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"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win," goes the line attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. Typically, you'll find this pearl adorning a classroom or splashed across a motivational poster. But last month, on the eve of Super Tuesday-when a dozen states cast ballots for the Republican presidential nomination-you could find it on Donald Trump's Instagram page, the caption to a photograph of a massive rally in Alabama the day before.

Perverse as it may seem for the belligerent real estate magnate to channel even apocryphal Gandhi wisdom, the line is apt. First, we did ignore him-as a buffoon who wouldn't survive past the summer. Then, we laughed at him-as a buffoon who wouldn't survive through fall. Eventually, Republicans began to fight him, terrified of his traction with voters. Now, he's winning, with more votes and delegates than anyone left in the field. On the eve of another critical Tuesday slate of votes, Trump is on the verge of an even greater victory. Polls show him in command both in the smaller states that will award their delegates proportionally, and in the larger, winner-take-all prizes of Ohio and Florida. By Wednesday morning, Trump could be a stone's throw from the Republican presidential nomination.

We've learned, by now, not to underestimate Donald Trump, but we're still struggling to understand his rise. Why now? Why, when the United States is stronger and wealthier than it's been since the Great Recession, are some voters suddenly receptive to nativist demagoguery? How is Trump-who has been described as a proto-fascist, if not an outright fascist -just a few steps away from leading the Grand Old Party?

For some on the left, Trump is the result of decades of divisive politics-the inevitable outcome of a Republican political strategy that stoked white racial resentment to win elections. "Trump's campaign can best be understood not as an outlier but as the latest manifestation of the Southern Strategy, which the Republican Party has deployed for a half-century to shore up its support in the old Confederate states by appeals to racial resentment and white solidarity," writes Jeet Heer in the New Republic.

For some on the right, Trump is the grassroots response to Republican elites who have abandoned their working-class voters to the whims of laissez-faire capitalism. "[T]he Republican Party, and the conservative movement, offer next to nothing to working-class Trump supporters," writes Michael Brendan Dougherty in the Week. "There are no obvious conservative policies that will generate the sort of growth needed to raise the standard of living for these working-class voters."

These explanations aren't mutually exclusive; each touches on an important element of the Trump phenomenon. The Republican Party does have a tradition of harnessing white racial resentment to win elections, from the infamous " welfare queen" rhetoric of Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich labeling Barack Obama the " food stamp president" during the 2012 presidential election. GOP elites have failed to offer solutions to struggling working-class whites, who have suffered keenly from the collapse of the industrial economy. And it is true that rapid, disorienting economic and cultural change has led a substantial group of Americans to turn to someone who disdains feckless politicians and pledges to restore the country's strength.

But none of these theories answer the question why now. Each of these forces has been in play for years. Wages for working-class Americans have long been stagnant, and the collapse of job opportunities for workers without a college degree was apparent in the 1990s, long before the Great Recession. What's more, economic and social decline-as well as frustration with foreign competition, which Trump has channeled in his campaign-isn't unique to white Americans. Millions of Americans-blacks and Latinos in particular-have faced declining economic prospects and social disintegration for years without turning to a demagogue like Trump.

Race plays a part in each of these analyses, but its role has not yet been central enough to our understanding of Trump's rise. Not only does he lead a movement of almost exclusively disaffected whites, but he wins his strongest support in states and counties with the greatest amounts of racial polarization. Among white voters, higher levels of racial resentment have been shown to be associated with greater support for Trump.

Obama didn't herald a post-racial America as much as he did a racialized one, where many whites were hyperaware of their racial status.

All of which is to say that we've been missing the most important catalyst in Trump's rise. What caused this fire to burn out of control? The answer, I think, is Barack Obama.

There have been some conservative writers who have tried to hang Trump's success on the current president, pointing to his putatively extreme positions. But in most respects, Obama is a conventional politician-well within the center-left of the Democratic Party. Or at least, he's governed in that mode, with an agenda that sits safely in the mainstream. Laws like the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Affordable Care Act weren't impositions from the far left; they were built out of proposals from the right and left, passed by a majority of Congress that was elected to pursue solutions on health care and the economy. Barack Obama is many things, but conservative rhetoric aside, he's no radical.

We can't say the same for Obama as a political symbol, however. In a nation shaped and defined by a rigid racial hierarchy, his election was very much a radical event, in which a man from one of the nation's lowest castes ascended to the summit of its political landscape. And he did so with heavy support from minorities: Asian Americans and Latinos were an important part of Obama's coalition, and black Americans turned out at their highest numbers ever in 2008.

For liberal observers, this heralded a new, rising electorate, and-in theory-a durable majority. "The future in American politics belongs to the party that can win a more racially diverse, better educated, more metropolitan electorate," wrote Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post after the 2008 election. "It belongs to Barack Obama's Democrats."

For millions of white Americans who weren't attuned to growing diversity and cosmopolitanism, however, Obama was a shock, a figure who appeared out of nowhere to dominate the country's political life. And with talk of an "emerging Democratic majority," he presaged a time when their votes-which had elected George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan-would no longer matter. More than simply " change," Obama's election felt like an inversion. When coupled with the broad decline in incomes and living standards caused by the Great Recession, it seemed to signal the end of a hierarchy that had always placed white Americans at the top, delivering status even when it couldn't give material benefits.

In a 2011 paper, Robin DiAngelo-a professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University-described a phenomenon she called " white fragility." "White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves," she writes. "These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium."

DiAngelo was describing private behavior in the context of workplace diversity training, but her diagnosis holds insight for politics. You can read the rise of Obama and the projected future of a majority nonwhite America as a racial stress that produced a reaction from a number of white Americans-and forced them into a defensive crouch. You can see the maneuvering DiAngelo describes in the persistent belief that Obama is a Muslim-as recently as last fall, 29 percent of Americans held this view, against all evidence. It is a way to mark Obama as "other" in a society where explicit anti-black prejudice is publicly unacceptable. Consistent with this racialized fear and anxiety is the degree to which white Americans now see "reverse discrimination" as a serious problem in national life. For its American Values Survey, the Public Religion Research Institute asks respondents whether "discrimination against whites is a significant problem." In last year's survey, 43 percent of Americans-including 60 percent of working-class whites-said discrimination against whites had become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.

You can draw a direct line to the rise of Trump from the racial hysteria of talk radio.

The anxieties DiAngelo describes, and the fears cataloged by the American Values Survey, have real political impact. In a 2014 study, political scientists Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson tried to measure "perceived status threat" from a shift in racial demographics, surveying how people responded when informed that California is now home to more blacks, Hispanics, and Asians than non-Hispanic whites. In other words, how do white Americans react to unrelated political questions when exposed to news of a "majority-minority" future? The results were clear. "Making the majority-minority shift in California salient led politically unaffiliated white Americans to lean more toward the Republican Party," wrote Craig and Richeson. Likewise, "making the changing national racial demographics salient led white Americans (regardless of political party affiliation) to endorse both race-related and relatively race-neutral conservative policy positions more strongly."

The Obama era didn't herald a post-racial America as much as it did a racialized one, where millions of whites were hyperaware of and newly anxious about their racial status. For example, during a Marco Rubio rally before the New Hampshire primary in February, I spoke to a voter who, in her way, gave voice to this hyperawareness. "I think he's divided this country in many ways," said Lori, an older white woman, of Obama. "I know in a lot of places in America there's a divide in color ... like, when I walk up to someone in the stores"-she looked at me to emphasize what she means-"I feel that they're wondering if I like them. ... I didn't feel that before. I was accepting of everyone, and I hate that he brought that."

This isn't the first time in our history that whites have worried about losing their pre-eminent status. In the early 20 th century, massive Southern and Eastern European immigration, as well as Chinese immigration in the American West, fueled nativism and white racism, and helped lead to the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan. The revived Klan organized millions of white Americans in a movement against immigrants, blacks, and religious minorities like Catholics. This, along with a broader nativist movement, had an enormous impact on American politics-entire states, like Indiana, were controlled by Klan-backed politicians while national lawmakers passed harsh, restrictive immigration laws. Our current burst of nativism and racial anxiety is proving to be a similarly potent force.

"The election of the country's first black president had the ironic upshot of opening the door for old-fashioned racism to influence partisan preferences after it was long thought to be a spent force in American politics," wrote Brown University political scientist Michael Tesler in a 2013 paper titled " The Return of Old Fashioned Racism to White Americans' Partisan Preferences in the Early Obama Era." For Tesler, "old-fashioned racism" isn't a rhetorical term; it refers to specific beliefs about the biological and cultural inferiority of black Americans. His work suggests that there are some white Americans who, in his words, have "concerns about the leadership of a president from a racial group whom they consider to be intellectually and socially inferior."

Other research points to the degree to which Obama's election seems to have exacerbated racial animus among white voters. In a paper titled " The Impact of Anti-Black Racism on Approval of Barack Obama's Job Performance and on Voting in the 2012 Presidential Election," a trio of researchers found a substantial increase in the number of voters with anti-black attitudes, which rose from 47.6 percent in 2008 to 50.9 percent in 2012. "The proportion of people expressing anti-Black attitudes," they write, "was 32 percent among Democrats, 48 percent among independents, and 79 percent among Republicans."

What does anti-black racism in the Obama era have to do with Donald Trump, who crashed the 2016 campaign with a wave of anti-Latino rhetoric?

Trump may have started this campaign by denigrating Latinos and Muslims, but his first appearance in the Obama era was in the context of anti-black racism. In 2011, Trump took the " birtherism" conspiracy-the belief that Obama is foreign-born and thus an illegitimate president-and turned it into a full-fledged movement. Even now, his supporters believe Obama is illegitimate -62 percent say he is a Muslim, and 61 percent that he was born in another country. I spoke to a voter who echoed this sort of othering anti-Obama rhetoric in Las Vegas, at a Trump event the day before the Nevada caucuses. "In my opinion, Obama is the most anti-American president that I have experienced. He bows down to every other country. He puts other countries before America," explained Martin, a staunch backer of the real estate mogul.

More recently, anti-black racism has returned to the fore, with behavior that attracts those who would like to see the old racial hierarchy restored. He shares racist memes on Twitter and has built a symbiotic relationship with white nationalists, refusing a chance to repudiate former Klan leader David Duke during one interview and offering his son for an interview with a white-nationalist radio host. And in recent weeks, Trump supporters have attacked black protesters at his rallies. At an event in North Carolina, a protester was punched in the face by an audience member, while another yelled a racist slur. Afterwards, Trump condoned the behavior. "He was swinging, he was hitting people, and the audience hit back," he said, despite no evidence of any attack from the protester. "That's what we need more of."

In St. Louis, Missouri, a Trump rally collapsed into scuffles between supporters and opponents, with multiple arrests. At a Kentucky rally-the same day Trump promised to defend supporters in court if they fought with demonstrators-two protesters were assaulted by members of a white-supremacist group. On Friday evening, demonstrators in Chicago held a mass rally against an impending Trump event, forcing the campaign to cancel. Trump blamed the ensuing melee on "thugs."

None of this is to discount the material facts behind Trump's appeal to working-class whites. The collapse of the industrial economy in the wake of the Great Recession caused real devastation. The middle class has been losing ground for a long time, and there are few jobs for people without college degrees-or at least, few jobs that hold a path to mobility. Even in places where new factories have cropped up, unions are sparse and wages are low, following a race-to-the-bottom among the towns and cities that vie for the remaining manufacturing jobs. When economic desperation meets hopelessness-as we saw in the 1980s, when an earlier wave of deindustrialization ravaged the inner cities-the results are tragic.

The effects of these trends were highlighted in a widely analyzed study released last fall that showed rising mortality rates among middle- and working-class white Americans, the group that makes up Trump's main body of support. Princeton University professor Anne Case and co-author Angus Deaton found that white working-class Americans are increasingly dying from suicide, alcohol abuse, and drugs. "In 1999," writes Case for Quartz, "people in this group died from accidental drug and alcohol poisonings at four times the rate of Americans with a bachelor's degree or more. By 2013, they were dying at seven times the rate of their better-educated peers. In 2013, they also committed suicide at more than twice the rate of people with more education, and died from alcoholic liver disease and cirrhosis at five times the rate of those with a college degree."

These spikes in mortality are so large that, for whites aged 45 to 54, they've lowered overall life expectancy. Young whites, meanwhile, face rising rates of addiction and a corresponding increase in mortality.

Canvas a Trump event and you'll meet people who have seen these changes up close. They are teachers, police officers, small-business owners, and city employees who hold the closest thing to middle-class jobs in the rural towns and older suburbs where Trump draws his most ardent support. In the Michigan primary, for example, Trump won most of his votes from voters with incomes less than $50,000; in New Hampshire, he dominated among voters making less than $100,000. Everywhere, in fact, Trump is winning Republicans with modest middle-class incomes.

These somewhat better-off Americans have seen their friends and family fall into dependency, whether to drugs or alcohol or welfare. They are both sympathetic to this plight-which is why Trump's call for more help for veterans and seniors resonates with them-but also frustrated and angry. The country, and its leaders, made a promise: If you worked hard, you would get ahead. But that didn't happen. Instead, for millions of Americans, it was the reverse: They worked hard and fell behind. They're afraid, for themselves and for their children. Trump speaks for them. "What do we all want?" Trump asked at a rally on the eve of the Nevada caucus. "We want security. We want a strong country." Those who feel insecurity most acutely have turned out to back the real estate mogul en masse.

The good news is that movements like Trump's tend to fade away. The bad news is that, even in defeat, they are influential.

With that said, perceptions of race inform their embrace of Trump as well. In the recent past, holding the favored spot in our racial hierarchy brought benefits. As historian and political scientist Ira Katznelson details in When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America, being white was traditionally a pathway to middle-class security, the key that won access to vital mortgage and education programs, as the federal government worked to build a white middle-class in the middle part of the 20 th century. Even after the civil rights movement and the end of formal discrimination against black Americans, it was still true that being white and middle-class offered protection from the worst of our economy's ravages. Drugs, ghettos, and dependency existed among whites in pockets of the country, but they were popularly understood as black and Latino problems, not white ones. Now, that isn't true. Now, middle-class whites face addiction and dependence, which adds a racial element to economic anxiety, as the security provided by whiteness no longer exists for many Americans.

