eluded justice again, it was the most shocking statement of pure equality since the civil-rights movement. Simpson had killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. I suspected that then, and I am sure of it now. But he’d gotten away with it—in much the same way that white people had killed black men and women for centuries and gotten away with it.</p><p>The virtue of equality does not always feel like a virtue, because equality does not always run on the same axis as morality. Equality for African Americans means the right to be treated like anyone else—whether we’re doing good or doing evil. Simpson’s great accomplishment was to be indicted for a crime and then receive the kind of treatment typically reserved for rich white guys. His acquittal, achieved as incarceration rates skyrocketed, represented something grand and inconceivable for blacks. He had defied the police who brutalized black people, the prosecutors who tried them, the prisons that held them. He had defied them all, and in the process, much like Houdini, he escaped.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>In 2016 we confront a new phase of the problem of police legitimacy. The Rodney King video was a shocker in its time. Now it seems that every week brings a new video of a black body being beaten and shot by the police. A flurry of government reports on policing in Ferguson, Cleveland, Baltimore, and Chicago have all delivered the same message—that racism has deeply infected American policing. Simpson is currently in prison for charges unrelated to the killing of Brown Simpson and Goldman. And yet the problems that moved those crowds of black people to cheer for a murderer remain. The same anger, the same fear of police remain. The elements that interacted to turn the Simpson trial into a spectacle are still with us, so that today, two decades after Simpson was acquitted, “the audience for escapes,” in Doctorow’s words, “is even larger.”</p><hr><p><small>* Photo-collage images courtesy of Getty Images and Bettmann, Charles Steiner / Image Works, Focus on Sport, Jean-Marc Giboux, Lawrence Schiller, Lee Celano, Michael Ochs Archives, Mike Nelson, Myung Chun, Peter Turnley, Tiziana Sorge, and Vince Bucci</small></p><p></p>Ta-Nehisi Coateshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_source=feedPhoto collage by Jeff Elkins*What O. J. Simpson Means to Me2016-09-12T08:00:00-04:002016-09-12T20:59:29-04:00His great accomplishment was to be indicted for a crime and then receive the kind of treatment typically reserved for rich white guys.