Our politics will get even uglier. That's a brutal thought to contemplate. But consider some of the events of this past year -- even this past month. The country still hasn't come to terms with a violent insurrection that saw a member of a mob brandish a Confederate flag during an attack on the Capitol while others hung a noose and scaffold outside on the grounds.
A major political party is passing a wave of laws across the country that may restrict voting by racial minorities and other groups that don't tend to vote for them. Trump supporters clash with police and security forces as they try to storm the US Capitol on January 6, in Washington. Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, a hero of the right, traveled to Hungary the same week of Obama's 60th birthday to conduct a fawning interview with the country's leader, Viktor Orban, who once said : " We must defend Hungary as it is now.
We must state that we do not want to be diverse and do not want to be mixed. We do not want our own color, traditions and national culture to be mixed with those of others. And new census data are raising fresh questions about the future of our democracy. For the first time in the country's history, the number of White people in the US is declining -- a benchmark that's come about eight years earlier than projected.
The news should make anyone who knows this country's history shudder. It's been well documented that a segment of White America will abandon any commitment to democracy if they no longer consider themselves the dominant group. One can envision a future where White politicians and partisan judges double down on voter restriction laws and appeals to racism in a desperate bid to hold onto power.
That's why one commentator warned the shifting US demographics are about to "set our politics on fire. In such a future, there may be no leaders who talk about seeking common ground. There will be no stirring oratory about how America doesn't have red or blue states. It'll be a war of attrition where both sides seek only to turn out their bases for elections. US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wears a "Trump Won" face mask as she arrives on the floor of the House to take her oath of office as a newly elected member of the th House of Representatives in Washington on January 3, I foresee this future as a distinct possibility.
Leaders will keep speaking to people's fears instead of their hopes. There won't be any poetry in politics, just trench warfare. Obama was born into a country where laws barring his very conception—let alone his ascendancy to the presidency—had long stood in force.
A black president would always be a contradiction for a government that, throughout most of its history, had oppressed black people.
The attempt to resolve this contradiction through Obama—a black man with deep roots in the white world—was remarkable. The price it exacted, incredible. The world it gave way to, unthinkable. When Barack Obama was 10, his father gave him a basketball, a gift that connected the two directly. Obama was born in in Hawaii and raised by his mother, Ann Dunham, who was white, and her parents, Stanley and Madelyn. They loved him ferociously, supported him emotionally, and encouraged him intellectually.
They also told him he was black. Ann gave him books to read about famous black people. This biography makes Obama nearly unique among black people of his era. That passion was directed at something more than just the mastering of the pick-and-roll or the perfecting of his jump shot. These are lessons, particularly the last one, that for black people apply as much on the street as they do on the court. Basketball was a link for Obama, a medium for downloading black culture from the mainland that birthed the Fabulous Five.
Historically, in black autobiography, to be remanded into the black race has meant exposure to a myriad of traumas, often commencing in childhood.
Frederick Douglass is separated from his grandmother. The enslaved Harriet Ann Jacobs must constantly cope with the threat of rape before she escapes. The division is not neat; the two are linked, and it is incredibly hard to be a full participant in the world of cultural identity without experiencing the trauma of racial identity. Obama is somewhat different. But the kinds of traumas that marked African Americans of his generation—beatings at the hands of racist police, being herded into poor schools, grinding out a life in a tenement building—were mostly abstract for him.
Moreover, the kind of spatial restriction that most black people feel at an early age—having rocks thrown at you for being on the wrong side of the tracks, for instance—was largely absent from his life.
In its place, Obama was gifted with a well-stamped passport and admittance to elite private schools—all of which spoke of other identities, other lives and other worlds where the color line was neither determinative nor especially relevant.
Obama could have grown into a raceless cosmopolitan. Surely he would have lived in a world of problems, but problems not embodied by him.
He was sitting on Air Force One , his tie loosened, his shirtsleeves rolled up. Why that is, I think, is complicated. You feel pretty good about it. Stanley, his grandfather, who came originally from Kansas, took him to basketball games at the University of Hawaii, as well as to black bars.
Stanley introduced him to the black writer Frank Marshall Davis. The facilitation was as much indirect as direct. That suspicion of rootlessness extends throughout Dreams From My Father.
But instead of being in awe, Obama realized that he and the woman lived in different worlds. After college, Obama found a home, as well as a sense of himself, working on the South Side of Chicago as a community organizer. It was less obvious to me. How do I pull all these different strains together: Kenya and Hawaii and Kansas, and white and black and Asian—how does that fit? And through action, through work, I suddenly see myself as part of the bigger process for, yes, delivering justice for the [African American community] and specifically the South Side community, the low-income people—justice on behalf of the African American community.
