I wrote the post below in 2022, after reading Pres. Obama’s book “A Promised Land“ at the prodding of a family member. There is one point he made that really hit home for me: “Being the first means you’re going to let people down.” I’ve lived this since 2019, as folks love to say to me, “As a Black politician, you have to do more to help Blacks” or, my favorite, “What are you, as a Black city councilman, doing to fight racism in Southlake?” My answers:
“I was elected to represent ALL of Southlake; that’s what I plan to do.”
“If I thought fighting racism in Southlake was worthwhile pursuit, I’d simply move. I did my time fighting racism as a youth growing up in Mississippi. Instead of fighting anything or anyone, I’m focused on helping people be the best they can be.”
I’m riding in a cab, headed to dinner with a group of clients in downtown Denver, Colo. The year is 2008 and it’s late August. The cab driver, who identified himself as being an immigrant from Sri Lanka, strikes up a conversation by looking in the rear-view mirror and saying to me, “Obama! He’s going to win, yeah?” I shot back with “I hope not,” only to see his brow furrow and his expression change from happiness to bewilderment
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“Well, you obviously make more than $250,000 a year,” he said, echoing a well-worn talking point from the 2008 Obama campaign, which promised to effectively increase the marginal tax rate for those making more than $250,000 annually.
We bantered a bit about the tax proposal, before I added, “I would never vote for a Democrat, in large part because their views on taxes, race, social programs, and business regulation doesn’t jibe with my vision for the country. But, Obama’s candidacy presidency does represent progress, as it highlights how far this country has come in a little over 40 years.”
The Black America of the 1960s could scarcely have envisioned that in 2008 a bi-racial Hawaii native, whose father was Kenyan, could be elected president of the United States of America with the name Barack Hussein Obama. But on Nov. 2008, that’s just what happened, as 69,498,516 pulled the lever for a one-term Senator from Illinois, giving him the “largest share of the popular vote won by a Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, and making him the first Democrat to win an outright majority of the popular vote since Jimmy Carter in 1976.”
Progress
I don’t remember much about the election, other that realizing, while standing in the line outside the polling station, which was held at my church in Windermere, Fla., and realizing that the 2:1 line for Democrats confirmed my suspicions that McCain/Palin would fall to Obama’s promise of “hope” and “change.”
I’d seen the writing on the wall early that year, as the crowds swelled at each of his rallies, the media coverage changed from “Is he too inexperienced?” to “He’s the front runner.” But, an incident from August 2008 cemented in my mind that Obama would win.
I’m in Key West for a sailfish tournament. I order a beer at the bar of my hotel. An Illinois couple seated next to me introduce themselves, and we start talking about college football, the economy, and then politics. At some point, I make the mistake of tipping my hand to which party I’d be voting for by alluding to being against any candidate who ran on raising the marginal tax rate for the so-called wealthy.
Upon hearing this, the gentlemen—who was White—became apoplectic, saying how it’s only fair that wealthy people pay their fair share and explaining how businesses like his should be required to shoulder more of the load. He then stormed off. His wife apologized, explaining that her husband, who owned a very successful real estate company in Chicago and who personally knew Obama, was obviously supporting him and thinks he’ll be good for the country.
On the last point, I didn’t disagree—at the time, certainly optically, for Black America.
Take race off the table
For months leading up to the election, I’d said that despite his politics and my misgivings about an Obama presidency, there was value in the country electing its first Black (though he was half-black, his mother insisted on raising him as a Black, whatever that means) president. I imagined older Blacks, who’d grown up in the Jim Crow South like my parents, being awash in pride at seeing a Black man inaugurated as president of the United States of America just 44 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Additionally, for poor minorities, young and old, it was easy to envision their horizons appearing a little brighter as, maybe, their faith in the promise of America was strengthened or even restored.
Candidly—and I was not shy about saying this—even I conceded that an Obama presidency would accomplish something I had long dreamed of: Taking race off the table as the primary impediment to black progress. Let me be emphatic: I am not saying that racism in the U.S. has been extinguished. It has not been. Nor will it ever be. But, even in 2008, we had to be willing to admit that the primary ailment(s)—crime, fatherlessness, high rates of incarceration, failing schools—afflicting Black America was not racism, in and of itself.
Even Randall Kennedy, the Harvard University professor and proponent of reparations for the descendants of slaves, admits that while racism remains an issue for Black America, “It’s just one of the issues.”
(Note: That is, these ailments might all have slavery and racism as their antecedents, but none of these issues remains a stronghold solely, or even primarily, because of racism.)
A historic election
Election day was largely a blur, other than remembering that our nanny gave us an Obama plaque like the one below, and we placed in on our mantle.
“I can’t believe Ronell hasn’t accidentally dropped it on the floor,” joked my sister when she visited our home in Florida in 2008.
The plaque was in no real danger: I was mindful that my young daughters would see it each day, which, I hope served as a reminder of the progress our country had made in the preceding decades. (Full disclosure: I felt at the time, and still do to this day, that it would have been best for the first Black president to be conservative, because that person needed to deliver some tough medicine that the masses needed to hear, and no Democrat would get elected by telling Black people what they needed to hear.)
Opportunity missed
For most of the run up to Obama’s election and, then, later, during his presidency, I wasn’t paying close attention to politics. I had a young family, was traveling a good deal, and when I had free time it was spent fishing or at a beach with my wife and daughters. I was hopeful early on, however, that he could be the voice I thought could help move the Black community forward.
In 2008, for example, in Cincinnati, he urged blacks to take more responsibility for improving their own lives. That same year, he chided black parents for feeding their children “cold Popeyes” and delivered a dash of cold water to absent Black fathers.
“Too many fathers are M.I.A, too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes,” Obama said to a crowd in Chicago. “They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”
In the years that followed, his message became more Progessive boilerplate, though he did call out protestors in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, MD., for violence against police during riots in both cities in 2014 and 2015, respectively.
Reaching the nadir
The lowest point of the Obama presidency, in my mind, was when he said of Trayvon Martin—the Sanford, Fla., youth killed by neighbor named George Zimmerman in 2012, in what was viewed as a racially motivated shooting—”That could have been my son.” Those six words, uttered by the president of the United States before all of the information had been gathered, was seen by a wide swath of the nation as racial in nature.
We lived less than 45 minutes away from Sanford, in Windermere, Fla., at the times; I vividly remember thinking, “He just made it racial.” There have been many books written detailing how those six words lead to a shift in how the president was seen by White America. He dropped the ball.
“Obama had an opportunity to lead the country, [but at that moment] the country needed a Black conservative. Why bother electing a black man to the highest office in the land if, when he gets there, he’s going to perform the same shtick that any hustling political operative who claims to represent Black people would perform.” —Brown University economist Glenn Loury.
I don’t remember much else about his second term. By that point, I was convinced that whatever good I’d hoped he’d achieve would never come to fruition.