There are objections to this narrative. It's possible, for example, that Obama's decision to push forward with liberal policies and to galvanize a liberal base produced an inevitable partisan backlash, of which Trump is part. Had Obama governed more moderately, had he tried to find a space in his coalition for white working-class voters, then Trumpism might have stayed in the deep.

But this analysis ignores the extent to which Trump reflects specific choices by Republican and conservative elites. From indulging anti-Obama conspiracy theories to attacking him as an enemy of the United States, conservatives chose to nurture resentment and anxiety and distill it into something potent. You can draw a direct line to the rise of Trump from the racial hysteria of talk radio-where figures like Rush Limbaugh, a Trump booster, warned that Obama would turn the world upside down. "The days of [minorities] not having any power are over and they are angry," said Limbaugh to his audience. "They want to use their power as a means of retribution."

It also ignores the degree to which these voters likely would have found this hypothetical partnership inimical to their conception of their interests. Even if Obama had reached out, they would be mere partners in a larger coalition, when what they want is to be its driving force. Trump speaks to that desire, signaling-in ways subtle and otherwise-that he plans to "Make America Great Again" by making the white American worker the center of his universe.

Throughout our history, a substantial minority of whites has responded to America's always-shifting racial and economic terrain with a primal fear of being dominated, of finding themselves at the bottom of the hierarchy. It's one of the strongest forces in American life, and politicians and demagogues of many partisan stripes channeled it long before Donald Trump; it's so strong that researchers have found a direct and robust connection between a given county's proportion of enslaved people before emancipation and its present-day Republican vote share. The more slaves held in a given area, the more Republican votes.

The good news is that movements like Trump's tend to fade away. The bad news is that, even in defeat, they are influential. One antecedent to Trump -Alabama Gov. George Wallace-never won a national party nomination. But he had massive impact on the direction of national politics, giving Richard Nixon raw materials for his "Southern Strategy" of racial resentment that would shape and define American politics for the next four decades.

For Americans opposed to Trump, it's tempting to believe that his base is a shrinking part of America; that these are the death throes of racial reaction. Eventually, goes the thinking, they'll fade from view too.

That is wishful thinking. America is a diverse country. But it's still a predominantly white one, where a Trumpist movement can still encompass millions of voters. And "eventually" might be a while. In the space between now and then, Trumpism-the potent mix of open prejudice, nationalist aggression, and heterodox economic policy-could thrive. In fact, it likely will, since the trends that produced Trump-a brittle economy, an ailing white working-class, an insecure white middle-class, a rising nonwhite population, political gridlock, and growing minority political power-are ongoing.

Given the more than uphill climb he would face in a general election, Trump the person might have an expiration date. But Trumpism will enter the firmament of modern politics, a powerful current that will shape the future of the Republican Party, and the Democratic one too. Trump came on the stage as a clown. But whenever he leaves, he'll do it as a new icon of a familiar movement in American life.

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The Racist Backlash Against Barack Obama Is What Brought Us Donald Trump

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"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win," goes the line attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. Typically, you'll find this pearl adorning a classroom or splashed across a motivational poster.

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Back in November, after it became clear that he would become president of the United States, Barack Obama stood before thousands of supporters and spoke these words: "Because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America."

The point was undeniable: Mr. Obama's election heralded not just a fundamental shift in U.S. policy, but a change in the way Americans saw themselves. Yet questions linger about the meaning of President Obama's victory, particularly for African-Americans. Yes, America had its first black president. But on a day-to-day basis, how much has really changed?

As Mr. Obama's presidency's hits the 100 days mark, CBSNews.com sought out some preliminary answers.

"He was elected at a time of a profound downturn in the economy," noted Alvin F. Poussaint, Professor of Psychiatry at Judge Baker Children's Center and Harvard Medical School and co-author with Bill Cosby of Come On People. Poussaint argues that the economic downturn is to some degree offsetting the positive impact of Mr. Obama's victory for African-Americans.

"The unemployment rate was already high among black people - twice the white rate," he said. "And now it's way up. That means that there are more economic hard times in the black community - more black families are drifting into poverty, despite Obama."

Poussaint pointed out that an economic downturn is correlated with increases in domestic violence, crime and family instability, and that tough economic times mean a reduction in the social services upon which many black families depend.

Mr. Obama's election "may spur [African-American young people] to achieve at a higher level," he said. "The problem is you need more than the inspiration. If the schools are no good, and you can't build on the inspiration and get them to levels of high achievement, if it can't turn around a high school dropout rate of about 50 percent in urban areas for black youth, then these new dreams are not going to be realizable."

And yet the new president has spurred an outpouring of optimism among African-Americans. A CBS News/New York Times poll released Monday found that the percentage of blacks who say that both races have equal opportunities has risen by twelve points since last July. And seventy percent of blacks now say the country is headed in the right direction, up from 21 percent in January.

"There's a new sense of optimism, and a breaking down of many of the stereotypes that have been so profound in this country against African-American males," said Hilary O. Shelton, vice president for Advocacy at the NAACP. Shelton said his organization has generally been happy with the president's policy initiatives, in which, he suggested, "issues of racial diversity are ... incorporated into the overall policy agenda."

"I think for many of our students, the morning following the election, they were reenergized," added Charles Adams, the principal of the SEED Charter School in southeast Washington, D.C., where Mr. Obama recently signed Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act.

Mr. Obama's victory, he argued, changed students' perceptions of what they could achieve. "It's something you were told you could do, but you never really believed it," he said. "I can tell you that from personal experience."

Yet according to Charles Nyantakyi, a junior at New York City's High School of Environmental Studies, the symbolic value of Mr. Obama's victory has its limits.

"Maybe we have more inspiration because we have an African-American president, that shows us that we could do anything, the sky's the limit," he said. "But I feel like it really doesn't change things [on a daily basis]. It's still high school."

At this early point in the president's term, much of the evidence of the social impact of Mr. Obama's presidency is anecdotal, notes Richard Prince, who writes the "Journal-isms" column on diversity issues in the media.

"People have talked about how schoolteachers have told children, 'You wouldn't see Sasha And Malia behaving like this,' or saying 'Barack paid attention in his studies, you should too,'" he said. "It's hugely important having Michelle Obama as a role model, and having the kids as a role model."

The president has addressed black family life directly: Last Father's Day, he gave a speech suggesting too many fathers are "missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men."

Mr. Obama stated "how true this is in the African-American community" and talked about the responsibilities that fathers must embrace.

Poussaint suggests that cultural representations of African-Americans have begun to change under the new president. He said he has noticed more black newscasters on television and a "diminishing of some of the buffoonish types of black sit-coms."

Mike Chapman, the editor of Adweek, said he has not seen a noticeable change in the portrayals of blacks in advertising during the president's first 100 days - though he said a recent trend toward more and better African-American representation, which began before the new president took office, has continued.

"Representation of minorities has increased and improved and is closer to the breakdown of the population, but it's still way off," he said. Chapman noted that a class action suit is being threatened against the ad industry because it employs relatively few minority employees - something that could lead to more jobs at ad agencies for minorities and, presumably, better representation.

The most important component of Mr. Obama's social impact during his first hundred days may be the fact that, amid all the discussion of his policies and priorities, his race has been little discussed.

Mr. Obama is indeed "obviously black," as the NAACP's Shelton puts it, but that fact has not much been dwelled upon. The president himself acknowledged as much last month when asked if his presidency had marked a "relatively color-blind time."

"You know, obviously, at the inauguration, I think that there was justifiable pride on the part of the country that we had taken a step to move us beyond some of the searing legacies of racial discrimination in this country, but that lasted about a day," said the president. "And, you know, right now, the American people are judging me exactly the way I should be judged. And that is: Are we taking the steps to improve liquidity in the financial markets, create jobs, get businesses to re-open, keep America safe? And that's what I've been spending my time thinking about."

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Back in November, after it became clear that he would become president of the United States, Barack Obama stood before thousands of supporters and spoke these words: "Because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America."

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CELESTE HEADLEE, HOST:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Celeste Headlee in Washington. If the election of Barack Obama was a milestone in America's racial history, then his first term was perhaps a measure of progress. Many Americans hoped the election of a black man to the highest office was more than a singular achievement but may have opened up the possibility of breakthroughs on racial equality and understanding.

Some African-Americans have expressed disappointment that the president didn't specifically address issues that affect their community during his first time. But has the presence of a black man in the White House changed the way we see each other and talk to each other? We want to hear from you on this. Have you had a conversation about race in the last four years that you don't think you would have had prior to the election of President Barack Obama?

Our number is 1-800-989-8255. The email address is talk@npr.org, and you can also join the conversation by going to our website, npr.org, and then click on TALK OF THE NATION. Later on in the program we'll hear Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech in its entirety on what would have been his 84th birthday.

But first the conversations we have about race. Keli Goff joins us, she's a political correspondent for theroot.com, and is in our New York bureau. Welcome back to TALK OF THE NATION, Keli.

KELI GOFF: Great to be back.

HEADLEE: And also welcome back to Gustavo Arellano. Gustavo is the editor of OC Weekly and author of the syndicated column Ask a Mexican. He joins us by phone from his office in Orange County, California. Glad to have you as well, Gustavo.

GUSTAVO ARELLANO: Always a pleasure.

HEADLEE: Let me begin with you, Keli, because you were on this air about three years ago, it had been a year since Barack Obama's election, and you were asked basically the same question, both of you - if anything has changed since then is our question now. It's been three years since you made those comments. What do you think? You thought there was a lot of anger at the time. Has that anger dissipated?

GOFF: Well, apparently not because according to polls, there was a Pew Research Center poll conducted before - just around the time of President Obama's election, that found that half - more than half of Americans felt that he would be helpful to race relations. And then that was about 52 percent.

Daily Beast and Newsweek conducted a poll several months ago that found now that 30 percent of Americans actually think that the first term of President Obama has actually been worse for race relations. So that's - and then a number of Americans actually refused to answer the question.

So when it's all taken together, they found that about 50 percent of Americans either think he's been worse, or they just think that he's been sort of stagnant or helped race relations sort of just flat line. So that shows where we're at. Now in terms of where I think we're going, I wrote a piece for The Root and the Washington Post talking about the impact - if things have gotten worse, then how can we ever be optimistic and assume they'll get better?

And my take on this is that things will get better, and we should believe that because history tells us so. There's not been a single major gain we've made in terms of race relations in this country, whether it's civil rights, whether it's the abolition of slavery, whether it's the increase of African-Americans who participate in voting, that has not preceded by some horrible, horrifying step back.

And when I say step back, I mean like lynchings. And so what I would say is that if you took a poll of Americans right after the Civil Rights Act was passed, I'm going to guess that a majority, a lot of them probably whites in the South, would say that that was horrible for race relations, right?

But then we look back on that and know that our country would never be where we are today if we hadn't made those strides. And I kind of think that we're in the growing pains throes of the election of the first black president, but things will get better in 10 years, and we'll look back on this as a pivotal turning point.

HEADLEE: OK, well, that's a little bit of optimism. Let me take you back three years, Gustavo. Three years ago you said there was a lot of fear about having an African-American in the White House. Has the fear dissipated?

ARELLANO: The fear, I believe, has - I don't think it's been dissipated, but if it makes things any better, I think a lot of people are really upset by President Obama's proposals, not so much his race anymore but what he's proposing, whether it be on health care, whether it be on gun control, whether it be, you know, on economics or the big thing that's supposed to happen in the next couple of months, immigration reform.

A lot of people are really upset by what he feels. But what I've seen - because I love to monitor the conservative media - what I've been seeing is not so much an attack on, or an explanation of his policies because he's an African-American or a black man, but because he's this crazy socialist liberal according to these people.

So in that sense I guess there's progress, that now we're attacking people for the content of their ideas instead of, you know, the color of their skin. On the other hand, you do have this anger. You have a huge portion of this country really fearful of the demographic changes that are happening here. And all across the United States. Latinos are now, all across the United States, specifically Mexican immigrants, especially in the South, places where historically the only conversation about race was between black and white; now you have to include Latinos, you have to include Muslims, you have to include Asian-Americans all across the board.

And I really think what's so - what was so amazing about the election of Obama is that it was no longer, you know, race - complex race relations or the conversations that we had wasn't just, you know, philosophical or all in the mind, now we have a black man in the White House. Now it's up, you know, up and center, a black man who lived in Indonesia, whose brother-in-law is Asian.

For a lot of people who thought that nuclear American family was white and maybe black, now Obama was a monkey wrench. And, you know, I agree with my fellow guests that it's true, right now we're going through growing pains. But I am also optimistic that 10 years in the future, we'll look back on these times as, hey, this is a reformation of this country that was long needed.

HEADLEE: OK, well, let me check in. You actually mentioned, Keli Goff, the Pew and the research they've been doing. We have with us Paul Taylor, who is executive vice president of the Pew Research Center, and he also directs the Social and Demographic Trends Project there and the Hispanic Center. Welcome to TALK OF THE NATION, Paul.

PAUL TAYLOR: Good to be with you.

HEADLEE: A lot of these things that we're talking about, when we talk about whether or not race relations have changed, that's not an easy thing to study. I mean what kind of things have you - what kind of research do you have that gives an indication on what's changed since Barack Obama was elected?

TAYLOR: Well, it is very complicated. One of the things that's changed is race has changed. We are a much more diverse and multiracial community than we were just four years ago, certainly than we were 40, 45 years ago when Dr. King spoke.

We now have Hispanics and Asian-Americans. They were a very important factor in the election two months ago. They will be a growing factor by the middle of this century. Hispanics will be about 30 percent of our population, up from about 17 percent now, Asian-Americans now at about five percent, closer to 10 percent. Blacks, currently at 13 or 14 percent, will only grow slightly.

You add all that up, and we are on a path to become what some have called a majority minority nation or a plurality nation. So, you know, we've been dealing as a society for race for 400 years not very well. It's mostly been a binary black-white checkerboard, if you will. It's a much more confusing checkerboard. And inevitably the lines are getting blurred.

One of the fascinating things is a question of identity. You ask people who they are, you ask Hispanics who they are, and it's a complicated question for them because we tend to want to push people into racial categories which don't really work for Hispanics. But even to pin an ethnic category doesn't work that well.

Most Hispanics, if they're Mexican-American, they say I'm Mexican, or I'm Cuban, or I'm Dominican, et cetera, similarly for Asian-Americans. I think I would say from our survey research a couple of findings stand out. African-Americans, since the election of Barack Obama, have become - have felt notably better about the country as a whole and about their place in it, their sense of racial progress, their expectations for their children.