But also thereby promoting my ideas of justice and equality and empathy that my mother taught me were universal. And I can fit the African American struggle for freedom and justice in the context of the universal aspiration for freedom and justice. If women, as a gender, must suffer the constant evaluations and denigrations of men, black women must suffer that, plus a broad dismissal from the realm of what American society deems to be beautiful. But Michelle Obama is beautiful in the way that black people know themselves to be.
Her prominence as first lady directly attacks a poison that diminishes black girls from the moment they are capable of opening a magazine or turning on a television. The South Side of Chicago, where Obama began his political career, is home to arguably the most prominent and storied black political establishment in the country. Washington forged the kind of broad coalition that Obama would later assemble nationally.
But Washington did this in the mids in segregated Chicago, and he had not had the luxury, as Obama did, of becoming black with minimal trauma.
Axelrod recalled sitting around a conference table with Washington after he had won the Democratic primary for his reelection in , just as the mayor was about to hold a press conference. He felt those things. He had fought in an all-black unit in World War II. He had come up in times—and that and the sort of indignities of what you had to do to come up through the machine really seared him. Like Washington, Obama attempted to forge a coalition between black South Siders and the broader community.
But Obama, despite his adherence to black cultural mores, was, with his roots in Kansas and Hawaii, his Ivy League pedigree, and his ties to the University of Chicago, still an exotic out-of-towner. But even as many in the black political community were skeptical of Obama, others encouraged him—sometimes when they voted against him.
You just have to be patient. And being able to break through in the African American community is difficult because of the enormous loyalty that people feel towards anybody who has been around awhile. There was no one around to compete for loyalty when Obama ran for Senate in , or for president in He was no longer competing against other African Americans; he was representing them.
Obama ran for the Senate two decades after the death of Harold Washington. Axelrod checked in on the precinct where Washington had been so loudly booed by white Chicagoans. Obama believes that his statewide victory for the Illinois Senate seat held particular portent for the events of Illinois effectively allowed Obama to play a scrimmage before the big national game in And so part of the reason I was willing to run [for president in ] was that I had had two years in which we were generating enormous crowds all across the country—and the majority of those crowds were not African American; and they were in pretty remote places, or unlikely places.
So what that told me was, it was possible. What those crowds saw was a black candidate unlike any other before him. For most African Americans, white people exist either as a direct or an indirect force for bad in their lives. Biraciality is no shield against this; often it just intensifies the problem. What proved key for Barack Obama was not that he was born to a black man and a white woman, but that his white family approved of the union, and approved of the child who came from it.
They did this in —a time when sex between black men and white women, in large swaths of the country, was not just illegal but fraught with mortal danger. The first white people he ever knew, the ones who raised him, were decent in a way that very few black people of that era experienced. And he was like a blue-black brother. And so, yeah, I will always give my grandparents credit for that. In this, the first lady is more representative of black America than her husband is.
African Americans typically raise their children to protect themselves against a presumed hostility from white teachers, white police officers, white supervisors, and white co-workers. But that willingness to help is also a defense, produced by decades of discrimination. Obama sees race through a different lens, Kaye Wilson told me.
He needs that frame of reference. He needs that lens. Or Al Sharpton. Different lens. What Obama was able to offer white America is something very few African Americans could—trust. The vast majority of us are, necessarily, too crippled by our defenses to ever consider such a proposition.
But Obama, through a mixture of ancestral connections and distance from the poisons of Jim Crow, can credibly and sincerely trust the majority population of this country. That trust is reinforced, not contradicted, by his blackness. That, too, is defensive, and deep down, I suspect, white people know it. Four days earlier, The Washington Post had published an old audio clip that featured Donald Trump lamenting a failed sexual conquest and exhorting the virtues of sexual assault.
As we flew to North Carolina, the president was in a state of bemused disbelief. A feeling of cautious inevitability emanated from his staff, and why not? He had likely not paid taxes in 18 years. He had been denounced by leadership in his own party, and the trickle of prominent Republicans—both in and out of office—who had publicly repudiated him threatened to become a geyser.
At this moment, the idea that a campaign so saturated in open bigotry, misogyny, chaos, and possible corruption could win a national election was ludicrous. This was America. It is a quintessentially Obama program—conservative in scope, with impacts that are measurable. But what are we going to do? They told stories of being in the street, of choosing quick money over school, of their homes being shot up, and—through the help of mentoring or job programs brokered by MBK—transitioning into college or a job.
Obama listened solemnly and empathetically to each of them. When he asked the young men whether they had a message he should take back to policy makers in Washington, D. He was correct. The ghettos of America are the direct result of decades of public-policy decisions: the redlining of real-estate zoning maps, the expanded authority given to prosecutors, the increased funding given to prisons.
