Tensions across the country prompted the president to abandon his early reticence on race again and again
Jolted by deaths, Obama found his voice on race
ONLY weeks after 70 million Americans chose a black man for president, shattering a racial barrier that had stood for the entirety of the nation’s 232-year history, no one in the White House, especially the man in the Oval Office, wanted to talk about race.
President Barack Obama had made a pragmatic calculation in January 2009, as the financial crisis drove communities across the United States towards economic collapse. Whatever he did for AfricanAmericans, whose neighbourhoods were suffering more than others, he would not describe as efforts to specifically help Black America.
Obama made the decision knowing how powerfully his election had raised the hopes of African-Americans – and knowing that no matter what he did, it would not be seen as enough.
“I remember thinking, ‘They are going to hate us one day’,” said Melody Barnes, who is black and served as Obama’s first domestic policy adviser, recalling her sadness when she stood in an auditorium in those early months as a crowd cheered for the success of the president. “I knew that we couldn’t do everything that people wanted to meet those expectations.”
The fear inside the West Wing was that promoting a “black agenda” and aiming programs directly at African-Americans at a time of widespread economic anxiety would provoke a white backlash – the kind that, years later, White House officials would view as helping to elect Donald Trump.
“At a minimum, that would have been tone deaf,” said Eric Holder, who served as the nation’s first African-American attorney-general during much of Obama’s presidency, “and at worst, would have created a reaction in the larger community that would have prevented the things you wanted to do.”
Obama, who had grown up straddling two worlds as the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, wanted to be the president of all America. Framing his efforts in racial terms could exacerbate something that was already simmering, he thought.
“The most important thing I can do is to lift the economy overall,” Obama told reporters in the summer of 2009 when he was asked about doing more to help African-Americans recover economically.
But over the next seven and a half years, racial tensions across the country forced Obama to abandon his early reticence on race again and again. Ultimately, he led a national conversation on race ignited by spasms of violence – police shootings and protests in Florida, South Carolina, Missouri and elsewhere. Inside the White House, aides recall them as among his most painful moments as president.
“After my election, there was talk of a post-racial America,” Obama said in his farewell speech on Tuesday in Chicago, reflecting on the threat that racial strife poses for the country’s democratic ideals. “Such a vision, however well-intended, was never realistic. Race remains a potent and often divisive force in our society.”
After he leaves office, Obama will continue that conversation in work for My Brother’s Keeper and other programs to help black youths. There is plenty to do. As much as his onceunthinkable presidency has inspired and empowered African-Americans, black unemployment is still about double that for whites. Nearly a quarter of blacks are living in poverty, almost the same as in 1976.
“He made it seem like everything was all good, and it’s not,” said Thelonious Stokes, 21, a black artist whose experiences of being racially profiled in Chicago left him jaded about the state of race relations. “We almost needed Trump to show the true state of America.”
The ‘beer summit’ backlash
Obama’s earliest public reflection about race as president backfired. Asked about a black Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr, a friend of Obama’s who was arrested in July 2009 trying to enter his own house by a white officer, Obama immediately took sides.
“It is fair to say,” the president said six days after the arrest at a prime-time news conference, “that the Cambridge police acted stupidly”.
Those words – and the frenzied reaction to them – helped deepen the caution about racial issues inside the White House. For days, the president’s critique of the arresting officer dominated the news and staff meetings in the West Wing. Robert Gibbs, the press secretary, was especially agitated, his colleagues recalled, and argued that the White House had to do something to change the subject.
Gibbs succeeded in pushing for what the news media quickly labelled a “beer summit” on the edge of the Rose Garden at the White House, where Gates and the arresting officer, Sergeant James Crowley, joined Obama over beer for a discussion. “It had to be cauterised in a way that it would stop leading the news,” Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s closest adviser, conceded.
Gates, for one, was pleased. “I don’t think anybody but Barack Obama would have thought about bringing us to- gether,” he said at the time.
As a candidate for president in 2008, Obama had drawn praise for confronting racial divisions during a powerful speech he delivered about his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who had characterised the United States as fundamentally racist and the government as corrupt.
