Episode 27: Barack Obama
Today’s episode is all about Barack Hussein Obama, the 44th president of the United States. Also, the first in more than two centuries who didn’t identify as white. Obama’s tenure remains fresh, yet hard to fully evaluate given the tumult that followed in his wake—and to some minds, the tumult that arose in direct response to his presidency. If we were taping this podcast a decade ago, in 2010 or 2011 during Obama’s first term, we might well have talked about his presidency as a culmination, a victory in the long march of progress towards a more equitable and free American society that has with every generation expanded the bounds of liberty and citizenship. Imagine what Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, or even Ronald Reagan would say to know that a black man had become president. The Whig interpretation of American history is right, we’d have said. Ours is a story of progress.
Well, it isn’t 2011. It’s 2021, and as we’ve been discussing all season, that feel-good narrative of struggle leading to inevitable progress doesn’t quite jive with America’s actual history. Or, its present.
Here’s your primer on Obama. In some ways he’s the least surprising president of all. No, he wasn’t born to wealth and privilege, but like Andrew Jackson, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, he was born to a deeply loving mother, who guided her precocious son to heights few could have predicted from his humble birth. You might say, Obama’s narrative isn’t that unusual at all. If I told you that the United States elected President a man—yes, a man—educated in the Ivy League and then editor of the Harvard Law Review, who rose from his state assembly to the United States Senate and then to the Oval Office, well you wouldn’t be surprised in the least. Like Clinton and Nixon and so many others, Obama’s election was a triumph of the meritocracy.
Of course, he was different than the rest. He was black. Technically mixed race, with a Kenyan father and a Kansan mother, young Barry—as he called himself throughout his youth—wrestled with his identity through much of his formative years. Raised in Hawaii and also overseas, he ultimately identified as black, indeed as genuinely African-American, but that wasn’t always how he was seen. Even deep into his second term, only a quarter of Americans polled considered him black. Almost as many considered him white. The majority called it as they saw it, and said he was mixed.
Which is precisely the opaque line on race Obama always tread. He could operate in African-American circles, and spent time after law school as a political organization in predominantly black neighborhoods in Chicago. But he just as easily moved in white circles as well, comfortable with small-town Midwesterners like his grandparents, and with coastal elites with whom he’d gone to school. Perhaps it was his tone. Eloquent in the extreme, arguably one of the best pure writers we’ve ever had as president, his calm tones seemed with every measured word designed to diffuse white anxiety over his race. Those same tones, it should be noted, also made some in the black community question his commitment to them, his very legitimacy as a black man. As we saw in today’s interviews, that is a tension that exists within historical accountings of his presidency as well.
Obama came to office in 2009, frankly, at an awful moment in American history. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, and the economy had tanked. It became known as the Great Recession, with foreclosures on housing and unemployment on the rise, and the roster of huge banks dwindle. Things didn’t feel as desperate as in 1933 when FDR took office. But the problems appeared so huge and arguably insolvable that it was worth asking, was it 1930? The satirical magazine, the Onion, perhaps captured the mood of his election, and its historic nature, with the following headline: “America gives worst job in country to black man.”
He oversaw a comeback, albeit a slow one. By the time he’d left office the country had enjoyed more consecutive months of economic growth than ever before, yet also saw near record levels of poverty, income inequality, and ultimately, distrust in the basic promise that the American dream was attainable for all. The percentage of Americans not born in the country grew to record levels as well, and the proportion of white voters within the electorate shrank to its lowest level in history. It made for a combustible mix. Obama’s successor rode this anxiety to the White House, leaving future historians to invariably wrestle with an unanswerable question: was Donald Trump’s election a direct backlash against the country having elected its first black president?
As the old historian saying goes, ‘too soon to tell.’ But not too soon to talk about this erudite president some considered pathbreaking, and others deemed far too passive, especially when the potentially divisive politics of race arose.
Thankfully we have great guests to help guide us through this maze. We first spoke to Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who teaches at Princeton University, writes for The New Yorker, and authored a truly pathbreaking book, a finalist for the Pulitzer prize in fact, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership.
We then spoke with Alison Landsberg, who directs the Center for Humanities Research at George Mason University, where she works on the fascinating, and sometimes confusing, question of not necessary what happened in the past, but how we remember it.
These were compelling discussions indeed, which highlighted two themes in particular:
First, that perhaps no one was fully happy with Barack Obama’s presidency, if for not other reason than the entirely unreasonable hope and dreams it seemed to represent when he first took office.
Second, that race clearly helped Obama politically, but perhaps hindered him even more.
Guests:
Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States.
She is author Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press. Race for Profit was a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020.
Her earlier book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018.
Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, among others. She is a former Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times.
In 2016, she was named one of the hundred most influential African Americans in the United States by The Root. In 2018 Essence Magazine named her among the top one hundred “change makers” in the county. She has been appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians by the Organization of American Historians.
Taylor is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.
Follow Dr. Taylor on Twitter.
Alison Landsberg is the inaugural Director of the Center for Humanities Research at George Mason University and an internationally recognized scholar in the field of memory studies. Her book, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (Columbia UP, 2004) considers the way in which individuals are increasingly able to take on memories of events they did not live through.
Her book entitled, Engaging the Past, explores popular modes of engagement with the past in contemporary mediated society, and the ramifications of those modes of engagement for the projects of history and politics. Considering a wide range of history texts—historical fiction films, TV historical dramas, Reality History TV, Immersive History Museum websites, among others—this book engages with the dynamics of the experiential to explain both what it makes possible for people and what it obscures or refuses. Engaging the Past suggests that these popular engagements pose some fundamental challenges for our sense of what constitutes history in the 21st century, but also that academic historians need to take more seriously the kind of work popular media can do in the production of historical knowledge.
She is interested in the potential of such memories to produce empathy and to become the grounds for progressive politics. Professor Landsberg has been invited to speak at conferences in the Norway, the UK, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and France. In 2007, the journal Rethinking History published a forum on her book. Professor Landsberg divides her teaching between the History and Art History Department, where she serves as Associate Chair, and the Cultural Studies PhD program, where she served as Acting Director for the academic year 2010-11.
Follow Dr. Landsberg on Twitter.
Join us LIVE for the season 1 finale of “The Past, the Promise, the Presidency: Race & the American Legacy,” the CPH’s inaugural podcast season. If you’ve been with us from the start, or for any period of time since then, we’re sure you’ve got questions! And comments. Critiques and thoughts.
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