by Keith Boykin
Is it possible to imagine a scenario in which President Obama, or any Black president, could justify his support for a shift in American foreign policy by citing America’s history of crimes? This is exactly what Trump was allowed to do in his first month of office, and yet white America never questioned his patriotism for saying so. On the other hand, is it possible that a Black president could even be elected to the presidency if the public knew that the candidate was supported by the aid of a foreign government? Or that he or she openly encouraged that government to interfere in the election by hacking emails from an opponent’s campaign? Is it in any way conceivable that a Black candidate with that baggage could be elected president of the United States?
The implicit loyalty oath that the Obamas were forced to affirm suggested that many white Americans did not believe that a Black president could represent the interests of the entire country without seeking revenge against the white majority. This remained true even as white candidates were free to run political campaigns that represented the interests primarily of white Americans while largely ignoring the concerns of minorities.
Barack Obama was required to prove himself in a way that his predecessors and his immediate successor did not. Any one of the many major controversies that plagued the Trump campaign would have ended Obama’s campaign. Obama had to be squeaky clean to bear the burden of representation for all Black people. If he had entered his presidential campaign, as Trump did, with no prior political experience, no one would have taken him seriously. If he had a history of six bankruptcies, five draft deferments, and a $25 million fraud settlement on his record, he would never have won a single primary. If Obama had five children from three different women, he would have been denounced by evangelicals. And imagine what white America would have said if he had married an immigrant who had appeared nude on the cover of a magazine.
Barack Obama could not have spent five and a half years lying about a white president’s birth certificate. He could not have paid hush money to a Playboy Playmate or an adult-film star to keep them from speaking about his adulterous affairs. He could not have had a lawyer, campaign chairman, and a national security adviser who were convicted of federal crimes, and he would have lost support from his own party if he tried to pardon them. The truth about Obama and Trump is that Trump turned out to be all the things that white Americans feared that the Black president would be—lazy, vulgar, loud, gaudy, unprofessional, incompetent, immoral, and corrupt. These were the traits that racist white people consistently derided in Black Americans but boldly defended in Donald Trump.
For many white Americans, it did not matter that Obama was president of the United States. He was still a Black man in a white-dominated society, and they expected him to know his place. In fact, his very presence in the White House threatened centuries-old rules of white supremacy and would inspire some racists to go to great lengths to turn back the clock in their race against time. The reaction to Obama made this clear to those who chose to pay attention. Racism was not just an old problem of the past. It was a looming new crisis for the foreseeable future.
From the very beginning of his presidency, Obama would face fierce resistance and unprecedented disrespect, and any attempt he made to initiate civil discourse about race was met with stiff opposition from conservatives who accused him of being hostile to the interests of white people. When a white police officer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, arrested Black Harvard professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. for breaking into his own home in July 2009, Republicans questioned Obama’s commitment to law enforcement just because he said the police “acted stupidly.” The criticism was so severe that the president was reduced to hosting a “beer summit” with Sergeant James Crowley and Professor Gates on the South Lawn of the White House to make peace. Yet in 2020, when President Trump tweeted an angry complaint about “29 gun toting FBI Agents” raiding the home of his convicted associate Roger Stone, Republicans didn’t say a word.
Two months after the beer summit, President Obama faced another unprecedented insult. It happened in the middle of Obama’s health care speech to a joint session of Congress, when South Carolina Republican Representative Joe Wilson yelled, “You lie!” It was a shocking breach of decorum. Yet, when President Trump actually did lie to Congress in his 2020 State of the Union speech that he had protected patients with preexisting conditions, no one in the Republican caucus bothered to correct him.
Although it is difficult to discern how much of the opposition Obama faced was based on race instead of politics, he did encounter a new level of disrespect in office. In an October 2010 interview in National Journal, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell declared that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” On the surface, this was not a terribly controversial remark. At some level, every legislative opposition leader wants to defeat the incumbent president in office. What’s different is that this type of political hostility is rarely communicated publicly as a party’s top priority. Typically, leaders couch their language in policy terms that disguise their political motivations. We want to stimulate the economy with tax cuts and deregulation, Republicans might say, and the only way to accomplish that is to elect a Republican president. McConnell, on the other hand, dispensed with the pleasantries and launched directly into the politics.
With a Black president in office, Republicans found themselves increasingly strident and more overtly political. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich even labeled Obama “the food stamp president.” It was a reminder of just how naïve President Clinton had been in 1996, when he negotiated a compromise with Republicans for a welfare reform bill. “After I sign my name to this bill, welfare will no longer be a political issue,” Clinton claimed that day. He couldn’t have been more wrong. The Republicans’ antiwelfare rhetoric would continue into the 2020s, and the confrontational politics of demonization that Gingrich brought to Congress in the early 1990s became the rule instead of the exception for the party. President Obama watched the GOP’s divisive politics play out through his last days in the White House, with Senator McConnell’s unprecedented refusal even to consider the president’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the US Supreme Court. McConnell had argued that Antonin Scalia’s seat should not be filled because the vacancy occurred just nine months before election day. Four years later, however, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, McConnell allowed Trump to nominate a replacement. The Republican-controlled Senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court just over one week before Election Day. Every argument that McConnell and his party had used to block a vote, or even a hearing, on Obama’s nominee had been a lie.
