The Other Obama Legacy

On Tuesday, I spoke to a room full of beaming high school and middle school boys — about 150, a vast majority of whom were black — at the St. Petersburg College Allstate Center in St. Petersburg, Fla.

The talk was sponsored by the Cross and Anvil Human Services Center as part of the heritage lecture series that seeks to present historical, political and educational conversations that honor the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The group targets “at-risk” boys in the community.

I didn’t sugarcoat things for these boys. I gave them the unvarnished truth, the same way I would for my own boys. For me, it is very important to help children place themselves historically, even when that history is painful, because within that truth they can anchor themselves and from it they can aim themselves.

When my speech was over, we had a question and answer period, and President Obama came up.

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I told the boys that whatever else the president does or doesn’t do, his impact on young people of color will most likely be incalculable. As I told them: For many young people like you and like my own children, the first president they consciously registered was Barack Obama, a black man.

Photo

President Obama bends over so the son of a White House staff member can touch his hair during a visit to the Oval Office. Credit Pete Souza/The White House
That afternoon, I flew back to New York, and that night I watched the president give his last State of the Union address.

The whole time I watched, the image of those boys was in my mind — smart, eager, hopeful. I thought about my 21-year-old son in the next room, still on winter break from college, who voted in his first presidential election in 2012.

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I thought of some of the amazing pictures that the White House has released of the president meeting with black folks in the Oval Office, like 5-year-old Jacob Philadelphia touching the president’s hair because, as he put it, “I want to know if my hair is just like yours.” I thought of all the boys being reached by the president’s “My Brother’s Keeper” program.

These things register in a way that should never be underestimated. As a child, I couldn’t name many politicians, but I knew that P.B.S. Pinchback had been the first and only black governor of Louisiana, my home state; that Thurgood Marshall was a sitting Supreme Court Justice; and that Ed Bradley was one of the most respected journalists on television.

Obama is the first black president — and may well be the last, who knows — and that alone has a historical weight and impact on this generation that will play out for generations to come.


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He has not been a perfect president. He has not been as vocal on issues facing the black community as some would have liked (for instance, I thought that he could have more explicitly addressed the Black Lives Matter movement in Tuesday’s speech). Nor has the plight of black America been dramatically altered during his two terms — it will take more than two terms of one president to undo hundreds of years of harm.

But he has simply, miraculously, won the position (twice!) and successfully negotiated the space — so well, in fact, that race is tangential to his record. He has opened yet another door of possibility, erased yet another myth of inadequacy, expanded yet another plane on which children can dream.

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Indeed, as The New York Times reported in 2009:

“Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.”

As The Times explained:

“The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome anxieties about racial stereotypes that had been shown, in earlier research, to lower the test-taking proficiency of African-Americans, the researchers conclude in a report summarizing their results.”

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RECENT COMMENTS

minh z 13 hours ago
Obama has been a huge disappointment to many, and not because of his skin color. He had many chances to make better choices and surround...
Paris Artist 13 hours ago
Beautiful article about a graceful leader. He, as president of the US, will be missed by many all over the world!
Mike j 13 hours ago
I don't think he will be the last president of color. This is just the begining, and the begining is good.
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It has become something of a punditry parlor game, particularly as the Obama presidency winds down, to try to gauge how history will judge him.

A 2014 Brookings Institution survey of 162 members of the American Political Science Association’s Presidents & Executive Politics section ranked Obama as the 18th greatest.

But Brookings points out:

“Beneath the surface of the aggregate figures lurks evidence of significant ambivalence. For example, those who view Obama as one of the worst American presidents outnumber those who view him as one of the best by nearly a 3-1 margin. Similarly, nearly twice as many respondents view Obama as overrated than do those who consider him underrated. One area where there is significant expert consensus about the president, however, concerns how polarizing he is viewed as being — only George W. Bush was viewed as more a more polarizing president.”

For comparison, the institute provided other rankings:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/op...ht-region&_r=0