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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTa-Nehisi Coates: My President Was Black
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/My President Was Black
A history of the first African American White Houseand of what came next
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
January/February 2017 Issue Politics
Theyre a rotten crowd, I shouted across the lawn. Youre worth the whole damn bunch put together.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
snip//
Obamas 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.
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. Thats the last one. Yall better treat this one right. The next one gonna be from Cleveland. He gonna wear a perm. Then you gonna see what its really like. Throughout their residency, the Obamas had refrained from showing America what its really like, and had instead followed the first ladys motto, When they go low, we go high. This was the idealblack and graceful under firesaluted that evening. The president was lionized as our crown jewel. The first lady was praised as the woman who put the O in Obama.
Barack Obamas 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 nigger is also symbolic. Burning crosses do not literally raise the black poverty rate, and the Confederate flag does not directly expand the wealth gap.
Much as the unbroken ranks of 43 white male presidents communicated that the highest office of government in the countryindeed, the most powerful political offices in the worldwas 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 peoples everyday, extraordinary Americanness.
Whiteness in America is a different symbola 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.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/
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