When Barack Obama was inaugurated as our first black president in 2009, many A

Author : greensameblue

Publish Date : 2021-01-06 18:08:04

When Barack Obama was inaugurated as our first black president in 2009, many Americans breathed a sigh of relief that our country had made progress on the question of race after all. In his concession speech, John McCain — who maturely competed alongside the Illinois senator for the presidency — expressed his overwhelming joy for the election of his Democratic contender: “A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation of Booker T. Washington to visit — to dine at the White House — was taken as an outrage in many quarters. America today is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African-American to the presidency of the United States. Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on Earth.” In those hundred years since Booker T. Washington set foot in the President’s Palace, our country had seen the emergence of revolutionaries like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Stokely Carmichael in the face of Jim Crow, the passage of legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act which swiftly followed, and even the groundbreaking appointment of our first black justice to the Supreme Court. After the civil unrest which America endured for decades, our country seemed finally ready to welcome a black man into the highest executive office of the land: when he beat John McCain in 2008, Barack Obama became that black man, and — man — did he make history!
Unfortunately, the Arizona senator spoke too soon. Ever since he arrived on the campaign trail in 2007, Barack Obama was the subject of a fringe conspiracy theory regarding the whereabouts of his birth; even after he was elected into office, “birthers” — including his eventual successor Donald Trump

— continued to harass Barack Obama for his birth certificate. In addition, Michelle Obama was also the frequent victim of racist harassment by her husband’s political opponents who would insult her for her blackness; in 2015, a mayor in Washington state called the first lady “gorilla face Michelle” and refused to admit to the anti-blackness of his derogatory remarks. For the most part, the very fact of Barack Obama’s historic election did very little to stem the tide against the racism which chronically burdened him through his childhood and adulthood in Hawaii and Chicago, during his two-term presidency in the White House, and even after his quiet retirement in Washington. However, the true failure of the Obama presidency to confront the perennial issue of racism resulted not from birther conspiracies or insults to the first lady but rather the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012. Even under the unprecedented leadership of a black president — as well as his cabinet filled with the most qualified black men and women our country had ever seen — Trayvon Martin still lived (and died) in a country where men like George Zimmerman still violently threatened by his blackness.
After Trayvon Martin was murdered, Barack Obama bared his soul before a country which struggled to understand why black death was still an unfortunate reality in a twenty-first century that, according to John McCain, had seemingly surpassed the need for race. In a press briefing delivered after the controversial verdict which acquitted George Zimmerman, our former president couldn’t help but see himself — or a hypothetical son of his — in Trayvon Martin: “There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.” However, as much as Barack Obama tried his best to resonate with the trauma of black people nationwide, there was a clear restraint in his voice as he walked the fine line between honoring the pain of his own and angering the white constituents who could not bring themselves to see race before a black president. Though he acknowledged the myriad of ways in which black people — like Trayvon Martin — were still disproportionately impacted by the lingering racism in our civil society, he could not bring himself to call the entire paradigm into question. Contrary to what Barack Obama suggested at the time, police brutality was not merely the unintended consequence of wrongheaded individuals but rather the unsurprising result of a country that never thought black lives mattered.

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