“The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress had been made,” Obama said that March day in Philadelphia, urging people to move beyond old racial wounds. “Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit, as well.”
But the beer summit was deeply disturbing to many of the president’s African-American advisers, who thought he should not have backed down. The officer had acted stupidly, they thought, and the nation’s first black president ought to be able to say so.
The meeting “was demeaning and diminished his leadership and his voice at that moment”, one of them recalled, asking for anonymity to bluntly discuss the topic. “People thought we were being punked. I got so many emails, so many phone calls from people I respected: ‘He was right. Why are you backpedaling?’”
Inside the West Wing, the impact was clear. Obama would have to be more cautious when it came to racial issues, particularly before the 2012 re-election campaign. The issue of race was too divisive at a time when Obama needed to emphasise inclusion.
“What it did teach us is that you just have to be careful about the words that you choose,” Jarrett said. “It doesn’t mean you shy away from issues that arise that deal with race, just as he didn’t shy away from Reverend Wright. But you have to be sensitive to a long history of people reacting strongly to the topic.”
Outside the White House, people noticed, too: “He plainly arrested him because he was black,” said Edward Robinson, who is black and works at a box factory in Cleveland. Obama “backtracked because he wanted to be everybody’s president”.
Like others, Robinson said the president was met with racially motivated disrespect in Washington and pointed to the moment when a white Republican lawmaker yelled, “You lie!” at the president during a congressional address.
The White House would go on to publish reports about its efforts to help African-Amer- icans, including details about the impact that the Affordable Care Act was having to help poor blacks. But Obama rarely talked about race publicly during the next few years.
A personal connection
The president’s voice was shaking with emotion.
“If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin,” Obama told Jarrett and David Plouffe, his senior adviser and former campaign manager, as the three talked in the Oval Office about what the president should say publicly about the death of the 17-year-old African-American at the hands of a neighbourhood watch volunteer in Florida. “I am going to say that.”
It was March 2012, nearly three years after the beer summit. The spectre of that meeting still hovered and Obama was, in a sense, taking sides again.
But in personalising the shooting, his aides recalled, Obama’s hope was that people might view African-African boys differently if they saw Trayvon through the president’s own eyes.
Obama headed out to the Rose Garden, announced his nomination of a new World Bank president, then took the question from a reporter that everyone knew was coming: “Can you comment on the Trayvon Martin case, sir?”
Obama called it a tragedy, said he was glad the Justice Department was looking into it, reflected on how the nation was doing necessary soul searching and then concluded: “But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.’’
Moments after Obama returned to the Oval Office, Gene Sperling, one of his top economic advisers, stopped by with tears in his eyes.
“You can’t imagine what that will mean to my son,” Sperling, who is white and is married to an African-American woman, told the president, according to a colleague who was there at the time.
This time, the president’s comments were embraced by many outside the White House, too. Media reports focused on the emotion Obama had displayed – rare for a politician whose usual demeanour was cool and professorial.
“For him to say things like that in front of the entire country and the world, I think sends a strong message to people,” Ryan Shultz, 33, an art teacher in Chicago who is white, said in a recent interview.
But others saw in those comments a willingness to take sides in the racial debate. For at least one person, it went further. Dylann S Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, later said he was inspired to kill because of media coverage of Trayvon’s shooting.
“Crime is still bad and police are still shooting black people left and right,” Shultz said. “I live in Chicago – a murder capital of the United States – and it’s crazy and it hasn’t gotten that much better, I don’t think.”
The circuit breaks
Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, in Ferguson, Missouri, shortly after noon on August 9, 2014. Only minutes before, Obama had arrived on Martha’s Vineyard for his summer vacation, which would soon be dominated by how to respond to the racial violence that Brown’s death unleashed.
The president and his aides, including Holder and Jarrett, who were also vacationing on the island, made urgent calls to Missouri’s governor, state police officials and civil rights leaders. They debated whether Obama should go to Ferguson and decided against it, knowing that a presidential visit would be disruptive. Holder would go instead.
But the more urgent question for the three of them was how to weigh in. The president