The Obama Nation

It is the end of the Obama presidency. The two-term stint in office of our 44th president means that there are children in my country old enough to write grammar school history essays who have known only a Black president. This, when juxtaposed against the political offerings of the world at large, appears a less-significant feat.

I fondly remember the swell season—the buzz, glitz and hopefulness that surrounded the president’s early days.

I remember the days before he was president: the pictures of Senator Obama rising from the ocean in his black swim trunks like a corporeal god. “I would listen to anything that man said to me,” I joked with another writer at the time, not yet comprehending how true that would be for the whole country, how much this visage of Obama ascending expressed how so much of the world would come to think of him–charming, aspirational, enigmatic and shockingly real.

On the day Obama got elected, it was the “real” part that most impressed me. In so much of the world on that day, the streets felt enlivened with confetti, even when they weren’t. My friend Iggy was in Paris. He reported back to me tales of Arab and African children in the street, improvising the rules to a brand-new game—le plus Obama—I Am Most Like Him.

US President Barack Obama speaks about race in the context of the not guilty ruling of George Zimmerman in the killing of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin in February 2012, as he appears at the start of the Daily Press Briefing in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, DC, July 19, 2013. Photo: ANP/AFP. Saul Loeb

When we three intrepid Black employees arrived at the office that day, a few white co-workers clapped. (That was too much, I felt.) During lunch, my Haitian-born colleague and I watched satirical YouTube videos about African-American communal movements to make “president” replace the “n-word” in the common vernacular. Although posed as a parody, the sentiment was true when it came to the blocks of our home communities—Harlem and Jamaica, Queens—where Black people now levitated a little in their skins and meant new things when they smiled or nodded to acknowledge each other.

When President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, some people protested, claiming his term in office was too nascent to bestow this prize of equanimity upon him with no demonstrated leadership to back it. I did, and still, disagree. What we saw in the face—in the face—of President Obama was the world we imagined. Change. The opportunity to believe we were better than we knew. This is what I mean when I say that there are children in my country, old enough to understand and communicate the rules to kick-ball, who have only ever lived in the shadow of a Black American President.

What went before

George Bush Sr. became president when I was eight years old. President Bush was stately, yes, but every bit the rich, white hegemony my elementary school touted as Founding Fathers’ legacy. When President Bill Clinton took office, my fifth-grade teacher, a poor, recently divorced single mother from the South, breathed an audible sigh of relief. If the Clintons of the early nineties ushered into America a spirit of palpable advancement, the Obamas ushered in the Holy Ghost. The excitement was not just about what Barack Obama represented to America; it was about what Obama meant for the international promise of people of colour, non-traditional families and immigrants. In what before was a singularity, the Obamas brought a deluge, ushering in a new era of youth, celebrity and diversity. The hopefulness present in the Nobel committee’s prize selection was echoed by much of the world.

US President Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton, Photo: Flickr/Roger H. Goun.

“When President Bill Clinton took office, my fifth-grade teacher, a poor, recently-divorced single mother from the South, breathed an audible sigh of relief. If the Clintons of the early nineties ushered into America a spirit of palpable advancement, the Obamas ushered in the Holy Ghost.”

Perhaps it is my own naiveté, but I do not believe anyone looking at the early years of the Obama legacy was prepared for the carnage to come. America was too busy fashioning itself in the likeness of its new president to notice the restlessness of its fraught past, clawing its way persistently toward the mainstream. Months into Obama’s first presidential term, sitting in on the strategy meeting for an arts and culture magazine I interned for, this manifested itself in the staff deciding to pull an article on Obama’s campaign volunteers because the collection of young citizens they had amassed were ‘not pretty enough’. Months into his second term, George Zimmerman shot down Trayvon Martin.

“Perhaps it is my own naiveté, but I do not believe anyone looking at the early years of the Obama legacy was prepared for the carnage to come.”

Although the connection is growing more apparent, I have difficulty explaining to those who are not Black Americans the parallel between the election of our first Black president and the number of Black citizens we have watched being snuffed out in our country’s streets. Much like when France delivered to America the gift of the Statue of Liberty in support of slavery’s abolition, President Barack Obama was a symbol to the world of our progression forward. Much like the Statue of Liberty, America soon recognised its discomfort—making such strides from its white supremacist past—and made every effort to course-correct.