It's hard to imagine there's any other reason for that than but the election of Barack Obama because if you look at the other important thing that's happened in the four, four and half - or the four years that Obama has been president is we've had a terrible economy. And that has hit blacks and Hispanics and other minorities harder than other folks.

And yet their sense of themselves and even of their economic circumstances have gotten better, and I think that goes to, if you will, a fuller sense of belonging that has come from this truly historic breakthrough, so...

HEADLEE: Well, let me take that - sorry to interrupt you there, Paul, but let me take that to you, Keli, because you wrote recently that Obama's first term could be considered a failure, and people shouldn't be surprised by that. How does that coincide with what Paul just said about African-Americans in general feeling better?

GOFF: Well, I'll take a very anecdotal example, although there has been some wider studies to sort of couch this phenomenon I'm about to reference. I was talking to Jamal Simmons, who some of you may know is a political analyst and has appeared on a lot of networks. And he was talking about a family member of his is a principal in a low-income community that's predominately African-American school district.

And he said the thing about - his family member was saying his observation in terms of the impact of President Obama on African-American children, particularly boys, is he's the first black man who's successful, who's perceived as cool, who wears a suit for work every day.

And that, I think, is something that a lot of African-Americans respond to because the educational achievement gap in our community has had such damaging effects, this perception that if you get A's, if you wear a suit, you're acting white, and the trickle-down impact of that, of us having the largest dropout rate.

So I think for a lot of African-Americans, that is - there's something so symbolic that actually does have a tangible impact that's almost impossible for studies to gauge, even though if you will recall there was a study during the primary that showed that student test scores in a particular community did better whenever he won. Do you remember that study from I think 2007?

So that's I think part of what's at play here in terms of when you talk about why people sort of feel better. And lastly, I have to say that that Newsweek/Daily Beast study, while it did find that Americans as a whole were less positive about his impact on race relations, with black Americans you actually found that they were more optimistic about his impact on race relations.

So that's why I say you have to kind of look back at history and say, no, not everyone's going to be thrilled that we passed the Civil Rights Act or we have a black president, but by and large I think there are enough people who perceive that that will eventually be better for our country.

HEADLEE: Well, you know, one thing, Paul Taylor, that the Pew studied was whether or not blacks and whites had grown more alike over the past decade. We've got a couple minutes left here before we take a break. What did you find?

TAYLOR: We found that both blacks and whites said that, yes, they believe in terms of their core values, what they think is most important in life, there's a growing perception across this historic racial divide - yes, we are more like each other. And actually within the black community there was also a growing perception that there were wider gaps between blacks who - or middle-class or well-to-do and blacks who were poor.

And that's one of the things that's happened in this country since the civil rights era. It opened up a lot of opportunities, and a lot of blacks have done much better economically, but many have not, and there's a wider gap within the black community itself reflected in some of this polling data.

GOFF: Celeste?

HEADLEE: Yeah, go ahead.

GOFF: I'm sorry, and I know we only have a little bit of time, but one other thing we can't leave out of this conversation is the other thing that's impacting all of this too, is that one of the fastest growing demographics in our country is actually people who identify as multiracial and biracial.

Right, so that completely shakes up when we're talking about his long-term impact that we have a biracial president who identifies as black and now the Pew studies show that the majority of millennials, I think over 95 percent, support interracial relationships.

So you know, I think a lot of this that we're worrying about really will work itself out.

HEADLEE: We are talking about how President Obama's first four years in office have changed how we talked about race. Thanks to Paul Taylor, executive vice president of the Pew Research Center; he joined us from the studio there. Paul, thanks so much.

TAYLOR: Thank you.

HEADLEE: Give us a call. Have you had a conversation about race recently that you don't think you'd have had prior to Barack Obama's election? The number is 800-989-8255. Or send an email to talk@npr.org. Stay with us. I'm Celeste Headlee. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

HEADLEE: This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Celeste Headlee. When President Obama took office about this time four years ago, there was a feeling, due in some part to the themes of his campaigns, that change was in the air. And it was. According to a recent AP poll, racial attitudes have not improved since then.

In fact the poll found 51 percent of Americans now express explicitly anti-black attitudes, that's up slightly from their 2008 survey. They also tested implicit anti-black sentiments and found those numbers also went up while pro-black attitudes dropped.

Numbers are interesting. They can be helpful. But what we're especially interested in is the conversation about race, how people are really talking about things that go on in their schools, their neighborhoods, their communities, even in their families, and how that may or may not have changed since President Obama's election.

And I wanted to read this email we got from Erica(ph) in Sun Valley, Idaho. Erica writes: A few weeks ago, I was in the post office with my four-year-old. He saw a picture of some African-American postal workers, and he asked me if they were presidents. This wouldn't have happened before Obama was elected president. We live in a rural community with a mostly white population.

And we're going to take a call here. We want to get your reports on any conversations you've had that maybe you wouldn't have had before Barack Obama was elected. The number is 800-989-8255. Our email address is talk@npr.org. Or just go to the website, to npr.org, and click on TALK OF THE NATION.

Calling right now is Philip(ph) in Los Angeles. Philip, conversation you've had that may not have happened before President Obama?

PHILIP: It's more of an observation that I've noticed in my professional life. And I notice that non-blacks, non-blacks tend to be a bit more, you know, aggressive and sort of we're on par now as before, sort of, you know...

HEADLEE: Explain what you mean. You're African-American, I assume.

PHILIP: Yes.

HEADLEE: And when you say that non-blacks have become more aggressive, aggressive about what?

PHILIP: Well, in - personally, it seems as though we're on par now, even though, you know, if you consider things like post-traumatic slave syndrome, that theory, and, you know, we're still kind of getting over it. We're not equal yet, I don't think, considering all what happened here. And but however, since the president came along, President Obama came along, it seems as though the fight's more fierce.

You know, I'm ready for it personally, but a lot of people might not be.

HEADLEE: That's really interesting.

GOFF: Celeste?

HEADLEE: Yeah, let me say thank you to Philip, that's Philip calling from Los Angeles, California. And Keli Goff, political correspondent for theroot.com, what was your response?

GOFF: So Celeste, I think that if I may, I don't want to take his comments out of context, but I think he kind of tapped into something that has been discussed. I've written about it, and a lot of other African-Americans have certainly discussed it, even within my own family, which is that since that, because we have a black president, that subtle racism has become more acceptable, or comments that would not have been acceptable when we had a black president are now considered fair game because it's like how could it be perceived as racist, we have a black president, or I voted for a black president, so I'm just launching legitimate criticism that has nothing to do with me being racist.

And I've certainly heard this time and time again from a number of people, like I said including people in my own family, who say co-workers have made comments that they would not have felt comfortable making five years ago, but because there's a black president, it's more inclined to say, well, I think you people have gotten X, or I think black people do Y.

And I think - and I would want to see any president, regardless of his color, try to address that. That's...

HEADLEE: Yeah. I mean, just a guideline, you might - people might want to stay away from the phrase you people.

(LAUGHTER)

ARELLANO: Here in Orange County, we actually had two huge political controversies in the last term. We had a council member in the city of Los Alamitos. He forwarded a picture of a watermelon patch in front of the White House, and it says hey, there's new times in the White House coming along.

And of course everyone criticized him, saying he's racist, and he's like: I'm not being racist, it's just a watermelon patch. How could I possibly be racist for that? And even more, even worse, there was a Republican activist who forwarded a picture - it was of President Obama and his family, and it had President Obama as a baby with chimpanzees as parents. And again, she was saying: I'm not being racist. I just think he's an ape. That's all I'm thinking about.

And what's amazing to me is - the way I see it, it's a last gasp of a dying people. And I'm not talking about white people, I'm talking about bona fide racist fools who think that now because you have a black man in the White House, we can say this, but thankfully, there is a lot of people who get disgusted by it, conservative or not.

And so I really think right now, again, in 10 years we'll be looking at these days as, you know, the dying gasps of an America that has always been part of this country but is slowly disappearing away.

HEADLEE: That's - you just heard the voice of Gustavo Arellano. He's author of the syndicated column Ask a Mexican. He and Keli Goff of theroot.com are my guests. You know, I wanted to ask you ask specifically, Gustavo, because there's two different things going on here.

Both of you seem to be emphasizing that right now the conversation on race is worse but that it has to get bad before it gets better. But there's also this theme of the idea that African-Americans, at least, feel like there's more possibilities, feel better about their chances. And I wonder if that's the same for Latinos, as well, Gustavo, even though he's African-American.

ARELLANO: Yeah, you know, with regards to the Obama administration, on one hand a lot of Latinos say we're very proud of the fact that now we - you know, we had a black man in the White House. That is a landmark for civil rights. On the other hand, you know, President Obama has also shown just because you're an African-American or a minority in the White House doesn't mean that you're not - you know, it's going to be business as usual.

Deportations have gone significantly up under the Obama administration. So I guess that's progress, right, when you have a black man being as much of a sellout as a white man. That's pretty cool.

HEADLEE: Ooh.

ARELLANO: That's on one hand. You know, on the other hand, though, it is something for us to aspire to, and what's great is that now it's not just Democrats but also Republicans who are realizing, like, uh-oh, like we can no longer malign the Latino vote because they're really powerful.

You know, in this past election, I think Latinos, 70-some percent of Latinos voted for President Obama. They swung the vote for him, the swing states, against Mitt Romney. Now what you're seeing is a real reflection in the GOP, realizing, like, we can no longer ignore this vote.

And at the same, Latinos are telling President Obama and other Democrats, saying hey look, like you're not going to be able to take us for granted anymore. So there has been a lot of criticism of President Obama for his policies. And what's happened as a result? Not only President Obama - not only is President Obama offering these immigration proposals, but on the Republican side Marco Rubio is really going up at the forefront and...

HEADLEE: Marco Rubio of Florida.

ARELLANO: Yeah, Marco, the Senator Marco Rubio of Florida - we need to have immigration reform. It's no longer a matter of what my party has said for the past four years, deportation all the way through. We need to legalize these people. And that alone, that really is extraordinary. I really don't think it would have happened under another president.

GOFF: And also, can I just say one of his first actions, I know Gustavo will - already knows this, but for your listeners who don't - was to help those who are undocumented to have an easier time staying in this country. The moment he was re-elected, he helped get that waiver through the Department of Homeland Security, for those who have spouses or children...

HEADLEE: Answer to your use of the word sellout. But let me read...

GOFF: That is a (unintelligible)...

(LAUGHTER)

HEADLEE: Let me read a couple emails here from listeners - and we encourage you to give us a call at 800-989-8255. Tell us about a conversation that has happened in the past four years that may not have happened without President Barack Obama in the White House.

Ray in St. Louis writes: A conversation that seemed too distant until Barack Obama was elected president is one that occurred a few weeks ago, when one of my four daughters and me, wherein she indicated that because the country chose an African-American male into the highest office, she has hope, certainty even, that a woman will be elected sooner rather than later.

We talked about how African-American males got the right to vote before women, and we wondered if that past event prepped us for this contemporary and future hope. That's a positive thing.

And then we got this from Scott, and I wanted to get both of you to react to this. Scott says: After watching interviews with the cast of "Django," "Django Unchained" of course the Quentin Tarantino film, and hearing that it's the first movie to show a black slave whipping a white slave owner, I wonder if those in charge of producing media have more courage to include these types of scenes since the election of a black president. FYI, I'm a white, 43-year-old male who loved "Django."

Keli, what do you think? Has it made people a little more courageous?

GOFF: I'm torn on this because I have so many issues with "Django" that have nothing to do with that. So I don't know if I'm the best person to ask, especially since I am a Tarantino fan, and I wasn't a fan of this flick. So I don't know. I think it's made people in the media more courageous to have these kinds of conversations we're having right now about race. I'll give you an example.

When the Trayvon Martin story broke, right, and you had the Jena Six story years before that that took a really long time for the media to ever wake up to, and it was really only because unknown black bloggers banded together to sort of push it to the mainstream media, whereas Trayvon Martin it took a little while for the media to catch on, but they really did catch on fast, and they really have, I think, done a really good job of sort of covering not just the story but some of the underlying issues, such as racial profiling, such as subtle racism.

I myself, as an example of conversations I wouldn't have had without President Obama, because Trayvon happened, and President Obama was asked about it and did address it, I ended up having conversations with white friends who had no idea I'd been racially profiled. You know, it was just so beyond the realm of possibility to them that even since I've been appearing on television, I was once followed out of the store and diplomatically accused of stealing something, which I didn't.

HEADLEE: And the Jena Six that you're referring to are the six black teens who were convicted in the beating of Justin Barker, a student in Louisiana, just to give commentary. But let's go to a phone call here. This is Bill calling from Panama City, Florida. Bill, what's changed in terms of race relations since Barack Obama's election?

BILL: Well, I - well, you know, just a comment. But I actually - I worked on an Air Force base, and it was very taboo for people to make racial comments, of most any kind. But, you know, I've heard it a lot now, and I think it happens to me. You know, I'm a white guy, and what happens is people feel comfortable. All the guys, I think, feel comfortable with me.

HEADLEE: Let me be - I'm sorry. Let me clarify here, Bill. You're saying it would have been taboo to make these racial comments before Barack Obama's election and has become sort of, in an unspoken way, OK to make openly racist comments since Barack Obama was elected.

BILL: You know, I don't know how do you say OK. I just know that I spent 20 years in the Air Force, and there are people that are there that are retired now, too, that openly make racial comments, you know, towards black people or people on welfare that you never heard before.

I mean, I had a conversation one day where a guy turned around. He said, you know, when we get him out of the White House, things will get better. And one of the supervisors said, well, you know, it's not really him. His comment was, oh, yeah, that's right. Once you have one of them in there, you got to let him stay eight years.

HEADLEE: Oh.

BILL: And you would never hear that, you know?

HEADLEE: All right. Well, thank you very much. That's Bill calling from Panama City, Florida. Keli, your reaction to that. This appears to be what you were talking about before.

GOFF: Yeah, which is why I'm not surprised, unfortunately, in my reaction because I think Gustavo made a really great point in the opening when he was talking about how so much more of it is issues-based, and that seems to be progress. But I would argue, actually, that that is part of the subtle racism I'm talking about. I'll give you a quick example.