And all of this was done on the backs of people still reeling from the year legacy of slavery. The results of this negative investment are clear—African Americans rank at the bottom of nearly every major socioeconomic measure in the country. Blacks disproportionately benefit from this effort, since they are disproportionately in need. Its full benefit has yet to be felt by African Americans, because several states in the South have declined to expand Medicaid. Obama also emphasized the need for a strong Justice Department with a deep commitment to nondiscrimination.
And what the [George W. Holder is certainly blunter, and this worried some of the White House staff. But positioning the two men as opposites elides an important fact: Holder was appointed by the president, and went only as far as the president allowed.
I asked Holder whether he had toned down his rhetoric after that controversial speech. He is the Zen guy. But he and I share a worldview, you know? Obama would deliver this lecture to any black audience, regardless of context. This part of the Obama formula is the most troubling, and least thought-out. This judgment emerges from my own biography. I am the product of black parents who encouraged me to read, of black teachers who felt my work ethic did not match my potential, of black college professors who taught me intellectual rigor.
And they did this in a world that every day insulted their humanity. It was not so much that the black layabouts and deadbeats Obama invoked in his speeches were unrecognizable. I had seen those people too. If black men were overrepresented among drug dealers and absentee dads of the world, it was directly related to their being underrepresented among the Bernie Madoffs and Kenneth Lays of the world.
Power was what mattered, and what characterized the differences between black and white America was not a difference in work ethic, but a system engineered to place one on top of the other. For instance, the unemployment rate among black college graduates 4. But that college degree is generally purchased at a higher price by blacks than by whites.
This is both the result and the perpetuator of a sprawling wealth gap between the races. Obama had been on the record as opposing reparations.
But now, late in his presidency, he seemed more open to the idea—in theory, at least, if not in practice. The political problems with turning the argument for reparations into reality are manifold, Obama said. But the progress toward nondiscrimination did not appear overnight.
It was achieved by people willing to make an unpopular argument and live on the frontier of public opinion. Obama is unfailingly optimistic about the empathy and capabilities of the American people.
But Obama is almost constitutionally skeptical of those who seek to achieve change outside that consensus. Early in , Obama invited a group of African American leaders to meet with him at the White House. When some of the activists affiliated with Black Lives Matter refused to attend, Obama began calling them out in speeches. You then have a responsibility to prepare an agenda that is achievable—that can institutionalize the changes you seek—and to engage the other side.
Opal Tometi, a Nigerian American community activist who is one of the three founders of Black Lives Matter, explained to me that the group has a more diffuse structure than most civil-rights organizations. One reason for this is to avoid the cult of personality that has plagued black organizations in the past. Tometi noted that some other activists allied with Black Lives Matter had been planning to attend the meeting, so they felt their views would be represented.
When I asked Obama about this perspective, he fluctuated between understanding where the activists were coming from and being hurt by such brush-offs. And that sort of lack of awareness on the part of an activist about the constraints of our political system and the constraints on this office, I think, sometimes would leave me to mutter under my breath.
Very rarely did I lose it publicly. I get that. And I think it is important. Obama himself was an activist and a community organizer, albeit for only two years—but he is not, by temperament, a protester.
Mr Obama did not name anyone but his rare comments came after President Donald Trump sought to deflect criticism that his anti-immigrant rhetoric had fuelled violence. In a speech on Monday, Mr Trump condemned hatred and white supremacy. He was speaking after 31 people died in mass shootings in Texas and Ohio.
While in office, Mr Obama fought unsuccessfully to restrict gun ownership. He told the BBC in that his failure to pass "common sense gun safety laws" had been the greatest frustration of his presidency. He has refrained from commenting on Mr Trump's controversial rhetoric regarding migrants but on Monday issued a statement.
And it's time for the overwhelming majority of Americans of goodwill, of every race and faith and political party, to say as much - clearly and unequivocally. During his presidential campaign Mr Trump said Mexican immigrants included drug dealers, criminals and rapists. More recently, he caused widespread anger by suggesting that four US congresswomen of colour "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came".
He denied his comments were racist. In a statement from the White House on Monday, Mr Trump called for mental health gun control reforms; the death penalty for those who commit mass murder and more bi-partisan co-operation over gun laws.
He did not express support for gun control measures proposed in Congress. Hate has no place in America. The president also outlined a number of policies, including more co-operation between government agencies and social media companies, changes to mental health laws as well as ending the "glorification of violence" in American culture. He called for red flag laws that would allow law enforcement authorities to take away weapons from individuals believed to be a threat to themselves or others.
Mr Trump said government agencies must work together and identify individuals who may commit violent acts, prevent their access to firearms and also suggested involuntary confinement as a way to stop potential attackers. He also said he directed the justice department to propose legislation to ensure those who commit hate crimes and mass murders face the death penalty.
The president criticised the internet and "gruesome" video games for promoting violence in society.
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