Out of office, the Obamas are freed in their Blackness

On Monday, “CBS This Morning” airs a longer interview between Gayle King and former first lady Michelle Obama. In a portion already released, Obama discussed the statement she and former President Barack Obama issued after Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd.

As Michelle Obama put it, “We can’t sort of say, ‘Great, that happened. Let’s move on.’” She continued:

“I know that people in the Black community don’t feel that way because many of us still live in fear, as we go to the grocery store or worry about walking our dogs or allowing our children to get a license.

As I often say, this is a constant fear of Black people and Black parents — that assumptions are made in seconds, that when they pull a gun, you can’t pull a resume. In the moment of fear and violence, your individuality is meaningless. When you’re at the wrong end of a gun barrel, you can’t achieve your way out of that moment.”

But there is something more important and natural happening in the lives of the Obamas out of office, beyond Donald Trump and in an era in which racial justice is a pressing part of the national conversation: They have been liberated in their Blackness. They’re now able to discuss racism with a candor and frankness that their time in the White House in many ways prohibited.

The Obamas were chastened often on the subject of race, from the time Obama began his run for the presidency. This resulted in a skittishness on the subject.

In 2011, as a regular citizen, Trump suggested that Obama, a Black man, couldn’t have written his first book, “Dreams From My Father,” because of its quality. He believed it must have been written by Bill Ayers, a white man. As Trump put it:

“Bill Ayers was a supergenius. And a lot of people have said he wrote the book. Well, recently, as you know, last week Bill Ayers came out and said he did write the book.”

In 2013, after George Zimmerman was found not guilty in the killing of Trayvon Martin, Obama said:

“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”

But in the political sense, he was Martin: under suspicion from first glance, suspected of nefarious intent, stalked and descended upon by the self-appointed guardians of the space.

Later that year, Obama was pictured with his feet on the desk in the Oval Office, which sent his critics into convulsions.

All of this, I believe, had a chilling effect on the Obamas’ expressed positions on race. Now that that period has passed, they are eager to be heard on racial justice.

But as timing would have it, the Biden administration, including its Department of Justice, is being lauded, rightfully, for forthrightly and explicitly confronting and condemning racism. It has been a whiplash-inducing reversal from four years of a white nationalist presidency.

However, any comparison between Biden and the Obamas on race is fraught: America would still rather applaud the white savior of the Black and pitied than applaud the Black and powerful seen as interested in their own liberation.

The Obamas are now freer just to be Black people, Black parents and Black citizens, and as such, they are just as upset, angry and unsettled as the rest of us.