Some Last Words On The First Black President
January 20, 20173:52 AM ET
GENE DEMBY
... It wasn't that long ago that the idea of a black man in the White House was a side detail in a movie about the apocalypse ... But there he was on Wednesday, a dude from the South Side of Chicago, .. trying one last time to calm the nerves of a jittery, divided nation ...
"We're going to have a woman president," Obama said at the presser. "We're going to have a Latino president. And we'll have a Jewish president, a Hindu president. You know, who knows who we're going to have? I suspect we'll have a whole bunch of mixed up presidents at some point that nobody really knows what to call them" ...
Obama's faith in the inevitability of more American presidents of color was a good example of what Tressie McMillan Cottom might have called Obama's misplaced faith in white folks. Cottom, a sociologist at Virginia Commonwealth University and one our podcast guests, underlined this paradox for us: Obama's optimism about the country's capacity to overcome its racial divisions — a byproduct of his remarkable personal story — made it possible for him to be elected. But, she said, it also led him to underestimate the vehemence of the opposition to his administration, which was punctuated by U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson's (R-S.C.) 2009 outburst at a joint session of Congress ...
What did Wilson's rude disrespect have to do with race? The architects and cheerleaders of the Republican party's policies are, with a few exceptions, white people. The voters they turn out in midterm and presidential elections are, with a few exceptions, white people. Their opposition to the president and to Democrats didn't need to be racist in order to be racialized. Those demographic facts were true long before Obama, but his presidency and the monochromatic opposition party arrayed in lockstep against him certainly seemed to cast those dynamics into sharper relief. There was no way to unsee it ...
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/01/20/510676874/obamas-racial-legacy-some-last-words-on-the-first-black-president
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