This article is part of a series of responses to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s story “My President Was Black.” You can read other responses to the story here.
I deeply dislike the man whose victory may vacate––who in some sense already has vacated––Obama’s legacy. I dislike that man as much as I can dislike anyone I never have and never will meet, and I condemn a great deal of what his partisans imagine he stands for.
But I have never hated President Obama. Not even a little. I found him frustrating and wrongheaded. And of course I wanted him to lose, twice. But I never doubted his basic honor, nor failed to appreciate the import of the very fact of his presidency. I watched with—is there such a thing as begrudging awe?—the jubilee in Chicago in 2008. I retweeted tiny Virginia McLaurin, born ten years before the 19th amendment and 45 before Brown vs. Board, dancing with the Obamas in the Blue Room. The breath caught in my throat when the little boy asked if he could touch the hair.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s president was black. So was mine.
But if even I, the abominable, shared the odd moment of wonder with Coates during Obama’s presidency, I also glumly share his pessimism at its end. Because for all the joy he invests in the personages of the Obamas, Coates’s essay is an autopsy. Obamaism is dead, Coates argues, because Obama bought into America’s founding myths instead of dismantling them, because he cut unapologetic celebrations of blackness with genuflections to respectability politics, because he offered white America a vision that “reinforce[d] the majoritarian dream” by erasing “the nightmare endured by the minority.”