Hard to Say Goodbye
I had eight years to prepare for this moment. And somehow, eight years didn’t seem quite long enough.
I had eight years to prepare for this moment.
I’m trying to figure out how the time flew by so quickly. How, in March of 2007, I saw you speak in Austin, while I was still a small-time UT student, at Auditorium Shores. Far enough away in the crowd to not be able to reach out to you and shake your hand, but not so far enough that I couldn’t get decent pictures of you at the podium with my digital camera.
How, the following year, I made my way to the basement of the Dobie Center, where Michelle Obama would be holding a rally to essentially stump for you during your presidential campaign. Kerry Washington had allegedly stopped by a day before, while I’d been in class. I watched as Michelle told us there was a long fight ahead, that we’d have to “have Barack’s back” in the months ahead. I watched this beautiful Black woman proudly brag on her husband and also make every single one of us in that room, from students to teachers to parents to every day workers who’d stopped by, feel like we were important.
How, in the fall of 2008, myself and fellow members of Student African American Brotherhood had “marched” from the Malcolm X Lounge on the UT campus to the Jester East dormitory, where a student lounge in the back had been converted to a voting site. Four years prior, I’d stepped into a voting booth for the first time. This year felt a little more special. It felt a little more different.
That night in November. When so many of the Black student community had packed themselves into the Jester Auditorium. As the election results were broadcast via a laptop and projected onto two screens on either side of the room. It wasn’t JUST Black folks there, by any means. That was the effect you had on us all — you appealed to anyone who would listen, regardless of background or skin color. People saw the worst in you, often, but you always sought out the best in them. This was a trait that would define your entire tenure as President, an admirable trait that to some degree may also have made things harder for you.
And then you won. You touted a line of “change you can believe in.” So we believed. You told us to “hope.” So we hoped.
I remember that moment in the auditorium when the results were revealed, when CNN confirmed that you were indeed the 44th President of the United States based on projected electoral votes. I remember the room erupting. I remember the joy. I remember the sighs of relief and the wonderment of it all. I remember the people around me. The hugs. The elation. The celebration. I remember hopping on stage with some of my peers, crying out “Put your fists up!” and many of us raising our fists in pride. I remember Young Jeezy’s “My President is Black” erupting, all of us singing along. I remember calling my mother and saying, “We did it! We did it!”
You won, and it felt like our victory, too.
Some of us expected — perhaps myself as well, to a degree — for you to look out for Black people most of all. Many anticipated this from the so-called “first Black president”: they suspected you’d take things away from them, things they’d so held closely to themselves forever. You had already taken the highest office in the land and broke that barrier, and so they worried you might exact a certain… revenge, if you will, in policy and approach. In retrospect, it’s obvious now. That they were scared of you paled in comparison to WHY they were scared of you. It wasn’t that you were dangerous or any real threat — you merely posed a challenge to assumptions and lines of thought many of them had accepted as unalterable fact.
I had eight years to prepare for this moment. How was it that 96 months didn’t last as long as I thought it might?
I imagine it takes a certain amount of resolve and confidence in self to power through in government with people who don’t like you. And them not liking you is fine, if they at least respect you. But they didn’t respect you.
In your initial term, you might have felt you could make them respect you. You had inherited a mess of an economy and the remains of a war whose focus had been diverted. You took action to restore some faith in that ruined economy. In the months and even years prior to your presidency, it had become damn near staple to mention that you were mixed-race. Now that you were President, the one-drop rule reared its head and everything you did, were the actions of a Black man.
The actions you took to bail out the banks after their excessive lending and poor practice put them in a compromising position… the actions you took to lend money to those left in crisis due to terrible predatory housing loans and with potential foreclosures looming… the actions you took to revive the auto industry in the U.S. and build it back up as many factories filed for bankruptcy… as you are a Black man, it was easy — too easy, in fact — for your actions to be taken as “handouts.” You were critiqued for giving out money to “anyone” who held their hands out. Your methods were reduced to “using taxpayer money” to fund “an extra bedroom for people who can’t afford their mortgage!”
Then there was your aggressive pursuit to go after universal healthcare, a task attempted by many before you (and even achieved in some individual states) but never executed at the national level. Though you strove to press it as a partisan issue, bipartisan attitudes stood in the way. You were adamant about getting it done, extremely early in your term at that. I believed then — and still believe now — that you didn’t quite think you’d make it to two terms, and so you pushed to get things done as a “just in case.” So they couldn’t say you didn’t try to fulfill your campaign promises. And make no mistake: were you successful at getting universal healthcare to make its way through Congress and signed into law, it would be remarkable. Legacy-defining.
You did it. It wasn’t pretty but it was something that got insurance to people who’d previously never been able to afford it. The Affordable Care Act was monumental. The fact that you’d gone ahead and gotten it done in spite of opposition, garnered you many enemies. They rebuked it. They called it “Obamacare,” knowing that because some associated your name with negativity, they’d turn around and see the health insurance marketplace as negative as well. The strategy worked… so well that to this very day, in 2017, many American people STILL don’t know that the ACA and Obamacare are one in the same.