The Klan membership has exploded in the last 14 years, right? And when you talk to the Klan - and I actually - I interviewed not someone from the Klan, but I did interview a white supremacist for a piece. Long story, but people can feel free to Google the piece. But I did - so then I did get a chance to talk to one on the phone, and they do keep speaking about issues, right?

They keep saying there're issues with Obama. They're very specific to what he's doing on, policy-wise. He wants to take their guns, et cetera, et cetera. But you can't convince me that the explosion of Klan membership is not - it's not really just about immigration policy. It's not really about guns.

It's about the fact that on top of someone pushing those issues, you have a black guy who, by the way, to them is not just black, but it's the white woman, the black father, you know, everything that they are sort of essentially against in the White House.

And so he has literally been called one of the greatest recruiting tools in the history of the Ku Klux Klan. That's not me saying that. That's experts on hate groups and themselves. They've agreed that he has been one of the best promotional tools.

Lastly, I just want to mention, not to plug my piece, but some of the incidents Gustavo was referring to in terms of racist (unintelligible), et cetera, tweets and Facebook posts from conservative elected officials, that's actually linked to in a slideshow that New York magazine put together that's in my piece today on Colin Powell's comments about racism in the GOP. That's up on The Root. So if they want to see 10 examples of racist comments from GOP elected officials, you can go there, or read the news.

(LAUGHTER)

HEADLEE: You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

If, you know - and, look, this isn't a political thing. I've heard racist comments or things that could be interpreted as racist coming from Harry Reid and other people as well. This is a conversation that we as America needs to have and perhaps are not...

GOFF: It's true.

HEADLEE: ...doing very well. Let me - let's go to another call here. This is Letty(ph) calling from San Antonio, Texas. Letty, what's changed in race relations since Barack Obama was elected?

LETTY: Well, one of the things that I've noticed is my son, a huge football fan, but he - there are not many African-American students in the school. And initially, he idolized African-Americans that he saw, you know, on - in football, sports. But with Barack Obama's presidency - and really that's the only president he's known - it's - it doesn't even faze him. He's like, of course, a black man can be president. He doesn't even think black. He just thinks, that man can be president. Why not?

And - but one of the counters to that is that he had heard statements in school from other students. I guess they're expressing what parents have said - and, of course, it's hurtful to him because he's just thinking this is our president. Let's root for him like he'd root for any team. So he's seen a little bit of both, which we would not - I don't think - definitely would not have been exposed to with another, you know, with another white president, with another white male.

The only problem is when I say, well, you know, just is - I try to explain how historic it is, he'll say like - it's like if a woman were to be president. He looks at me and thinks, well, that would never happen because, of course, it hasn't happened in his lifetime.

HEADLEE: Oh.

GOFF: Wow.

LETTY: But, you know, it's - that's what I'm saying. There has been a change, and I don't think we'll see that until a few years down the road with the people that have been exposed to it now, you know, being born and knowing the only president they've ever known is an African-American president. So I think that'll definitely have a profound change in society down the road.

HEADLEE: Yeah. I mean, we're looking years ahead. Thanks so much. That's Letty calling from San Antonio, Texas. Let me put this then to you, Gustavo Arellano. Is this idea that non-blacks and non-minorities feel it's OK to say things that could be interpreted as racist? Has it become OK for a non-minority to feel like they're a victim? Maybe that's the source of the fear and the anger.

ARELLANO: No, it's not OK at all. I find it hilarious when you do have people now saying, oh, you know, like some white folks or other people saying, we're the minority now. We're the afflicted people. It just ignores - it really ignores the reality of the situation, especially with - when it comes to Latinos.

Here in Southern California, of course, Latinos are now the majority. And there seems - in some circles, there's this fear that somehow, now that minorities are in power, we're going to turn to the worst excesses of the Antebellum South and, like Django, start whipping everyone into frenzy, or, you know, as Mexicans, start ripping the white, you know, ripping the hearts out of white people and eating them, which is absolutely silly because we are students of American history.

Those of us who have suffered the racism and prejudices of the past, we're going to make sure not to turn around and do the same thing. And for those - especially in my Ask A Mexican column, I've been doing this way before Obama. I've been doing it since 2004.

So when you asked earlier if the media now feels it's OK to talk about certain subjects, us in the alt-weekly press, we've been doing it since forever. That's a question for the mainstream media. But especially now for me, when you do have Latino politicians making, say, anti-black or anti-Jewish or anti any minority jokes or comments, I'm going to be doubly hard on them, telling them, look, we went through all this crap so we could be at a more equal society. And now, you're doing what we've always argued about forever. You're going to get doubly shamed and everyone should doubly criticize you for that.

HEADLEE: And yet, I think there's a lot of complaints that people on the left get away with it, Kelly.

GOFF: Yeah. I mean, look, I think I was very candid that the Harry Reid situation, were for your listeners who have forgotten, you know, he made the comment about how President Obama was essentially a more palatable candidate because he was fair-skinned and to speaks well.

HEADLEE: Articulate.

GOFF: And he used the term - I think, was it colored? It was colored, right?

HEADLEE: Yeah. He uses that and Negro sometimes, yes.

GOFF: Yes, Negro, sometimes.

So, you know, and I was very candid that, of course, people are - were letting him - were less harsh on him mainly because most racists don't go around trying to give black men more power, right? This is sort of, like, OK, that's a very odd strategy that he's trying to get the racists, who's trying the black guy to be - to have the most powerful perch in the country.

HEADLEE: Fair enough.

GOFF: But you're right that there are things that we let Democrats get away with that we sometimes shouldn't, right?

HEADLEE: Yeah, right.

ARELLANO: And he never should.

HEADLEE: That's Keli Goff, political correspondent for theroot.com. She was with us today from NPR New York. Gustavo Arellano is editor of OC Weekly, author of syndicated column "Ask a Mexican!" He's also author of "Taco USA." Thanks to both of you.

GOFF: Thank you much.

ARELLANO: (Unintelligible).

HEADLEE: When we come back, we'll hear Martin Luther King Jr.'s landmark "I Have a Dream" speech. We usually to play it on the third Monday in January. This year, that's Inauguration Day, so you'll hear it in a moment. I'm Celeste Headlee. It's TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Shifts In Race Relations Since Obama's Election

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President Barack Obama's election in 2008, sparked many discussions about how race relations would change in the United States. Many Americans hoped that the election of a black man to the highest office would provide opportunities for breakthroughs in racial equality and understanding.

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As a candidate, Barack Obama said we needed to reckon with race and with America's original sin, slavery. But as our first black president, he has avoided mention of race almost entirely. In having to be "twice as good" and "half as black," Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.

The irony of President Barack Obama is best captured in his comments on the death of Trayvon Martin, and the ensuing fray. Obama has pitched his presidency as a monument to moderation. He peppers his speeches with nods to ideas originally held by conservatives. He routinely cites Ronald Reagan. He effusively praises the enduring wisdom of the American people, and believes that the height of insight lies in the town square. Despite his sloganeering for change and progress, Obama is a conservative revolutionary, and nowhere is his conservative character revealed more than in the very sphere where he holds singular gravity-race.

Part of that conservatism about race has been reflected in his reticence: for most of his term in office, Obama has declined to talk about the ways in which race complicates the American present and, in particular, his own presidency. But then, last February, George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old insurance underwriter, shot and killed a black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman, armed with a 9 mm handgun, believed himself to be tracking the movements of a possible intruder. The possible intruder turned out to be a boy in a hoodie, bearing nothing but candy and iced tea. The local authorities at first declined to make an arrest, citing Zimmerman's claim of self-defense. Protests exploded nationally. Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea assumed totemic power. Celebrities-the actor Jamie Foxx, the former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, members of the Miami Heat-were photographed wearing hoodies. When Representative Bobby Rush of Chicago took to the House floor to denounce racial profiling, he was removed from the chamber after donning a hoodie mid-speech.

The reaction to the tragedy was, at first, trans-partisan. Conservatives either said nothing or offered tepid support for a full investigation-and in fact it was the Republican governor of Florida, Rick Scott, who appointed the special prosecutor who ultimately charged Zimmerman with second-degree murder. As civil-rights activists descended on Florida, National Review, a magazine that once opposed integration, ran a column proclaiming "Al Sharpton Is Right." The belief that a young man should be able to go to the store for Skittles and an iced tea and not be killed by a neighborhood-watch patroller seemed uncontroversial.

By the time reporters began asking the White House for comment, the president likely had already given the matter considerable thought. Obama is not simply America's first black president-he is the first president who could credibly teach a black-studies class. He is fully versed in the works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X. Obama's two autobiographies are deeply concerned with race, and in front of black audiences he is apt to cite important but obscure political figures such as George Henry White, who served from 1897 to 1901 and was the last African American congressman to be elected from the South until 1970. But with just a few notable exceptions, the president had, for the first three years of his presidency, strenuously avoided talk of race. And yet, when Trayvon Martin died, talk Obama did:

When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids, and I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this, and that everybody pulls together-federal, state, and local-to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened ...

But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon. I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and that we're going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.

The moment Obama spoke, the case of Trayvon Martin passed out of its national-mourning phase and lapsed into something darker and more familiar-racialized political fodder. The illusion of consensus crumbled. Rush Limbaugh denounced Obama's claim of empathy. The Daily Caller, a conservative Web site, broadcast all of Martin's tweets, the most loutish of which revealed him to have committed the unpardonable sin of speaking like a 17-year-old boy. A white-supremacist site called Stormfront produced a photo of Martin with pants sagging, flipping the bird. Business Insider posted the photograph and took it down without apology when it was revealed to be a fake.

VIDEO: Ta-Nehisi Coates talks with Atlantic magazine editor Scott Stossel about the anger behind this article.

Newt Gingrich pounced on Obama's comments: "Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be okay because it wouldn't look like him?" Reverting to form, National Review decided the real problem was that we were interested in the deaths of black youths only when nonblacks pulled the trigger. John Derbyshire, writing for Taki's Magazine, an iconoclastic libertarian publication, composed a racist advice column for his children inspired by the Martin affair. (Among Derbyshire's tips: never help black people in any kind of distress; avoid large gatherings of black people; cultivate black friends to shield yourself from charges of racism.)

The notion that Zimmerman might be the real victim began seeping out into the country, aided by PR efforts by his family and legal team, as well as by various acts of stupidity-Spike Lee tweeting Zimmerman's address (an act made all the more repugnant by the fact that he had the wrong Zimmerman), NBC misleadingly editing a tape of Zimmerman's phone conversation with a police dispatcher to make Zimmerman seem to be racially profiling Martin. In April, when Zimmerman set up a Web site to collect donations for his defense, he raised more than $200,000 in two weeks, before his lawyer asked that he close the site and launched a new, independently managed legal-defense fund. Although the trial date has yet to be set, as of July the fund was still raking in up to $1,000 in donations daily.

But it would be wrong to attribute the burgeoning support for Zimmerman to the blunders of Spike Lee or an NBC producer. Before President Obama spoke, the death of Trayvon Martin was generally regarded as a national tragedy. After Obama spoke, Martin became material for an Internet vendor flogging paper gun-range targets that mimicked his hoodie and his bag of Skittles. (The vendor sold out within a week.) Before the president spoke, George Zimmerman was arguably the most reviled man in America. After the president spoke, Zimmerman became the patron saint of those who believe that an apt history of racism begins with Tawana Brawley and ends with the Duke lacrosse team.

The irony of Barack Obama is this: he has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear, by being "clean" (as Joe Biden once labeled him)-and yet his indelible blackness irradiates everything he touches. This irony is rooted in the greater ironies of the country he leads. For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts-one, an oft-stated love of democracy; the other, an undemocratic white supremacy inscribed at every level of government. In warring against that paradox, African Americans have historically been restricted to the realm of protest and agitation. But when President Barack Obama pledged to "get to the bottom of exactly what happened," he was not protesting or agitating. He was not appealing to federal power-he was employing it. The power was black-and, in certain quarters, was received as such.

No amount of rhetorical moderation could change this. It did not matter that the president addressed himself to "every parent in America." His insistence that "everybody [pull] together" was irrelevant. It meant nothing that he declined to cast aspersions on the investigating authorities, or to speculate on events. Even the fact that Obama expressed his own connection to Martin in the quietest way imaginable-"If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon"-would not mollify his opposition. It is, after all, one thing to hear "I am Trayvon Martin" from the usual placard-waving rabble-rousers. Hearing it from the commander of the greatest military machine in human history is another.

By virtue of his background-the son of a black man and a white woman, someone who grew up in multiethnic communities around the world-Obama has enjoyed a distinctive vantage point on race relations in America. Beyond that, he has displayed enviable dexterity at navigating between black and white America, and at finding a language that speaks to a critical mass in both communities. He emerged into national view at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, with a speech heralding a nation uncolored by old prejudices and shameful history. There was no talk of the effects of racism. Instead Obama stressed the power of parenting, and condemned those who would say that a black child carrying a book was "acting white." He cast himself as the child of a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas and asserted, "In no other country on Earth is my story even possible." When, as a senator, he was asked if the response to Hurricane Katrina evidenced racism, Obama responded by calling the "ineptitude" of the response "color-blind."

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others. Black America ever lives under that skeptical eye. Hence the old admonishments to be "twice as good." Hence the need for a special "talk" administered to black boys about how to be extra careful when relating to the police. And hence Barack Obama's insisting that there was no racial component to Katrina's effects; that name-calling among children somehow has the same import as one of the oldest guiding principles of American policy-white supremacy. The election of an African American to our highest political office was alleged to demonstrate a triumph of integration. But when President Obama addressed the tragedy of Trayvon Martin, he demonstrated integration's great limitation-that acceptance depends not just on being twice as good but on being half as black. And even then, full acceptance is still withheld. The larger effects of this withholding constrict Obama's presidential potential in areas affected tangentially-or seemingly not at all-by race. Meanwhile, across the country, the community in which Obama is rooted sees this fraudulent equality, and quietly seethes.

Obama's first term has coincided with a strategy of massive resistance on the part of his Republican opposition in the House, and a record number of filibuster threats in the Senate. It would be nice if this were merely a reaction to Obama's politics or his policies-if this resistance truly were, as it is generally described, merely one more sign of our growing "polarization" as a nation. But the greatest abiding challenge to Obama's national political standing has always rested on the existential fact that if he had a son, he'd look like Trayvon Martin. As a candidate, Barack Obama understood this.

