Throughout his eight years in office, Barack Obama had a tendency to be somewhat guarded in his remarks on race. As the first Black president, he knew his every utterance on the subject—his association with the pastor Jeremiah Wright; the arrest of renowned scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his own home by a white police officer; the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman—would be closely scrutinized and picked apart by bad faith observers. Even as Donald Trump, the man who would eventually succeed him, incessantly peddled the racist birther lie against him, Obama seemed careful to avoid the obvious—instead dismissing, as he released his longform birth certificate in 2011, the “silliness” that was being put forth by “sideshows and carnival barkers.”
The vitriol and conspiracy theories directed against him were more than mere silliness, of course. As Obama writes in his forthcoming memoir, they were a racist reaction to his historic election, and foundation on which Trump would build his own cruel, paranoid, nativist political movement. “It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted,” Obama writes in one of the book’s several candid discussions of race, according to excerpts reported on by CNN Thursday. “Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president.”
“For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House,” Obama continues, “he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.”
Obama’s presidency was marked by triumphs, including the passage of the Affordable Care Act—his signature healthcare reform. But the story of his presidency is also of the strategic obstructionism on the part of Capitol Hill Republicans, whose stubbornness thwarted major parts of his agenda on gun control, the Supreme Court, and other matters. That stonewalling, he writes, was animated and made possible by the racial anxieties Trump would eventually capitalize on. “[Birtherism] had migrated from the fringe of GOP politics to the center—an emotional, almost visceral, reaction to my presidency, distinct from any differences in policy or ideology,” Obama writes.
That dynamic in the Republican party had long been obvious, and only became more so as Trump took over the GOP. But it’s still striking to see Obama discuss it so directly. He never shied away from talking about race and racism. But his approach to such discussions tended to reflect an awareness that many white Americans would recoil or worse from facing the issue head on. His frankness over the last four years of Trump’s presidency and in his new memoir surely has much to do with the fact that he is no longer in office. But it also may speak to the added urgency such bluntness has taken on as the bigoted reaction to his presidency metastasized into Trump’s authoritarian movement and the high-profile killings this year of Black Americans by police thrust systemic racism into the national spotlight. “There have been times during the course of writing my book, as I’ve reflected on my presidency and all that’s happened since, when I’ve had to ask myself whether I was too tempered in speaking the truth as I saw it, too cautious in either word or deed, convinced as I was that by appealing to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature I stood a greater chance of leading us in the direction of the America we’ve been promised,” he writes in an excerpt of his memoir published by the Atlantic on Thursday.
He’s no longer quite so guarded. He admits the “jury’s still out” on whether the U.S. will be able to reach the ideals it claims to hold and will be able to keep its democracy. But 12 years after he was elected on a message of hope and change, he still speaks with a kind of optimism that can be difficult to maintain after the last four years. “What I can say for certain,” he writes in the Atlantic excerpt, “is that I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America.”
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