Of course, double standards are routine in politics, and politicians have been known to hold their adversaries to a higher level of accountability than they do their own allies. The sanctimonious Republicans who rushed to impeach Bill Clinton for hiding a consensual adult affair would spend four years without even investigating Donald Trump for adultery, infidelity, illegal hush money payments, or multiple allegations of rape. And, of course, the Republicans who spent sixteen years complaining about deficits under Presidents Clinton and Obama would conveniently ignore the astounding rise in federal deficits under Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
Yes, double standards have been common in politics, but the double standards in the Obama era seemed not just to enforce political norms but also to reflect racial biases. In fact, it appeared that many of the Obama-era double standards were specifically designed to police the behavior of the new Black family in America’s White House. As Obama had learned from his experiences with Jeremiah Wright and Skip Gates, he would be questioned and criticized whenever he spoke about race in any way that did not alleviate white guilt.
It happened again in March 2012, when the president was asked a question about Trayvon Martin. “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” the president said. “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids,” he
told the reporters in the Rose Garden press conference, and he called on the nation to do some “soul searching” about our laws and the circumstances that led to the case. Despite what was a transparently innocuous remark, conservatives pounced on the president. Right-wing radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh argued that Obama should never have mentioned anything about Trayvon Martin’s race. “It is the least important thing, what the kid looks like,” Limbaugh said. Republican strategist Karl Rove accused Obama of politicizing the tragedy “by injecting himself into it,” even though Obama had merely answered a question at a news conference. “We need a president to bring us together, not rip us apart,” Rove pleaded, in an argument that would be conveniently forgotten when Obama’s successor took office. Republican congressman Steve King of Iowa complained that Obama “turned it into a political issue that should have been handled exclusively with law and order.” And conservative political cartoonist Gary McCoy drew an image of Obama sobbing over Trayvon Martin’s tombstone in a staged photo op for the press.
The idea that a Black father expressing normal human remorse and empathy at the tragic and unnecessary death of a Black teenager would be portrayed as a publicity stunt reflects the depraved cynicism of modern American conservatism. But it also indicated the lengths to which white political leaders would go to police the conduct of the nation’s first Black president, to shrink his megaphone and to generate fake controversies to question his legitimacy, undermine his authority, and hamper his ability to govern.
There was the feigned outrage at the photo of President Obama working in the Oval Office, leaning back in his chair with his shoes on his desk, which critics slammed as “disrespecting” the White House, a complaint that was unheard when Presidents George W. Bush or Gerald Ford or other white men had been photographed casually relaxing their shoes on the same desk in the past. Those critics also ignored the rules of decorum when Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway would be photographed sitting cross-legged with her feet on the Oval Office sofa while she scrolled through her cell phone and ignored a group of visiting Black college presidents.
There were the complaints about Michelle Obama’s sleeveless dresses, which were considered unbecoming of her office, despite the fact that other first ladies, including Jacqueline Kennedy, had also worn sleeveless dresses. Those of us in the Black community knew it was more than just a dress that upset them. As one Virginia woman told NPR’s Ari Shapiro, “She’s far from the first lady. It’s about time we get a first lady in there that acts like a first lady and looks like a first lady.” American-born Michelle Obama, who worked her way up from her modest upbringing in Chicago to Princeton University and Harvard Law School and became a devoted wife and mother, was treated more disrespectfully by white conservatives than the Slovenian-born first lady who would follow her in the White House.
There was the time when President Obama appeared in a BuzzFeed video mocking himself by holding a selfie stick. Critics called it “undignified” and “not presidential.” Fox News anchor Lou Dobbs described Obama as a “self-absorbed ass clown,” and at least one Fox News critic contrasted Obama and Reagan by falsely claiming that Reagan refused even to remove his jacket in the Oval Office.
There was the infamous Obama “bro hug” scandal, in which the president was attacked for friendly physical contact with his outgoing chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, when Emanuel left his job to return to Chicago. I remember being on the set of CNBC with anchor Larry Kudlow that night to discuss the impact of Emanuel’s departure, but as soon as our segment began, Kudlow started complaining about the message being sent by seeing the president of the United States hugging another man in the White House instead of doing a formal handshake.
There was the infamous tan-suit scandal, which took place in the course of one afternoon when Obama simply wore a light-colored suit into the White House briefing room on a summer day in 2014. Admittedly, I, too, did not care for the suit or the way it fit the president, but I hardly felt it was scandalous. Dobbs, on the other hand, called it “shocking” and blamed it on a “desperate” White House hoping to turn around Obama’s poll numbers. Another Fox News commentator called it “unpresidential.”