"The thing is, a black man can't be president in America, given the racial aversion and history that's still out there," Cornell Belcher, a pollster for Obama, told the journalist Gwen Ifill after the 2008 election. "However, an extraordinary, gifted, and talented young man who happens to be black can be president."

Belcher's formulation grants the power of anti-black racism, and proposes to defeat it by not acknowledging it. His is the perfect statement of the Obama era, a time marked by a revolution that must never announce itself, by a democracy that must never acknowledge the weight of race, even while being shaped by it. Barack Obama governs a nation enlightened enough to send an African American to the White House, but not enlightened enough to accept a black man as its president.

Before Barack Obama, the "black president" lived in the African American imagination as a kind of cosmic joke, a phantom of all that could never be. White folks, whatever their talk of freedom and liberty, would not allow a black president. They could not tolerate Emmett's boyish gaze. Dr. King turned the other cheek, and they blew it off. White folks shot Lincoln over "nigger equality," ran Ida Wells out of Memphis, beat Freedom Riders over bus seats, slaughtered Medgar in his driveway like a dog. The comedian Dave Chappelle joked that the first black president would need a "Vice President Santiago"-because the only thing that would ensure his life in the White House was a Hispanic president-in-waiting. A black president signing a bill into law might as well sign his own death certificate.

The moment Obama spoke, the Trayvon case passed out of its mourning phase and into something dark and familiar-racialized political fodder.

And even if white folks could moderate their own penchant for violence, we could not moderate our own. A long-suffering life on the wrong side of the color line had denuded black people of the delicacy necessary to lead the free world. In a skit on his 1977 TV comedy show, Richard Pryor, as a black president, conceded that he was "courting an awful lot of white women" and held a press conference that erupted into a riot after a reporter requested that the president's momma clean his house. More recently, the comedian Cedric the Entertainer joked that a black president would never have made it through Monicagate without turning a press conference into a battle royal. When Chappelle tried to imagine how a black George W. Bush would have justified the war against Saddam Hussein, his character ("Black Bush") simply yelled, "The nigger tried to kill my father!"

Thus, in hard jest, the paradoxes and problems of a theoretical black presidency were given voice. Racism would not allow a black president. Nor would a blackness, forged by America's democratic double-talk, that was too ghetto and raw for the refinement of the Oval Office. Just beneath the humor lurked a resonant pain, the scars of history, an aching doubt rooted in the belief that "they" would never accept us. And so in our Harlems and Paradise Valleys, we invoked a black presidency the way a legion of 5-foot point guards might invoke the dunk-as evidence of some great cosmic injustice, weighty in its import, out of reach.

And yet Spud Webb lives.

When presidential candidate Barack Obama presented himself to the black community, he was not to be believed. It strained credulity to think that a man sporting the same rigorously managed haircut as Jay-Z, a man who was a hard-core pickup basketball player, and who was married to a dark-skinned black woman from the South Side, could coax large numbers of white voters into the booth. Obama's blackness quotient is often a subject of debate. (He himself once joked, while speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists in 2007, "I want to apologize for being a little bit late, but you guys keep on asking whether I'm black enough.") But despite Obama's post-election reluctance to talk about race, he has always displayed both an obvious affinity for black culture and a distinct ability to defy black America's worst self-conceptions.

The crude communal myth about black men is that we are in some manner unavailable to black women-either jailed, dead, gay, or married to white women. A corollary myth posits a direct and negative relationship between success and black culture. Before we actually had one, we could not imagine a black president who loved being black. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama describes his first kiss with the woman who would become his wife as tasting "of chocolate." The line sounds ripped from Essence magazine. That's the point.

These cultural cues became important during Obama's presidential run and beyond. Obama doesn't merely evince blackness; he uses his blackness to signal and court African Americans, semaphoring in a cultural dialect of our creation- crooning Al Green at the Apollo, name-checking Young Jeezy, regularly appearing on the cover of black magazines, weighing the merits of Jay-Z versus Kanye West, being photographed in the White House with a little black boy touching his hair. There is often something mawkish about this signaling-like a Virginia politico thickening his southern accent when talking to certain audiences. If you've often been the butt of political signaling (Sister Souljah, Willie Horton), and rarely the recipient, these displays of cultural affinity are powerful. And they are all the more powerful because Obama has been successful. Whole sections of America that we had assumed to be negrophobic turned out in support of him in 2008. Whatever Obama's other triumphs, arguably his greatest has been an expansion of the black imagination to encompass this: the idea that a man can be culturally black and many other things also-biracial, Ivy League, intellectual, cosmopolitan, temperamentally conservative, presidential.

It is often said that Obama's presidency has given black parents the right to tell their kids with a straight face that they can do anything. This is a function not only of Obama's election to the White House but of the way his presidency broadcasts an easy, almost mystic, blackness to the world. The Obama family represents our ideal imagining of ourselves-an ideal we so rarely see on any kind of national stage.

What black people are experiencing right now is a kind of privilege previously withheld-seeing our most sacred cultural practices and tropes validated in the world's highest office. Throughout the whole of American history, this kind of cultural power was wielded solely by whites, and with such ubiquity that it was not even commented upon. The expansion of this cultural power beyond the private province of whites has been a tremendous advance for black America. Conversely, for those who've long treasured white exclusivity, the existence of a President Barack Obama is discombobulating, even terrifying. For as surely as the iconic picture of the young black boy reaching out to touch the president's curly hair sends one message to black America, it sends another to those who have enjoyed the power of whiteness.

In America, the rights to own property, to serve on a jury, to vote, to hold public office, to rise to the presidency have historically been seen as belonging only to those people who showed particular integrity. Citizenship was a social contract in which persons of moral standing were transformed into stakeholders who swore to defend the state against threats external and internal. Until a century and a half ago, slave rebellion ranked high in the fevered American imagination of threats necessitating such an internal defense.

In the early years of our republic, when democracy was still an unproven experiment, the Founders were not even clear that all white people should be entrusted with this fragile venture, much less the bestial African. Thus Congress, in 1790, declared the following:

All free white persons who have, or shall migrate into the United States, and shall give satisfactory proof, before a magistrate, by oath, that they intend to reside therein, and shall take an oath of allegiance, and shall have resided in the United States for one whole year, shall be entitled to all the rights of citizenship.

In such ways was the tie between citizenship and whiteness in America made plain from the very beginning. By the 19th century, there was, as Matthew Jacobson, a professor of history and American studies at Yale, has put it, "an unquestioned acceptance of whiteness as a prerequisite for naturalized citizenship." Debating Abraham Lincoln during the race for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois in 1858, Stephen Douglas asserted that "this government was made on the white basis" and that the Framers had made "no reference either to the Negro, the savage Indians, the Feejee, the Malay, or an other inferior and degraded race, when they spoke of the equality of men."

After the Civil War, Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor as president and a unionist, scoffed at awarding the Negro the franchise:

The peculiar qualities which should characterize any people who are fit to decide upon the management of public affairs for a great state have seldom been combined. It is the glory of white men to know that they have had these qualities in sufficient measure to build upon this continent a great political fabric and to preserve its stability for more than ninety years, while in every other part of the world all similar experiments have failed. But if anything can be proved by known facts, if all reasoning upon evidence is not abandoned, it must be acknowledged that in the progress of nations Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.

The notion of blacks as particularly unfit for political equality persisted well into the 20th century. As the nation began considering integrating its military, a young West Virginian wrote to a senator in 1944:

I am a typical American, a southerner, and 27 years of age ... I am loyal to my country and know but reverence to her flag, BUT I shall never submit to fight beneath that banner with a negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throw back to the blackest specimen from the wilds.

The writer-who never joined the military, but did join the Ku Klux Klan-was Robert Byrd, who died in 2010 as the longest-serving U.S. senator in history. Byrd's rejection of political equality was echoed in 1957 by William F. Buckley Jr., who addressed the moral disgrace of segregation by endorsing disenfranchisement strictly based on skin color:

The central question that emerges-and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal-is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes-the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.

Buckley, the founder of National Review, went on to assert, "The great majority of the Negroes of the South who do not vote do not care to vote and would not know for what to vote if they could."

The myth of "twice as good" that makes Obama possible also smothers him. It holds that blacks feel no anger toward their tormentors.

The idea that blacks should hold no place of consequence in the American political future has affected every sector of American society, transforming whiteness itself into a monopoly on American possibilities. White people like Byrd and Buckley were raised in a time when, by law, they were assured of never having to compete with black people for the best of anything. Blacks used inferior public pools and inferior washrooms, attended inferior schools. The nicest restaurants turned them away. In large swaths of the country, blacks paid taxes but could neither attend the best universities nor exercise the right to vote. The best jobs, the richest neighborhoods, were giant set-asides for whites-universal affirmative action, with no pretense of restitution.

Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation: these bonded white people into a broad aristocracy united by the salient fact of unblackness. What Byrd saw in an integrated military was the crumbling of the ideal of whiteness, and thus the crumbling of an entire society built around it. Whatever the saintly nonviolent rhetoric used to herald it, racial integration was a brutal assault on whiteness. The American presidency, an unbroken streak of nonblack men, was, until 2008, the greatest symbol of that old order.

Watching Obama rack up victories in states like Virginia, New Mexico, Ohio, and North Carolina on Election Night in 2008, anyone could easily conclude that racism, as a national force, had been defeated. The thought should not be easily dismissed: Obama's victory demonstrates the incredible distance this country has traveled. (Indeed, William F. Buckley Jr. later revised his early positions on race; Robert Byrd spent decades in Congress atoning for his.) That a country that once took whiteness as the foundation of citizenship would elect a black president is a victory. But to view this victory as racism's defeat is to forget the precise terms on which it was secured, and to ignore the quaking ground beneath Obama's feet.

During the 2008 primary, The New Yorker's George Packer journeyed to Kentucky and was shocked by the brazen declarations of white identity. "I think he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race," one voter told Packer. "That's my opinion." That voter was hardly alone. In 2010, Michael Tesler, a political scientist at Brown University, and David Sears, a professor of psychology and political science at UCLA, were able to assess the impact of race in the 2008 primary by comparing data from two 2008 campaign and election studies with previous surveys of racial resentment and voter choice. As they wrote in Obama's Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America:

No other factor, in fact, came close to dividing the Democratic primary electorate as powerfully as their feelings about African Americans. The impact of racial attitudes on individual vote decisions ... was so strong that it appears to have even outstripped the substantive impact of racial attitudes on Jesse Jackson's more racially charged campaign for the nomination in 1988.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a doctoral candidate in economics at Harvard, is studying how racial animus may have cost Obama votes in 2008. First, Stephens-Davidowitz ranked areas of the country according to how often people there typed racist search terms into Google. (The areas with the highest rates of racially charged search terms were West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, upstate New York, and southern Mississippi.) Then he compared Obama's voting results in those areas with John Kerry's four years earlier. So, for instance, in 2004 Kerry received 50 percent of the vote in the media markets of both Denver and Wheeling (which straddles the Ohio-West Virginia border). Based on the Democratic groundswell in 2008, Obama should have received about 57 percent of the popular vote in both regions. But that's not what happened. In the Denver area, which had one of the nation's lowest rates of racially charged Google searching, Obama received the predicted 57 percent. But in Wheeling, which had a high rate of racially charged Google searching, Obama's share of the popular vote was only 48 percent. Of course, Obama also picked up some votes because he is black. But, aggregating his findings nationally, Stephens-Davidowitz has concluded that Obama lost between 3 and 5 percentage points of the popular vote to racism.

After Obama won, the longed-for post-racial moment did not arrive; on the contrary, racism intensified. At rallies for the nascent Tea Party, people held signs saying things like Obama Plans White Slavery. Steve King, an Iowa congressman and Tea Party favorite, complained that Obama "favors the black person." In 2009, Rush Limbaugh, bard of white decline, called Obama's presidency a time when "the white kids now get beat up, with the black kids cheering 'Yeah, right on, right on, right on.' And of course everybody says the white kid deserved it-he was born a racist, he's white." On Fox & Friends, Glenn Beck asserted that Obama had exposed himself as a guy "who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture ... This guy is, I believe, a racist." Beck later said he was wrong to call Obama a racist. That same week he also called the president's health-care plan "reparations."

One possible retort to this pattern of racial paranoia is to cite the Clinton years, when an ideological fever drove the right wing to derangement, inspiring militia movements and accusations that the president had conspired to murder his own lawyer, Vince Foster. The upshot, by this logic, is that Obama is experiencing run-of-the-mill political opposition in which race is but a minor factor among much larger ones, such as party affiliation. But the argument assumes that party affiliation itself is unconnected to race. It pretends that only Toni Morrison took note of Clinton's particular appeal to black voters. It forgets that Clinton felt compelled to attack Sister Souljah. It forgets that whatever ignoble labels the right wing pinned on Clinton's health-care plan, "reparations" did not rank among them.

Michael Tesler, following up on his research with David Sears on the role of race in the 2008 campaign, recently published a study assessing the impact of race on opposition to and support for health-care reform. The findings are bracing. Obama's election effectively racialized white Americans' views, even of health-care policy. As Tesler writes in a paper published in July in The American Journal of Political Science, "Racial attitudes had a significantly greater impact on health care opinions when framed as part of President Obama's plan than they had when the exact same policies were attributed to President Clinton's 1993 health care initiative."

While Beck and Limbaugh have chosen direct racial assault, others choose simply to deny that a black president actually exists. One in four Americans (and more than half of all Republicans) believe Obama was not born in this country, and thus is an illegitimate president. More than a dozen state legislatures have introduced "birther bills" demanding proof of Obama's citizenship as a condition for putting him on the 2012 ballot. Eighteen percent of Republicans believe Obama to be a Muslim. The goal of all this is to delegitimize Obama's presidency. If Obama is not truly American, then America has still never had a black president.

White resentment has not cooled as the Obama presidency has proceeded. Indeed, the GOP presidential-primary race featured candidates asserting that the black family was better off under slavery (Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum); claiming that Obama, as a black man, should oppose abortion (Santorum again); or denouncing Obama as a "food-stamp president" (Newt Gingrich).