A handout photo released by the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office on 11 November 2013 showing George Zimmerman in a booking photo after being arrested in connection with a ‘domestic disturbance’ at a home in Apopka, Florida, USA, 18 November 2013 Photo: ANPEPA/Seminole County Sheriff’s Office

In the fervor of the moment that was his election, few people took the time to consider the scope of his politics, the ways in which his visage (much like that of the Statue of Liberty’s) would be altered to fit the national climate. Having, at last, a Black man as Leader of the Free World, it seemed unfathomable for many that the President’s presence would create anything but a tenacious rebuttal of the racism that the American saga had rested on before—or at least a notable improvement. But by Obama’s second term it became clear to his Black constituency that much of what was happening with White House ethics was business as usual. Instead of overt racial reform, President Obama’s presidency was benchmarked by a government bailout of Wall Street, the capture and summary execution of Osama Bin Laden and universal healthcare. A political group known as the Tea Party escalated in support, thinly veiling their message of hate-fueled prejudice with the idea of preserving “conservative” Republican ideology.

In the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder

During the first eight months of Obama’s second term, those grueling months that followed Trayvon Martin’s murder, Black Americans waited for their President to do something. The President’s response came by way of two characteristically moving but measured press briefings. In the first, a month after Martin’s death, the President stated, “You know, if I had a son, he would look like Trayvon,” a statement that read as a very watered-down denouncement to American’s Black constituency. This was not the outright condemnation many Americans were looking for. Like the image of Lincoln, on which he claimed to model his presidential ethos, Obama attempted to remain shrewd, detached and representative of America in its entirety. However, in the days following George Zimmerman’s acquittal, Obama addressed the nation, stating, ‘Trayvon Martin looked like me,’ his face distressed, his dialogue significantly torn between what he felt he could say and still keep together a country and the words that he knew he should say.

(L-R) Kadiatou Diallo, mother of Amadou Diallo; Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin; Samaira Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice; Lesley McSpadden, the mother of Michael Brown Jr; Esaw Garner, the widow of Eric Garner; and Rev. Al Sharpton address the “Justice For All” march and rally in the nation’s capital December 13, 2014 in Washington, DC. Organized by Sharpton’s National Action Network Photo: ANPGetty Images/AFP

I cannot imagine what the 44th presidency has looked like to Obama. I imagine him as a monument looking out from Lincoln’s perch on the National Mall, staring into a recollection of the vast crowd that stood there on the day of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech, stretching clear to the Washington Monument. As Black people in America, we are always staring into the hopeful void of the past, trying to achieve a less redundant future.

Nearly 1,500 people take part in a ‘March Against Gun Violence’ in Orlando, Florida, USA, 17 July 2013, to honor Trayvon Martin days after George Zimmerman was found not guilty in the shooting death the South Florida teen. Zimmerman, a former volunteer neighborhood watch captain, was found not guilty of second-degree murder in the 26 February 2012 shooting death of 17 year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. Photo: ANP/EPA/Scott A. Miller

When Obama took office, America loudly proclaimed itself at the apex of a post-racial society. As the Obama years come to an end—and in addition to a host of racial aggressions issued against himself and his family—the President has had to address the wanton police shooting of more Black citizens than any president in history. The Civil Rights era, defined by the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmet Till has been exchanged for the Black Lives Matter movement, the documented deaths of hundreds of men, women and children whose names we lose count of in their litany. Who could have imagined the death toll that accompanied the first Black president’s empowerment?

Representing the whole of America

English writer Zadie Smith recently described President Barack Obama as “multi-voiced,” a person who tried to represent America in its entirety; even in his flaws, we found a person who could represent the best in what America wanted to see in itself. With Barack Obama we did not just elect our first Black president, we elected our first African American president—the son of a Kenyan-born Muslim and a Caucasian Midwesterner; raised by his white grandparents—a story, at its essence, more indelibly linked to our country’s racial past than any other part of the Black diaspora. He grew up in Hawaii—a state most Americans still think of as a foreign country. He married Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, the dopest lawyer Chicago ever produced. In the ways that our children are growing up in a world of history and present, nuance and multiplicity, Obama already did.

“Even in his flaws, we found a person who could represent the best of what America wanted to see in itself.”

As much as I may have grown frustrated with Obama during his years in office, I am leery of returning to a world without his benevolent face in the White House. Just his visage brought peace to my mind —the notion that America was obligated to live with a Black man at the helm; to see a Black family remain composed and morally incorruptible under the unrelenting eye of intense scrutiny. For once, America had to see Black people just I have seen so many of the people I love. Yes, Barack Obama was a President, and he carried on the affairs of government in the way of so many before, but through him, a nation indeed did change.