But no other fake controversy was more pernicious than the one spearheaded by Obama’s soon-to-be successor, Donald Trump. From March 2011 to September 2016, Trump led a nationwide public relations campaign, complete with dramatic live press conference events, to undermine the legitimacy of America’s first Black president. During this multiyear time span, he questioned the existence of President Obama’s birth certificate; claimed to have sent investigators to Hawaii who “cannot believe what they’re finding”; demanded Obama produce his birth certificate; refused to accept the veracity of the birth certificate once produced; and then, finally, two months before the 2016 presidential election, reluctantly admitted that Obama had been born in the United States, after all. Trump never once apologized for his five-and-a-half-year crusade of lies.
For anyone who might have believed in those early days of November 2008 that the election of Barack Obama had ushered in a new postracial era in America, the America of November 2016 should have shattered that myth. Eight years in office had deeply circumscribed Obama by race. The man who had reluctantly but eloquently discussed racism during his presidential campaign found no more freedom to do so even after he occupied the highest office in the land. One of the final ironies of the Obama era was that the Black man whom Republicans feared would center Black concerns above others had actually spoken less directly about racism than the white Democratic nominees who followed him. It was Hillary Clinton, after all, in 2016 who became the first major party nominee to use the term “systemic racism” in her official convention acceptance speech. And it was Joe Biden in 2020 who chose the first African American woman to be a running mate on a Democratic presidential ticket and pushed through a stimulus bill in 2021 that included targeted financial aid for Black farmers.
Obama, himself, had reacted defensively to the implication that he had not prioritized Black concerns during his time in office. “I’m not the president of Black America. I’m the president of the United States of America,” he told Black Enterprise in the summer of 2012. While he championed all-inclusive policies that redounded to the benefit of African Americans, he rarely spoke of those policies in language that gave the impression that he was focused primarily on Black progress. Yet under Obama, the Black unemployment rate was cut from a high of 16.8 percent in March 2010 to 7.4 percent when he left office. More African Americans gained health insurance because of his Affordable Care Act. He appointed sixty-two Black judges and added more Black women to the federal bench than any president in history. The number of Blacks in prison declined and the Black incarceration rate dropped. And he granted 1,927 presidential pardons and commutations, more than the previous five presidents combined.
Other actions were more symbolic, including his administration’s proposal to put Black abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill. But even that symbolism represented a profound threat to the existing order, as evinced by the Trump administration’s decision to rescind the changes to the nation’s currency. Obama also defied conservative criticism when he invited rapper Kendrick Lamar to perform at the White House after Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera attacked Lamar by claiming “that hip-hop has done more damage to young African Americans than racism in recent years.” Years later, when Donald Trump allowed Trump-supporting rapper Kanye West to call himself a “crazy motherfucker” in a ten-minute, profanity-laced monologue in the Oval Office, many conservatives remained curiously silent. Just as they did when Trump posed for an Oval Office photo op with rock star Ted Nugent, who had previously stood on a public stage with a “machine gun” and called President Obama a “piece of shit” and Hillary Clinton a “worthless bitch.” The invisible rules of presidential decorum that had been used to restrict Obama’s freedom in office did not apply to his white Republican successor.
In the face of so mu
ch blatant racial hypocrisy and inconsistency, it was difficult for me to understand how President Obama could remain so positive and optimistic. For many Black Americans, we could clearly see that he was being treated differently from other presidents. In our eyes, nearly every olive branch he extended to his critics and opponents was a wasted effort. His adversaries would never allow him to govern, and they would not only block his policies but also silence his voice. Surely, he appeared friendly and nonthreatening to the vast majority of white Republican leaders in Congress, but to the impassioned and indignant base of voters that elected those Republicans, he represented an existential threat. Even as Obama’s own supporters complained that he was too reasonable and too eager to seek bipartisanship with Republicans, his fiercest critics condemned him for being unreasonable and divisive. And for his most vocal opponents, Barack Obama’s very presence in the White House personified the fear that white America was losing its four-hundred-year grip on national power.
Obama’s reluctance to engage in divisive racial debates allowed him to be elected and reelected and to maintain his popularity with a significant percentage of white voters, but it also left a gaping hole at the highest levels of national public discourse at precisely the moment when activists developed the Black Lives Matter movement. African American martyrs like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and John Crawford would become household names during the Obama administration, and the existence of a Black president and two consecutive Black attorneys general did not save their lives. Of course, it was unfair to expect that any individual Black political figure or law enforcement officer could unilaterally end systemic racism or police brutality. These patterns had existed for centuries, but Obama had the mixed fortune of coming to office at exactly the time when new technology allowed us to record these incidents on our phones and rapidly disseminate the images on social media. In earlier years, high-profile cases like the beating of Rodney King, the sexual assault of Abner Louima, or the shooting of Amadou Diallo took more time to rise to the public consciousness and had to be filtered through mainstream media. By the end of the Obama era, these cases seemed to be documented almost weekly.