On August 4, 1961, living in a world that was torn apart by Jim Crow Laws and white supremacy, a young black boy was born to a white mother and black father. He entered a world that defined him as a black man, but through love and luck, was able to exist in a universe completely different than his contemporaries. Barack’s story is much different than the average “American Dream.” After his father returned to Kenya, he remained in Kansas with his white mother, who raised him alongside her parents. While the Black Panther Party was striking fear into the heart of white America, young Barack was coming of age in Kansas, Indonesia, and Hawaii.
While following her passion for anthropology, his traveling mother was also exposing her young child at a pivotal time in his life to different people, cultures, and religions. It would shape the way he saw the world.
When Fred Hampton was murdered by the Chicago police department for what our government feared he could build with a coalition of black activists and white Appalachian workers, the young Obama was thousands of miles away, still years from shaking up the streets of Chicago with his confident walk and passion for social justice.
Somehow, Obama was able to grow up with the physical attributes of every other black man during the height of the civil rights movement while being shielded from all of its terrors through the power of a white middle-class bubble. A president so different from the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant leaders this country has been used to for 250 years. An educated man above reproach who embraced and celebrated his blackness. In essence, a modern man for the modern American. Barack Obama’s time as president, just like his life, has been a combination of anomalies, triumphs, breaking points, and contradictions. For this, I thank him for being the greatest president of my lifetime, while never doing enough.
If we are honest, Obama’s time in office has been a success. This is a man who navigated our country through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, expanded access to affordable health insurance to over 20 million people, got rid of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy of the United States military, and provided pardons or clemencies to more people than any other president before him. Like it or not, when history reflects on his presidency, the black Democrat with a funny name will have a laundry list of game-changing legislation to take credit for.
We should be honest, the journey was not easy. Our economy is a perfect example of the turbulence he faced. The unemployment rate in 2009 was 7.6 percent, peaking at 10 percent. President Obama was responsible for it dropping to 4.9 percent and creating 15 million jobs – jobs that while helpful, didn’t do enough to address systemic income inequality. So while historians will celebrate the groundbreaking 70+ months of job growth, my friends, allies and enemies will complain about all he didn’t do for working class families. Republicans will be much worse. To be honest, they already have. For eight years they called his presidency illegitimate, questioned his religion, called his wife an ape, wished for his death, and vowed to never work with him. Their hatred for his policies so toxic that an entire segment of the country began to think that he had a secret agenda.
This president, our black president, has faced more opposition than anyone before him. It would be criminal to deny the impact the color of his skin had on the way people treated him. He had to remain neutral while racial slurs and death threats were thrown his way from the right and accusations of desertion asserted from many on the black left.
If he called out an officer for “acting stupidly” when that officer arrested a black man for entering his own house, white America thought he was trying to start a race war. If he didn’t criticize the system he was elected to protect and uphold, he was considered a sellout by many of his black supporters, for eight years he walked on tigh trope while a country watched and criticized his every step.
But now it’s over. And all of a sudden, his high stakes walk has come to an end. After years of keeping his balance, and sometimes almost falling off, President Obama has made it to the other side. We got so used to watching him work, I don’t think any of us were prepared for this. He spoiled us. No matter what we said, or even how we said it, he was always there.
Now that it’s time to say goodbye, I can’t help but think of the night he was elected. I was a 22-year-old college student moved to tears by the historic moment. After celebrating in the courtyard with what felt like thousands of other students, I walked into my building and saw a classmate sitting in the hallway crying. Her tears were laced with fear and dread. In her mind, the moment our country elected a black man as president was the beginning of a personal nightmare. We made eye contact, my brown eyes with her blue. I remember chuckling out loud and then walking away. You gave me hope and an excitement for this country that I didn’t think I could feel, but here was this white woman, crying uncontrollably, afraid that Obama was going to destroy her life. Now, Donald Trump is our president. I’m afraid that he will do everything he said he would. Eight years ago she feared Obama’s blackness. I wonder if anything has changed.