The resentment is not confined to Republicans. Earlier this year, West Virginia gave 41 percent of the popular vote during the Democratic primary to Keith Judd, a white incarcerated felon (Judd actually defeated Obama in 10 counties). Joe Manchin, one of West Virginia's senators, and Earl Ray Tomblin, its governor, are declining to attend this year's Democratic convention, and will not commit to voting for Obama.

It is often claimed that Obama's unpopularity in coal-dependent West Virginia stems from his environmental policies. But recall that no state ranked higher on Seth Stephens-Davidowitz's racism scale than West Virginia. Moreover, Obama was unpopular in West Virginia before he became president: even at the tail end of the Democratic primaries in 2008, Hillary Clinton walloped Obama by 41 points. A fifth of West Virginia Democrats openly professed that race played a role in their vote.

What we are now witnessing is not some new and complicated expression of white racism-rather, it's the dying embers of the same old racism that once rendered the best pickings of America the exclusive province of unblackness. Confronted by the thoroughly racialized backlash to Obama's presidency, a stranger to American politics might conclude that Obama provoked the response by relentlessly pushing an agenda of radical racial reform. Hardly. Daniel Gillion, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies race and politics, examined the Public Papers of the Presidents, a compilation of nearly all public presidential utterances-proclamations, news-conference remarks, executive orders-and found that in his first two years as president, Obama talked less about race than any other Democratic president since 1961. Obama's racial strategy has been, if anything, the opposite of radical: he declines to use his bully pulpit to address racism, using it instead to engage in the time-honored tradition of black self-hectoring, railing against the perceived failings of black culture.

His approach is not new. It is the approach of Booker T. Washington, who, amid a sea of white terrorists during the era of Jim Crow, endorsed segregation and proclaimed the South to be a land of black opportunity. It is the approach of L. Douglas Wilder, who, in 1986, not long before he became Virginia's first black governor, kept his distance from Jesse Jackson and told an NAACP audience: "Yes, dear Brutus, the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves ... Some blacks don't particularly care for me to say these things, to speak to values ... Somebody's got to. We've been too excusing." It was even, at times, the approach of Jesse Jackson himself, who railed against "the rising use of drugs, and babies making babies, and violence ... cutting away our opportunity."

The strategy can work. Booker T.'s Tuskegee University still stands. Wilder became the first black governor in America since Reconstruction. Jackson's campaign moved the Democratic nominating process toward proportional allocation of delegates, a shift that Obama exploited in the 2008 Democratic primaries by staying competitive enough in big states to rack up delegates even where he was losing, and rolling up huge vote margins (and delegate-count victories) in smaller ones.

And yet what are we to make of an integration premised, first, on the entire black community's emulating the Huxtables? An equality that requires blacks to be twice as good is not equality-it's a double standard. That double standard haunts and constrains the Obama presidency, warning him away from candor about America's sordid birthmark.

Another political tradition in black America, running counter to the one publicly embraced by Obama and Booker T. Washington, casts its skepticism not simply upon black culture but upon the entire American project. This tradition stretches back to Frederick Douglass, who, in 1852, said of his native country, "There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour." It extends through Martin Delany, through Booker T.'s nemesis W. E. B. Du Bois, and through Malcolm X. It includes Martin Luther King Jr., who at the height of the Vietnam War called America "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." And it includes Obama's former pastor, he of the famous "God Damn America" sermon, Jeremiah Wright.

The Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy, in his 2011 book, The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, examines this tradition by looking at his own father and Reverend Wright in the context of black America's sense of patriotism. Like Wright, the elder Kennedy was a veteran of the U.S. military, a man seared and radicalized by American racism, forever remade as a vociferous critic of his native country: in virtually any American conflict, Kennedy's father rooted for the foreign country.

The deep skepticism about the American project that Kennedy's father and Reverend Wright evince is an old tradition in black America. Before Frederick Douglass worked, during the Civil War, for the preservation of the Union, he called for his country's destruction. "I have no love for America," he declaimed in a lecture to the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1847. "I have no patriotism ... I desire to see [the government] overthrown as speedily as possible and its Constitution shivered in a thousand fragments."

Kennedy notes that Douglass's denunciations were the words of a man who not only had endured slavery but was living in a country where whites often selected the Fourth of July as a special day to prosecute a campaign of racial terror:

On July 4, 1805, whites in Philadelphia drove blacks out of the square facing Independence Hall. For years thereafter, blacks attended Fourth of July festivities in that city at their peril. On July 4, 1834, a white mob in New York City burned down the Broadway Tabernacle because of the antislavery and antiracist views of the church's leaders. Firefighters in sympathy with the arsonists refused to douse the conflagration. On July 4, 1835, a white mob in Canaan, New Hampshire, destroyed a school open to blacks that was run by an abolitionist. The antebellum years were liberally dotted with such episodes.

Jeremiah Wright was born into an America of segregation-overt in the South and covert in the North, but wounding wherever. He joined the Marines, vowing service to his country, at a time when he wouldn't have been allowed to vote in some states. He built his ministry in a community reeling from decades of job and housing discrimination, and heaving under the weight of drugs, gun violence, and broken families. Wright's world is emblematic of the African Americans he ministered to, people reared on the anti-black-citizenship tradition-poll taxes, states pushing stringent voter-ID laws-of Stephen Douglas and Andrew Johnson and William F. Buckley Jr. The message is "You are not American." The countermessage- God damn America -is an old one, and is surprising only to people unfamiliar with the politics of black life in this country. Unfortunately, that is an apt description of large swaths of America.

Whatever the context for Wright's speech, the surfacing of his remarks in 2008 was utterly inconvenient not just for the Obama campaign but for much of black America. One truism holds that black people are always anxious to talk about race, eager to lecture white people at every juncture about how wrong they are and about the price they must pay for past and ongoing sins. But one reason Obama rose so quickly was that African Americans are war-weary. It was not simply the country at large that was tired of the old Baby Boomer debates. Blacks, too, were sick of talking about affirmative action and school busing. There was a broad sense that integration had failed us, and a growing disenchantment with our appointed spokespeople. Obama's primary triumphs in predominantly white states gave rise to rumors of a new peace, one many blacks were anxious to achieve.

And even those black Americans who embrace the tradition of God Damn America do so not with glee but with deep pain and anguish. Both Kennedy's father and Wright were military men. My own father went to Vietnam dreaming of John Wayne, but came back quoting Malcolm X. The poet Lucille Clifton once put it succinctly:

They act like they don't love their country
No
what it is
is they found out
their country don't love them.

In 2008, as Obama's election became imaginable, it seemed possible that our country had indeed, at long last, come to love us. We did not need our Jeremiah Wrights, our Jesse Jacksons, our products of the polarized '60s getting in the way. Indeed, after distancing himself from Wright, Obama lost almost no black support.

Obama offered black America a convenient narrative that could be meshed with the larger American story. It was a narrative premised on Crispus Attucks, not the black slaves who escaped plantations and fought for the British; on the 54th Massachusetts, not Nat Turner; on stoic and saintly Rosa Parks, not young and pregnant Claudette Colvin; on a Christlike Martin Luther King Jr., not an avenging Malcolm X. Jeremiah Wright's presence threatened to rupture that comfortable narrative by symbolizing that which makes integration impossible-black rage.

From the "inadequate black male" diatribe of the Hillary Clinton supporter Harriet Christian in 2008, to Rick Santelli's 2009 rant on CNBC against subsidizing "losers' mortgages," to Representative Joe Wilson's "You lie!" outburst during Obama's September 2009 address to Congress, to John Boehner's screaming "Hell no!" on the House floor about Obamacare in 2010, politicized rage has marked the opposition to Obama. But the rules of our racial politics require that Obama never respond in like fashion. So frightening is the prospect of black rage given voice and power that when Obama was a freshman senator, he was asked, on national television, to denounce the rage of Harry Belafonte. This fear continued with demands that he keep his distance from Louis Farrakhan and culminated with Reverend Wright and a presidency that must never betray any sign of rage toward its white opposition.

Thus the myth of "twice as good" that makes Barack Obama possible also smothers him. It holds that African Americans-enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against, and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history-feel no anger toward their tormentors. Of course, very little in our history argues that those who seek to tell bold truths about race will be rewarded. But it was Obama himself, as a presidential candidate in 2008, who called for such truths to be spoken. "Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now," he said in his "More Perfect Union" speech, which he delivered after a furor erupted over Reverend Wright's "God Damn America" remarks. And yet, since taking office, Obama has virtually ignored race.

Whatever the political intelligence of this calculus, it has broad and deep consequences. The most obvious result is that it prevents Obama from directly addressing America's racial history, or saying anything meaningful about present issues tinged by race, such as mass incarceration or the drug war. There have been calls for Obama to take a softer line on state-level legalization of marijuana or even to stand for legalization himself. Indeed, there is no small amount of inconsistency in our black president's either ignoring or upholding harsh drug laws that every day injure the prospects of young black men-laws that could have ended his own, had he been of another social class and arrested for the marijuana use he openly discusses. But the intellectual argument doubles as the counterargument. If the fact of a black president is enough to racialize the wonkish world of health-care reform, what havoc would the Obama touch wreak upon the already racialized world of drug policy?

What we are witnessing is not some new racism-it's the dying embers of the same old racism that rendered the best pickings the province of unblackness.

The political consequences of race extend beyond the domestic. I am, like many liberals, horrified by Obama's embrace of a secretive drone policy, and particularly the killing of American citizens without any restraints. A president aware of black America's tenuous hold on citizenship, of how the government has at times secretly conspired against its advancement-a black president with a broad sense of the world-should know better. Except a black president with Obama's past is the perfect target for right-wing attacks depicting him as weak on terrorism. The president's inability to speak candidly on race cannot be bracketed off from his inability to speak candidly on everything. Race is not simply a portion of the Obama story. It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics.

But whatever the politics, a total submission to them is a disservice to the country. No one knows this better than Obama himself, who once described patriotism as more than pageantry and the scarfing of hot dogs. "When our laws, our leaders, or our government are out of alignment with our ideals, then the dissent of ordinary Americans may prove to be one of the truest expressions of patriotism," Obama said in Independence, Missouri, in June 2008. Love of country, like all other forms of love, requires that you tell those you care about not simply what they want to hear but what they need to hear.

But in the age of the Obama presidency, expressing that kind of patriotism is presumably best done quietly, politely, and with great deference.

This spring I flew down to Albany, Georgia, and spent the day with Shirley Sherrod, a longtime civil-rights activist who embodies exactly the kind of patriotism that Obama esteems. Albany is in Dougherty County, where the poverty rate hangs around 30 percent-double that of the rest of the state. On the drive in from the airport, the selection of vendors-payday loans, title loans, and car dealers promising no credit check-evidenced the statistic.

When I met Sherrod at her office, she was working to get a birthday card out to Roger Spooner, whose farm she'd once fought to save. In July 2010, the conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart posted video clips on his Web site of a speech Sherrod had delivered to the NAACP the previous March. The video was edited so that Sherrod, then an official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, appeared to be bragging about discriminating against a white farmer and thus enacting a fantasy of racial revenge. The point was to tie Obama to the kind of black rage his fevered enemies often impute to him. Fearing exactly that, Sherrod's supervisors at the USDA called her in the middle of a long drive and had her submit her resignation via BlackBerry, telling her, "You're going to be on Glenn Beck tonight."

Glenn Beck did eventually do a segment on Sherrod-one in which he attacked the administration for forcing her out. As it turned out, the full context showed that Sherrod was actually documenting her own turn away from racial anger. The farmer who was the subject of the story came forward, along with his wife, and explained that Sherrod had worked tirelessly to help the family. The farmer was Roger Spooner.

Sherrod's career as an activist, first in civil rights and then later in the world of small farmers like Roger Spooner, was not chosen so much as thrust upon her. Her cousin had been lynched in 1943. Her father was shot and killed by a white relative in a dispute over some cows. There were three witnesses, but the grand jury in her native Baker County did not indict the suspect. Sherrod became an activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, registering voters near her hometown. Her husband, Charles Sherrod, was instrumental in leading the Albany Movement, which attracted Martin Luther King Jr. to town. But when Stokely Carmichael rose to lead SNCC and took it in a black-nationalist direction, the Sherrods, committed to nonviolence and integration, faced a weighty choice. Carmichael himself had been committed to nonviolence, until the killings and beatings he encountered as a civil-rights activist took their toll. Sherrod, with a past haunted by racist violence, would have seemed ripe for recruitment to the nationalist line. But she, along with her husband, declined, leaving SNCC in order to continue in the tradition of King and nonviolence.

Her achievements from then on are significant. She helped pioneer the farm-collective movement in America, and co-founded New Communities-a sprawling 6,000-acre collective that did everything from growing crops to canning sugar cane and sorghum. New Communities folded in 1985, largely because Ronald Reagan's USDA refused to sign off on a loan, even as it was signing off on money for smaller-scale white farmers. Sherrod went on to work with Farm Aid. She befriended Willie Nelson, held a fellowship with the Kellogg Foundation, and was shortlisted for a job in President Clinton's Agriculture Department. Still, she remained relatively unknown except to students of the civil-rights movement and activists who promoted the rights of small farmers. And unknown she would have remained, had she not been very publicly forced out of her position by the administration of the country's first black president.

Through most of her career as an agriculture activist, Sherrod had found the USDA to be a barrier to the success of black farmers. What hurt black farms the most were the discriminatory practices of local officials in granting loans. Sherrod spent years protesting these practices. But then, after the election of Barack Obama, she was hired by the USDA, where she would be supervising the very people she'd once fought. Now she would have a chance to ensure fair and nondiscriminatory lending practices. Her appointment represented the kind of unnoticed but significant changes Obama's election brought.

But then the administration, intimidated by a resurgent right wing specializing in whipping up racial resentment, compelled Sherrod to resign on the basis of the misleading clips. When the full tape emerged, the administration was left looking ridiculous.

And cowardly. An e-mail chain later surfaced in which the White House congratulated Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack's staff for getting ahead of the news cycle. None of them had yet seen the full tape. That the Obama administration would fold so easily gives some sense of how frightened it was of a protracted fight with any kind of racial subtext, particularly one that had a subtext of black rage. Its enemies understood this, and when no black rage could be found, they concocted some. And the administration, in a panic, knuckled under.