In your first term, you aimed to use the rhetoric and approach you’d applied with the American people — to appeal to similar desires and interests, rather than focus on differences — with your peers in Washington. They took advantage of your kindness. When you came to them earnestly, they asked for more. When you gave, earnestly, they asked for still more. When you gave up on giving, they rebelled and rejected you like spoiled children. You were blamed for giving rise to racial tensions in this country at a greater level than they had been in a while… if only because your very presence and position made them feel uneasy. Who you were and what you stood for, made attitudes and dispositions they’d quietly kept in the comfort of their own homes, bubble up to the surface and appear in public. In the words of your fellow Chicagoan Kanye West, “racism (was) still alive/ they just be concealin’ it” — except when you took office, they no longer felt compelled to conceal it.
Two years into your first term, your party lost the Senate. Up until that point, I had never heard someone go on record as saying their “number one priority” was getting the President out of office. Presidents and their Congresses have disagreed before. This was far from a unique quandary. What made this disagreement different, was the fact that you had TRIED to reach out. You had tried to work “both sides of the aisle.” Your trying didn’t count. And now their priority was to make your life harder.
I keep saying “they.” We were just as likely to critique you.
Having never had a Black man as a President before, you were as much an experiment and test case to us, as you were to them. While it was often touted that you were NOT “The President of Black America,” some of us felt owed for the work we’d done to help you get elected. We did not understand that you operated differently. Not all Blackness is created equal. You are biracial, which doesn’t make you less Black — but as a biracial, light-skinned man, you had some liberty in choosing whether or not you IDENTIFIED as Black. And you did.
We expected you to be a “race man,” but you were not. Not in the way some of us expected you would be. Unlike Huey or Malcolm or Stokely, you wore your Blackness proudly but you were not necessarily Black “out loud.” This is not to delegitimize you — this is to make sense of the fact that you didn’t present or advocate for any policy that explicitly, directly singled out Black people.
Rather, you opted to put Black people in a position to better themselves. You started My Brother’s Keeper to put Black young males — who are disproportionately more likely than their peers to be left behind — in a positive space, amongst similar faces, so they wouldn’t fall prey to the streets or negative things. You advocated for riders in bills that would direct more money towards federal student aid grants, devote money to historically Black colleges and universities, grant aid to farmers (many of whom are Black), and improve tax credits for those with lower, lower-middle, and middle-class incomes. I don’t think we expected reparations from you, but we expected something vast. You paint in broad strokes, not necessarily specific ones, when it comes to Blackness. But perhaps your broad strokes in effect allowed victories we wouldn’t have considered before — like a push for same-sex marriage that was eventually approved by the Supreme Court and which absolutely affects Black folks who identify as LGBT.
Maybe it’s really that we loved what you represented. What we thought you could be. When you were not *exactly* what we expected you to be, we didn’t know how to deal with it. Some of us were proud but unfulfilled.
Others of us felt left behind. You met with advocates of Black Lives Matter. With the emerging young activists and social justice leaders of our time. You did not always agree with their methods, nor did they with yours. You understood their activism — you were, after all, a community organizer once upon a time — even as you felt chagrined that they did not trust the system to work. And you yourself UNDERSTOOD there was an imbalance in the system (how else does one explain your strategic dispatching of the Justice Department and recently granting them the authority to re-open civil rights cases?); but as the head of an institution within that system, you did not choose sides.
Still others of us understood the game that was being played against you — how even the mere mention of race, whether it involved mentioning a young boy who was shot by a neighborhood watchman or disproportionate treatment of some compared to others by law enforcement, was used against you. You had campaigned, after all, on our commonalities. How dare you point out our differences? They hoped you might JUST so they could say you were race-baiting. I hated it for you. You were so much more patient than I… and I consider myself pretty patient.
I had eight years to prepare for this. And somehow I’m still not ready.
Today, someone else will officially take your place. Unlike you, he does not occupy this new office with limited experience — he will occupy it with virtually no experience at all. He is, by all accounts, the polar opposite of you in temperament, in policy, in viewpoint. And the fact that he is your opposite may have greatly contributed as to why people came out in droves, in the states that mattered most, to vote him into executive office.
I don’t know how one goes from the swagger you exude and the standard you have set, to someone with fewer standards and a crude disposition.
I don’t know what the procedure is when you have a First Lady whose brilliance is as much mental and oratorical as it is in her beauty and character (For the record, your wife’s ability to flip her most-known statement in office from being an honest assessment of the changing times in the country, into the Democratic Party’s go-to slogan, is a finesse and redemption story for the ages), and you essentially downgrade from that.
The truth is that for the last eight years, I’ve watched your daughters, literally, grow up into young women. You’re about to send your oldest off to college, and I was in my fourth year of college on the day you were elected. You’re like… extended family. Like a person I’ve never met, yet who I relate to strongly. To some, you’re a Black President who they never thought they’d see in their lifetime; to others who were born during any of the last eight years, you’re a Black man who was their first image of a President in THEIR lifetime. Maybe I’ve deified you — I’ve made you a “god” when you’re only a man. I don’t think that’s true.
I do think you’re a good man. And I suspect history will remember you kindly for it. It’s just sad that your goodness was overlooked by sheer hatred. Was there more you could have done? Absolutely. But for the most that you were able to do while we had you, I am grateful. You made the impossible, attainable.
This wasn’t supposed to read like a eulogy, but this is the end of an era. You brought ‘The Birth of the Cool’ to the Presidency. And this country is about to follow the cool, with a complete fool. There might be another president of African descent in my lifetime. But there will never be another Barack Obama.
