emember the glory of Election Night 2008, and the months leading up to it? African Americans were buoyed by a greater sense of possibility than perhaps at any other time in our history with the candidacy and election of Barack Obama.
“Yes, we can!”
“Change WE can believe!”
Now flash-forward to present day, when news and social media are saturated with endless reports of Black people being gunned down by police officers across the nation. Unemployment for African Americans remains above 10 percent, and for the past six years, the chasm grows ever-wider between rich and poor, and a middle-class that has all but disappeared. The complicity and responsibility extends beyond President Obama, but he surely has some explaining to do when it comes to the state of Black America.
Ten years ago, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Kanye West startled everyone during the Concert for Hurricane Relief when he said on live TV that “George [W.] Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” As I reflect on Obama’s presidency, as it relates to Black America, I hear those words echoing in my head. Only now I find myself saying: “Barack Obama doesn’t care about Black people.”
Don’t get it twisted: I am not challenging or attacking our president’s blackness. I am not recycling the tired narratives of his bi-raciality or his transnational childhood. Nor is this about his experience at predominantly White institutions, his class sensibilities, or his identity. This is not about Barack Obama the man and whether he’s “Black enough,” “talks White,” or “acts White.”
And it ain’t even personal. This is not about disparaging his brilliance, his stellar achievements, or his overall leadership.
I also recognize that the GOP, Faux News, and Congress—the Legions of Doom—have been the ultimate defense against any sort of racial progress for more than six years. Sadly, within the real and comic worlds, there is little place for a Black superhero.
But, this is about a specific aspect of Obama’s leadership and the potential power he wields. It is about the institutions that he governs. It is about what Valerie Jarrett described to Politico as his policies on race relations being, at best, “a work in progress.” After six years in the White House, we should expect more than a work in progress.