Violence at the hands of whites robbed Shirley Sherrod of a cousin and a father. White rage outlined the substantive rules of her life: Don't quarrel with white people. Don't look them in the eye. Avoid Route 91 after dark. White racism destroyed New Communities, a fact validated by the nearly $13 million the organization received in the class-action suit it joined alleging racial discrimination by the local USDA officials granting loan applications. (Which means that her being forced out by Vilsack was the second time the USDA had wronged her directly.) And yet through it all, Sherrod has hewed to the rule of "twice as good." She has preached nonviolence and integration. The very video that led to her dismissal was of a speech aimed at black people, warning them against the dangers of succumbing to rage.

Acceptance depends not just on being twice as good but on being half as black. The community in which Obama is rooted sees this fraudulent equality and seethes.

Driving down a sparse country road, Sherrod and I pulled over to a grassy footpath and stepped out at the spot where her father had been shot and killed in 1965. We then drove a few miles into Newton, and stopped at a large brick building that used to be the courthouse where Sherrod had tried to register to vote a few months after her father's death but had been violently turned back by the sheriff; where a year later Sherrod's mother pursued a civil case against her husband's killer. (She lost.) For this, Sherrod's mother enjoyed routine visits from white terrorists, which abated only after she, pregnant with her dead husband's son, appeared in the doorway with a gun and began calling out names of men in the mob.

When we got back into the car, I asked Sherrod why she hadn't given in to rage against her father's killers and sided with Stokely Carmichael. "It was simple for me," she said. "I really wanted to work. I wanted to win."

I asked Sherrod if she thought the president had a grasp of the specific history of the region and of the fights waged and the sacrifices made in order to make his political journey possible. "I don't think he does," Sherrod said. "When he called me [shortly after the incident], he kept saying he understood our struggle and all we'd fought for. He said, 'Read my book and you'll see.' But I had read his book."

In 2009, Sergeant James Crowley arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr., the eminent professor of African American studies at Harvard, at his front door in Cambridge, for, essentially, sassing him. When President Obama publicly asserted the stupidity of Crowley's action, he was so besieged that the controversy threatened to derail what he hoped would be his signature achievement-health-care reform. Obama, an African American male who had risen through the ranks of the American elite, was no doubt sensitive to untoward treatment at the hands of the police. But his expounding upon it so provoked right-wing rage that he was forced away from doing the kind of truth-telling he'd once lauded. "I don't know if you've noticed," Obama said at the time, "but nobody's been paying much attention to health care."

Shirley Sherrod has worked all her life to make a world where the rise of a black president born of a biracial marriage is both conceivable and legal. She has endured the killing of relatives, the ruination of enterprises, and the defaming of her reputation. Crowley, for his actions, was feted in the halls of American power, honored by being invited to a "beer summit" with the man he had arrested and the leader of the free world. Shirley Sherrod, unjustly fired and defamed, was treated to a brief phone call from a man whose career, in some profound way, she had made possible. Sherrod herself is not immune to this point. She talked to me about crying with her husband while watching Obama's Election Night speech. In her new memoir, The Courage to Hope, she writes about a different kind of tears: when she discussed her firing with her family, her mother, who'd spent her life facing down racism at its most lethal, simply wept. "What will my babies say?," Sherrod cried to her husband, referring to their four small granddaughters. "How can I explain to my children that I got fired by the first black president?"

In 2000, an undercover police officer followed a young man named Prince Jones from suburban Maryland through Washington, D.C., into Northern Virginia and shot him dead, near the home of his girlfriend and 11-month-old daughter. Jones was a student at Howard University. His mother was a radiologist. He was also my friend. The officer tracking Prince thought he was on the trail of a drug dealer. But the dealer he was after was short and wore dreadlocks-Prince was tall and wore his hair cropped close. The officer was black. He wore dreadlocks and a T-shirt, in an attempt to look like a drug dealer. The ruse likely worked. He claimed that after Prince got out of his car and confronted him, he drew his gun and said "Police"; Prince returned to his car and repeatedly rammed the officer's unmarked car with his own vehicle. The story sounded wildly at odds with the young man I knew. But even if it was accurate, I could easily see myself frightened by a strange car following me for miles, and then reacting wildly when a man in civilian clothes pulled out a gun and claimed to be a cop. (The officer never showed a badge.)

No criminal charges were ever brought against Carlton Jones, the officer who killed my friend and rendered a little girl fatherless. It was as if society barely blinked. A few months later, I moved to New York. When 9/11 happened, I wanted nothing to do with any kind of patriotism, with the broad national ceremony of mourning. I had no sympathy for the firefighters, and something bordering on hatred for the police officers who had died. I lived in a country where my friend-twice as good-could be shot down mere footsteps from his family by agents of the state. God damn America, indeed.

I grew. I became a New Yorker. I came to understand the limits of anger. Watching Barack Obama crisscross the country to roaring white crowds, and then get elected president, I became convinced that the country really had changed-that time and events had altered the nation, and that progress had come in places I'd never imagined it could. When Osama bin Laden was killed, I cheered like everyone else. God damn al‑Qaeda.

When trans-partisan mourning erupted around Trayvon Martin, it reinforced my conviction that the world had changed since the death of Prince Jones. Like Prince, Trayvon was suspected of being a criminal chiefly because of the color of his skin. Like Prince's, Trayvon's killer claimed self-defense. Again, with little effort, I could see myself in the shoes of the dead man. But this time, society's response seemed so very different, so much more heartening.

Then the first black president spoke, and the Internet bloomed. Young people began "Trayvoning"-mocking the death of a black boy by photographing themselves in hoodies, with Skittles and iced tea, in a death pose.

In a democracy, so the saying goes, the people get the government they deserve. Part of Obama's genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites. Any black person who's worked in the professional world is well acquainted with this trick. But never has it been practiced at such a high level, and never have its limits been so obviously exposed. This need to talk in dulcet tones, to never be angry regardless of the offense, bespeaks a strange and compromised integration indeed, revealing a country so infantile that it can countenance white acceptance of blacks only when they meet an Al Roker standard.

And yet this is the uncertain foundation of Obama's historic victory-a victory that I, and my community, hold in the highest esteem. Who would truly deny the possibility of a black presidency in all its power and symbolism? Who would rob that little black boy of the right to feel himself affirmed by touching the kinky black hair of his president?

I think back to the first time I wrote Shirley Sherrod, requesting an interview. Here was a black woman with every reason in the world to bear considerable animosity toward Barack Obama. But she agreed to meet me only with great trepidation. She said she didn't "want to do anything to hurt" the president.

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As a candidate, Barack Obama said we needed to reckon with race and with America's original sin, slavery. But as our first black president, he has avoided mention of race almost entirely. In having to be "twice as good" and "half as black," Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.

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A history of the first African American White House-and of what came next

Ian Allen

"They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

I.
"Love Will Make You Do Wrong"

In the waning days of President Barack Obama's administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party, the full import of which no one could then grasp. It was late October, Friday the 21st, and the president had spent many of the previous weeks, as he would spend the two subsequent weeks, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. Things were looking up. Polls in the crucial states of Virginia and Pennsylvania showed Clinton with solid advantages. The formidable GOP strongholds of Georgia and Texas were said to be under threat. The moment seemed to buoy Obama. He had been light on his feet in these last few weeks, cracking jokes at the expense of Republican opponents and laughing off hecklers. At a rally in Orlando on October 28, he greeted a student who would be introducing him by dancing toward her and then noting that the song playing over the loudspeakers-the Gap Band's "Outstanding"-was older than she was. "This is classic!" he said. Then he flashed the smile that had launched America's first black presidency, and started dancing again. Three months still remained before Inauguration Day, but staffers had already begun to count down the days. They did this with a mix of pride and longing-like college seniors in early May. They had no sense of the world they were graduating into. None of us did.

Chapters

1. "Love Will Make You Do Wrong"

2. He Walked on Ice but Never Fell

3. "I Decided to Become Part of That World"

4. "You Still Gotta Go Back to the Hood"

5. "They Rode the Tiger"

6. "When You Left, You Took All of Me With You"

The farewell party, presented by BET (Black Entertainment Television), was the last in a series of concerts the first couple had hosted at the White House. Guests were asked to arrive at 5:30 p.m. By 6, two long lines stretched behind the Treasury Building, where the Secret Service was checking names. The people in these lines were, in the main, black, and their humor reflected it. The brisker queue was dubbed the "good-hair line" by one guest, and there was laughter at the prospect of the Secret Service subjecting us all to a "brown-paper-bag test." This did not come to pass, but security was tight. Several guests were told to stand in a makeshift pen and wait to have their backgrounds checked a second time.

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Dave Chappelle was there. He coolly explained the peril and promise of comedy in what was then still only a remotely potential Donald Trump presidency: "I mean, we never had a guy have his own pussygate scandal." Everyone laughed. A few weeks later, he would be roundly criticized for telling a crowd at the Cutting Room, in New York, that he had voted for Clinton but did not feel good about it. "She's going to be on a coin someday," Chappelle said. "And her behavior has not been coinworthy." But on this crisp October night, everything felt inevitable and grand. There was a slight wind. It had been in the 80s for much of that week. Now, as the sun set, the season remembered its name. Women shivered in their cocktail dresses. Gentlemen chivalrously handed over their suit coats. But when Naomi Campbell strolled past the security pen in a sleeveless number, she seemed as invulnerable as ever.

Cellphones were confiscated to prevent surreptitious recordings from leaking out. (This effort was unsuccessful. The next day, a partygoer would tweet a video of the leader of the free world dancing to Drake's "Hotline Bling.") After withstanding the barrage of security, guests were welcomed into the East Wing of the White House, and then ushered back out into the night, where they boarded a succession of orange-and-green trolleys. The singer and actress Janelle Monáe, her famous and fantastic pompadour preceding her, stepped on board and joked with a companion about the historical import of "sitting in the back of the bus." She took a seat three rows from the front and hummed into the night. The trolley dropped the guests on the South Lawn, in front of a giant tent. The South Lawn's fountain was lit up with blue lights. The White House proper loomed like a ghost in the distance. I heard the band, inside, beginning to play Al Green's "Let's Stay Together."

"Well, you can tell what type of night this is," Obama said from the stage, opening the event. "Not the usual ruffles and flourishes!"

The crowd roared.

"This must be a BET event!"

The crowd roared louder still.

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Obama placed the concert in the White House's musical tradition, noting that guests of the Kennedys had once done the twist at the residence-"the twerking of their time," he said, before adding, "There will be no twerking tonight. At least not by me."

The Obamas are fervent and eclectic music fans. In the past eight years, they have hosted performances at the White House by everyone from Mavis Staples to Bob Dylan to Tony Bennett to the Blind Boys of Alabama. After the rapper Common was invited to perform in 2011, a small fracas ensued in the right-wing media. He performed anyway-and was invited back again this glorious fall evening and almost stole the show. The crowd sang along to the hook for his hit ballad "The Light." And when he brought on the gospel singer Yolanda Adams to fill in for John Legend on the Oscar-winning song "Glory," glee turned to rapture.

De La Soul was there. The hip-hop trio had come of age as boyish B-boys with Gumby-style high-top fades. Now they moved across the stage with a lovely mix of lethargy and grace, like your favorite uncle making his way down the Soul Train line, wary of throwing out a hip. I felt a sense of victory watching them rock the crowd, all while keeping it in the pocket. The victory belonged to hip-hop-an art form birthed in the burning Bronx and now standing full grown, at the White House, unbroken and unedited. Usher led the crowd in a call-and-response: "Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud." Jill Scott showed off her operatic chops. Bell Biv DeVoe, contemporaries of De La, made history with their performance by surely becoming the first group to suggest to a presidential audience that one should "never trust a big butt and a smile."

The ties between the Obama White House and the hip-hop community are genuine. The Obamas are social with Beyoncé and Jay-Z. They hosted Chance the Rapper and Frank Ocean at a state dinner, and last year invited Swizz Beatz, Busta Rhymes, and Ludacris, among others, to discuss criminal-justice reform and other initiatives. Obama once stood in the Rose Garden passing large flash cards to the Hamilton creator and rapper Lin-Manuel Miranda, who then freestyled using each word on the cards. "Drop the beat," Obama said, inaugurating the session. At 55, Obama is younger than pioneering hip-hop artists like Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Kool Herc, and Kurtis Blow. If Obama's enormous symbolic power draws primarily from being the country's first black president, it also draws from his membership in hip-hop's foundational generation.

That night, the men were sharp in their gray or black suits and optional ties. Those who were not in suits had chosen to make a statement, like the dark-skinned young man who strolled in, sockless, with blue jeans cuffed so as to accentuate his gorgeous black-suede loafers. Everything in his ensemble seemed to say, "My fellow Americans, do not try this at home." There were women in fur jackets and high heels; others with sculpted naturals, the sides shaved close, the tops blooming into curls; others still in gold bamboo earrings and long blond dreads. When the actor Jesse Williams took the stage, seemingly awed before such black excellence, before such black opulence, assembled just feet from where slaves had once toiled, he simply said, "Look where we are. Look where we are right now."

This would not happen again, and everyone knew it. It was not just that there might never be another African American president of the United States. It was the feeling that this particular black family, the Obamas, represented the best of black people, the ultimate credit to the race, incomparable in elegance and bearing. "There are no more," the comedian Sinbad joked back in 2010. "There are no black men raised in Kansas and Hawaii. That's the last one. Y'all better treat this one right. The next one gonna be from Cleveland. He gonna wear a perm. Then you gonna see what it's really like." Throughout their residency, the Obamas had refrained from showing America "what it's really like," and had instead followed the first lady's motto, "When they go low, we go high." This was the ideal-black and graceful under fire-saluted that evening. The president was lionized as "our crown jewel." The first lady was praised as the woman "who put the O in Obama."

Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing "mere" about symbols. The power embedded in the word nigger is also symbolic. Burning crosses do not literally raise the black poverty rate, and the Confederate flag does not directly expand the wealth gap.

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Much as the unbroken ranks of 43 white male presidents communicated that the highest office of government in the country-indeed, the most powerful political offices in the world-was off-limits to black individuals, the election of Barack Obama communicated that the prohibition had been lifted. It communicated much more. Before Obama triumphed in 2008, the most-famous depictions of black success tended to be entertainers or athletes. But Obama had shown that it was "possible to be smart and cool at the same damn time," as Jesse Williams put it at the BET party. Moreover, he had not embarrassed his people with a string of scandals. Against the specter of black pathology, against the narrow images of welfare moms and deadbeat dads, his time in the White House had been an eight-year showcase of a healthy and successful black family spanning three generations, with two dogs to boot. In short, he became a symbol of black people's everyday, extraordinary Americanness.

