The conditions of a Black Presidency

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ reflections of the Obama years elucidate unfulfilled promises to Black Americans in We Were Eight Years in Power

Coates’ thoughtful collection of essays written during the Obama presidency are interspersed with candid narratives of his own life during those years and analysis of his writing. As a result, We Were Eight Years in Power has an interesting quality to it as it balances a personal journey and discrete, self-contained essays. While I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, I must admit I struggled in my approach to read it. Never feeling I had the time to sit down and read an entire essay, yet not wanting to read half an essay at a time, I often delayed reading. As a result, it has taken me around six weeks to finish the book, and I may have lost some of the common threads running throughout the book. What has remained most prominent in my mind were the final essay and the epilogue. In this post, I will share my own ruminations on Barack Obama’s presidency, and how the epilogue masterfully brings the reader to the crisis of the 45th administration.

As a fifth grader at the time of the 2008 election, my understanding of politics lay somewhere in between the notion that politics were deeply private and that the democratic nominee did not fit the country’s needs. Though politics were often left as a personal, undiscussed topic in my household, I knew that McCain was the favored candidate. Naively unhappy with the rejection of meritocracy shepherded in by identity politics, I resented that a person could be elected by the basis of their skin. Eventually, as the election passed and my life went on relatively oblivious to the stormy economic and political climate around me, I mostly abandoned political curiosity for the next six years.

After being awakened to a harsh reality outside my upper middle class New England bubble—and later outside the ornate gates of my prestigious university—I began to understand the danger posed by a Trump presidency. Obama’s presidency fell squarely outside what I perceived as an unceasing barrage of human rights crises. I hardly thought about the importance of his leadership except when I was pining for more normal times. Even when I eventually began to engage in discussions on those eight years, most of what I absorbed was its insufficiencies. I could not escape the idea that for all of Obama’s progress, he did not go far enough.

It seems that Ta-Nehisi Coates would agree; however, I am indebted to Coates for complicating this narrative to his readers. In his essay My President Was Black and throughout his essay preludes, Coates outlines what it meant for him and many other Black intellectuals the influence of a Black presidency. Beyond the powerful symbol it served as a new horizon of Black American attainment, it opened the door to Black artists, thinkers, and leaders like Coates to make their way into the mainstream. As a non-Black person of color who was young at the time of the election, it is difficult for me to fathom exactly how meaningful Obama’s presidency was, and also how unbelievable the concept was until it actually happened. As Coates explains in his essay, a Black president was so outside the realm of what was possible that conditions a Black president would have to navigate were only clear in hindsight.

As Coates speculates, Obama’s upbringing in a white family who educated him with Black thinkers, allowed him to pursue Black culture on his own terms, and loved him whole heartedly all enabled him to trust white people in a way that other Black Americans could not afford. His pedigrees from prestigious universities and his political career prior to running for office made him more than qualified for the position. With his ability to navigate diverse constituencies, he built a broad coalition throughout the United States. While he escaped the cage of what stereotypes dictated a Black man could be, he did not enjoy the benefits his presidential predecessors enjoyed. In particular, he was denied the benefit of the doubt. For all of Obama’s avoidance of “playing the race card”—that is, suggesting race could be a factor at play in an issue—his opponents tinged their critiques with the accusations of racial animus.

For all his differences of opinions with the 44th POTUS, I admire Coates’ ability to add nuance to the difficult, delicate position Obama was in throughout his eight years in power. His writing on the aftermath of a Black presidency is similarly compelling. Written in 2017, WWEYIP is shrouded in the shadow cast by the following presidency.

The epilogue addresses this looming fate, and analyzes how, in a nation that has just celebrated the election of its first Black president, a white supremacist could be elected. While many progressives, democrats, and moderates were shocked by the 2016 election of Trump, Coates postulates that his victory was a response to the Obama presidency. Not only a response, but a negation, destruction, of Obama’s presidency. He continues:

And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” writes the historian Nell Irvin Painter, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of no being a n*****… Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president… America’s first white president (344)

Coates essentiates this idea most memorably when he writes,

Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that in working 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 (343)

He then analyzes what numerous journalists and commentators have speculated on before: how was Trump elected? Coates even mentions President Obama’s incredulity regarding the republican nominee. Coates counters the notion that white, working class America elected Trump after years of neglect by political elites. As evidenced by Trump’s broad support across white demographics and his lack of support among non-white groups of comparable socio-economic status, Coates suggests that the legacy of white supremacy is at play in this election.

While I cannot do this epilogue—or any of this text—justice with my summarizing, I wanted to end my post by acknowledging how much Coates writing has revealed to me unspoken mechanisms operating underneath American culture and political thought. In his earnestness Coates does not sugar-coat his essays with clear paths to a brighter future, and admits that he does not have answers or promises to make with a concerned reader. But in this space he has left more or less empty, a reader is better equipped to imagine, discuss, and act towards a more humane world.