We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

Coates argues in this essay that Barack Obama faces a predicament: He is a Black president in a country that barely accepts the notion that a Black man could be president. White conservatives harbor a suspicion that at any moment, Obama’s talk about American ideals transcending America’s racist history will slip, and his supposed hatred of White people will be revealed by his actions.

For most conservatives, that moment for which they had been waiting came with Obama’s relatively mild observation that Trayvon Martin, a Black teen George Zimmerman tracked and killed in 2012, could have been his son. The sympathetic, “transpartisan” response to the killing—outrage and sadness that an unarmed young man could be killed with impunity—transformed suddenly to conservative outrage about the supposed racism of Obama’s response. Obama was unable to respond effectively to the shift.

For most of America’s history, Black people could only rely upon protest to confront White supremacy. Obama is the president, a position that gives him control over substantial federal powers, so he should have other options. He is hampered, however, by his frequent choice to avoid or minimize plain talk about White supremacy in America. Despite Obama’s reluctance to name White supremacy and racism, these forces explain many of the difficulties Obama faces as a political figure.

The presidency is the ultimate symbol of White privilege in a country in which only White people could claim to be citizens for most of its history. Obama and his family, potent symbols of Black excellence, are threats to White supremacy precisely because they disrupt the White supremacist narrative that Black people deserve to be second-class citizens because they are inherently inferior. Furthermore, even White people who claim to be allies are deeply uncomfortable with naming the role of White privilege in their own lives.

White conservative reactions to Obama’s anodyne comments on Trayvon Martin show the persistence of “racial animus” among White people. This animus is present even among White Democrats, who were much more comfortable voting for Bill Clinton than Obama. Racial animus is there when critics accuse Obama of harboring secret hatred of White people when Obama discusses issues that have nothing to do with race. Birtherism, the conspiracy theory that Obama is not American and is thus not a legitimate president, is a pure expression of the impact of racial animus on the Obama presidency.

Coates is sympathetic to the untenable position in which Obama finds himself as a result of this racial animus. Obama has been forced to live out that old saw that a Black person must be twice as good as a White person to gain half as much success. The man must be nearly perfect to survive politically, and this was true even before he became president. Obama’s campaign for the presidency had a near-death experience when video of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, calling for God to damn America for its racial crimes and labeling 9-11 as chickens coming home to roost went viral in 2008.

The video of Wright’s denunciation of America's White supremacy undercut the “convenient narrative” that Black people would suffer and wait patiently for White people to deliver on the promise of democracy—that they would never express a fully justified Black rage for the wrongs of white America. The attacks on Obama for words another person said were outrageous, but the politically adept Obama responded with one of his few candid speeches on race. In the “More Perfect Union” speech in Philadelphia, Obama called for more candor about race.

Despite this message, the political lesson Obama took from this episode during his run for the presidency was to avoid such candor from then on. His silence on issues that touch explicitly on race means that Obama has failed to lead on issues of real import to Black Americans, including mass incarceration. This self-imposed silence on important issues has extended to any issues that critics might connect to Obama’s supposed Black anger.

The firing of Shirley Sherrod, a US Department of Agriculture Obama appointee, is a prime example of how Obama handles racially sensitive issues these days. When Ms. Sherrod told a story about how her work in the farm community allowed her to come to terms with and overcome her anger at White people, critics miscast her statements as racism. Coates characterizes Obama’s reaction—firing her—as an act of cowardice that was the natural consequence of his silence on racial issues. The lack of moral courage extends to other actions, such as Obama’s use of drone warfare behind the veil of national security. There is something unseemly about watching a Black president rely upon this national security rationale because the government used this same rationale to justify spying on civil rights activists in the 1960s.

Coates has a deep distrust of America’s government, rooted in the actions of the government in surveilling civil rights activists but also in the police killing of Coates’s close friend Prince Jones in 2000. Like Wright, Coates saw 9-11 as just deserts for the police officers who died in the attack. Coates’s bitterness and anger at the police and state power softened somewhat with the election of Obama, but the episode with Trayvon Martin is proof that racial animus and fear of Black anger are here to stay.

In such a country, Obama will always be forced to calm White people’s racial animus and avoid showing any hint of his own anger. Despite Obama’s failure in this regard, Coates argues that Obama is still an important symbol of America’s attempts at racial integration. Like Shirley Sherrod, a woman much wronged by Obama, Coates cannot help but feel a little protective of Obama.