Whiteness in America is a different symbol-a badge of advantage. In a country of professed meritocratic competition, this badge has long ensured an unerring privilege, represented in a 220-year monopoly on the highest office in the land. For some not-insubstantial sector of the country, the elevation of Barack Obama communicated that the power of the badge had diminished. For eight long years, the badge-holders watched him. They saw footage of the president throwing bounce passes and shooting jumpers. They saw him enter a locker room, give a businesslike handshake to a white staffer, and then greet Kevin Durant with something more soulful. They saw his wife dancing with Jimmy Fallon and posing, resplendent, on the covers of magazines that had, only a decade earlier, been almost exclusively, if unofficially, reserved for ladies imbued with the great power of the badge.

For the preservation of the badge, insidious rumors were concocted to denigrate the first black White House. Obama gave free cellphones to disheveled welfare recipients. Obama went to Europe and complained that "ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs." Obama had inscribed an Arabic saying on his wedding ring, then stopped wearing the ring, in observance of Ramadan. He canceled the National Day of Prayer; refused to sign certificates for Eagle Scouts; faked his attendance at Columbia University; and used a teleprompter to address a group of elementary-school students. The badge-holders fumed. They wanted their country back. And, though no one at the farewell party knew it, in a couple of weeks they would have it.

On this October night, though, the stage belonged to another America. At the end of the party, Obama looked out into the crowd, searching for Dave Chappelle. "Where's Dave?" he cried. And then, finding him, the president referenced Chappelle's legendary Brooklyn concert. "You got your block party. I got my block party." Then the band struck up Al Green's "Love and Happiness"-the evening's theme. The president danced in a line next to Ronnie DeVoe. Together they mouthed the lyrics: "Make you do right. Love will make you do wrong."

Video: The Making of a Black President

II.
He Walked on Ice but Never Fell

Last spring, I went to the White House to meet the president for lunch. I arrived slightly early and sat in the waiting area. I was introduced to a deaf woman who worked as the president's receptionist, a black woman who worked in the press office, a Muslim woman in a head scarf who worked on the National Security Council, and an Iranian American woman who worked as a personal aide to the president. This receiving party represented a healthy cross section of the people Donald Trump had been mocking, and would continue to spend his campaign mocking. At the time, the president seemed untroubled by Trump. When I told Obama that I thought Trump's candidacy was an explicit reaction to the fact of a black president, he said he could see that, but then enumerated other explanations. When assessing Trump's chances, he was direct: He couldn't win.

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This assessment was born out of the president's innate optimism and unwavering faith in the ultimate wisdom of the American people-the same traits that had propelled his unlikely five-year ascent from assemblyman in the Illinois state legislature to U.S. senator to leader of the free world. The speech that launched his rise, the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, emerged right from this logic. He addressed himself to his "fellow Americans, Democrats, Republicans, independents," all of whom, he insisted, were more united than they had been led to believe. America was home to devout worshippers and Little League coaches in blue states, civil libertarians and "gay friends" in red states. The presumably white "counties around Chicago" did not want their taxes burned on welfare, but they didn't want them wasted on a bloated Pentagon budget either. Inner-city black families, no matter their perils, understood "that government alone can't teach our kids to learn ... that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white."

Perceived differences were the work of "spinmasters and negative-ad peddlers who embrace the politics of 'anything goes.' " Real America had no use for such categorizations. By Obama's lights, there was no liberal America, no conservative America, no black America, no white America, no Latino America, no Asian America, only "the United States of America." All these disparate strands of the American experience were bound together by a common hope:

It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a mill worker's son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too.

This speech ran counter to the history of the people it sought to address. Some of those same immigrants had firebombed the homes of the children of those same slaves. That young naval lieutenant was an imperial agent for a failed, immoral war. American division was real. In 2004, John Kerry did not win a single southern state. But Obama appealed to a belief in innocence-in particular a white innocence-that ascribed the country's historical errors more to misunderstanding and the work of a small cabal than to any deliberate malevolence or widespread racism. America was good. America was great.

Over the next 12 years, I came to regard Obama as a skilled politician, a deeply moral human being, and one of the greatest presidents in American history. He was phenomenal-the most agile interpreter and navigator of the color line I had ever seen. He had an ability to emote a deep and sincere connection to the hearts of black people, while never doubting the hearts of white people. This was the core of his 2004 keynote, and it marked his historic race speech during the 2008 campaign at Philadelphia's National Constitution Center-and blinded him to the appeal of Trump. ("As a general proposition, it's hard to run for president by telling people how terrible things are," Obama once said to me.)

But if the president's inability to cement his legacy in the form of Hillary Clinton proved the limits of his optimism, it also revealed the exceptional nature of his presidential victories. For eight years Barack Obama walked on ice and never fell. Nothing in that time suggested that straight talk on the facts of racism in American life would have given him surer footing.

I had met the president a few times before. In his second term, I'd written articles criticizing him for his overriding trust in color-blind policy and his embrace of "personal responsibility" rhetoric when speaking to African Americans. I saw him as playing both sides. He would invoke his identity as a president of all people to decline to advocate for black policy-and then invoke his black identity to lecture black people for continuing to "make bad choices." In response, Obama had invited me, along with other journalists, to the White House for off-the-record conversations. I attempted to press my points in these sessions. My efforts were laughable and ineffective. I was always inappropriately dressed, and inappropriately calibrated in tone: In one instance, I was too deferential; in another, too bellicose. I was discombobulated by fear-not by fear of the power of his office (though that is a fearsome and impressive thing) but by fear of his obvious brilliance. It is said that Obama speaks "professorially," a fact that understates the quickness and agility of his mind. These were not like press conferences-the president would speak in depth and with great familiarity about a range of subjects. Once, I watched him effortlessly reply to queries covering everything from electoral politics to the American economy to environmental policy. And then he turned to me. I thought of George Foreman, who once booked an exhibition with multiple opponents in which he pounded five straight journeymen-and I suddenly had some idea of how it felt to be the last of them.

Last spring, we had a light lunch. We talked casually and candidly. He talked about the brilliance of LeBron James and Stephen Curry-not as basketball talents but as grounded individuals. I asked him whether he was angry at his father, who had abandoned him at a young age to move back to Kenya, and whether that motivated any of his rhetoric. He said it did not, and he credited the attitude of his mother and grandparents for this. Then it was my turn to be autobiographical. I told him that I had heard the kind of "straighten up" talk he had been giving to black youth, for instance in his 2013 Morehouse commencement address, all my life. I told him that I thought it was not sensitive to the inner turmoil that can be obscured by the hardness kids often evince. I told him I thought this because I had once been one of those kids. He seemed to concede this point, but I couldn't tell whether it mattered to him. Nonetheless, he agreed to a series of more formal conversations on this and other topics.

The improbability of a black president had once been so strong that its most vivid representations were comedic. Witness Dave Chappelle's profane Black Bush from the early 2000s ("This nigger very possibly has weapons of mass destruction! I can't sleep on that!") or Richard Pryor's black president in the 1970s promising black astronauts and black quarterbacks ("Ever since the Rams got rid of James Harris, my jaw's been uptight!"). In this model, so potent is the force of blackness that the presidency is forced to conform to it. But once the notion advanced out of comedy and into reality, the opposite proved to be true.

Obama's DNC speech is the key. It does not belong to the literature of "the struggle"; it belongs to the literature of prospective presidents-men (as it turns out) who speak not to gravity and reality, but to aspirations and dreams. When Lincoln invoked the dream of a nation "conceived in liberty" and pledged to the ideal that "all men are created equal," he erased the near-extermination of one people and the enslavement of another. When Roosevelt told the country that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," he invoked the dream of American omnipotence and boundless capability. But black people, then living under a campaign of terror for more than half a century, had quite a bit to fear, and Roosevelt could not save them. The dream Ronald Reagan invoked in 1984-that "it's morning again in America"-meant nothing to the inner cities, besieged as they were by decades of redlining policies, not to mention crack and Saturday-night specials. Likewise, Obama's keynote address conflated the slave and the nation of immigrants who profited from him. To reinforce the majoritarian dream, the nightmare endured by the minority is erased. That is the tradition to which the "skinny kid with a funny name" who would be president belonged. It is also the only tradition in existence that could have possibly put a black person in the White House.

Obama's embrace of white innocence was demonstrably necessary as a matter of political survival. Whenever he attempted to buck this directive, he was disciplined. His mild objection to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 2009 contributed to his declining favorability numbers among whites-still a majority of voters. His comments after the killing of Trayvon Martin-"If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon"-helped make that tragedy a rallying point for people who did not care about Martin's killer as much as they cared about finding ways to oppose the president. Michael Tesler, a political-science professor at UC Irvine, has studied the effect of Obama's race on the American electorate. "No other factor, in fact, came close to dividing the Democratic primary electorate as powerfully as their feelings about African Americans," he and his co-author, David O. Sears, concluded in their book, Obama's Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America. "The impact of racial attitudes on individual vote decisions ... was so strong that it appears to have even outstripped the substantive impact of racial attitudes on Jesse Jackson's more racially charged campaign for the nomination in 1988." When Tesler looked at the 2012 campaign in his second book, Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era, very little had improved. Analyzing the extent to which racial attitudes affected people associated with Obama during the 2012 election, Tesler concluded that "racial attitudes spilled over from Barack Obama into mass assessments of Mitt Romney, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Charlie Crist, and even the Obama family's dog Bo."

Yet despite this entrenched racial resentment, and in the face of complete resistance by congressional Republicans, overtly launched from the moment Obama arrived in the White House, the president accomplished major feats. He remade the nation's health-care system. He revitalized a Justice Department that vigorously investigated police brutality and discrimination, and he began dismantling the private-prison system for federal inmates. Obama nominated the first Latina justice to the Supreme Court, gave presidential support to marriage equality, and ended the U.S. military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, thus honoring the civil-rights tradition that had inspired him. And if his very existence inflamed America's racist conscience, it also expanded the country's anti-racist imagination. Millions of young people now know their only president to have been an African American. Writing for The New Yorker, Jelani Cobb once noted that "until there was a black Presidency it was impossible to conceive of the limitations of one." This is just as true of the possibilities. In 2014, the Obama administration committed itself to reversing the War on Drugs through the power of presidential commutation. The administration said that it could commute the sentences of as many as 10,000 prisoners. As of November, the president had commuted only 944 sentences. By any measure, Obama's effort fell woefully short, except for this small one: the measure of almost every other modern president who preceded him. Obama's 944 commutations are the most in nearly a century-and more than the past 11 presidents' combined.

Obama was born into a country where laws barring his very conception-let alone his ascendancy to the presidency-had long stood in force. A black president would always be a contradiction for a government that, throughout most of its history, had oppressed black people. The attempt to resolve this contradiction through Obama-a black man with deep roots in the white world-was remarkable. The price it exacted, incredible. The world it gave way to, unthinkable.

III.
"I Decided to Become Part of That World"

When Barack Obama was 10, his father gave him a basketball, a gift that connected the two directly. Obama was born in 1961 in Hawaii and raised by his mother, Ann Dunham, who was white, and her parents, Stanley and Madelyn. They loved him ferociously, supported him emotionally, and encouraged him intellectually. They also told him he was black. Ann gave him books to read about famous black people. When Obama's mother had begun dating his father, the news had not been greeted with the threat of lynching (as it might have been in various parts of the continental United States), and Obama's grandparents always spoke positively of his father. This biography makes Obama nearly unique among black people of his era.

In the president's memoir, Dreams From My Father, he says he was not an especially talented basketball player, but he played with a consuming passion. That passion was directed at something more than just the mastering of the pick-and-roll or the perfecting of his jump shot. Obama came of age during the time of the University of Hawaii basketball team's "Fabulous Five"-a name given to its all-black starting five, two decades before it would be resurrected at the University of Michigan by the likes of Chris Webber and Jalen Rose. In his memoir, Obama writes that he would watch the University of Hawaii players laughing at "some inside joke," winking "at the girls on the sidelines," or "casually flipping lay-ups." What Obama saw in the Fabulous Five was not just game, but a culture he found attractive:

By the time I reached high school, I was playing on Punahou's teams, and could take my game to the university courts, where a handful of black men, mostly gym rats and has-beens, would teach me an attitude that didn't just have to do with the sport. That respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was. That you could talk stuff to rattle an opponent, but that you should shut the hell up if you couldn't back it up. That you didn't let anyone sneak up behind you to see emotions-like hurt or fear-you didn't want them to see.

These are lessons, particularly the last one, that for black people apply as much on the street as they do on the court. Basketball was a link for Obama, a medium for downloading black culture from the mainland that birthed the Fabulous Five. Assessing his own thought process at the time, Obama writes, "I decided to become part of that world." This is one of the most incredible sentences ever written in the long, decorated history of black memoir, if only because very few black people have ever enjoyed enough power to write it.

Historically, in black autobiography, to be remanded into the black race has meant exposure to a myriad of traumas, often commencing in childhood. Frederick Douglass is separated from his grandmother. The enslaved Harriet Ann Jacobs must constantly cope with the threat of rape before she escapes. After telling his teacher he wants to be a lawyer, Malcolm X is told that the job isn't for "niggers." Black culture often serves as the balm for such traumas, or even the means to resist them. Douglass finds the courage to face the "slave-breaker" Edward Covey after being given an allegedly enchanted root by "a genuine African" possessing powers from "the eastern nations." Malcolm X's dancing connects him to his "long-suppressed African instincts." If black racial identity speaks to all the things done to people of recent African ancestry, black cultural identity was created in response to them. The division is not neat; the two are linked, and it is incredibly hard to be a full participant in the world of cultural identity without experiencing the trauma of racial identity.

Obama is somewhat different. He writes of bloodying the nose of a white kid who called him a "coon," and of chafing at racist remarks from a tennis coach, and of feeling offended after a white woman in his apartment building told the manager that he was following her. But the kinds of traumas that marked African Americans of his generation-beatings at the hands of racist police, being herded into poor schools, grinding out a life in a tenement building-were mostly abstract for him. Moreover, the kind of spatial restriction that most black people feel at an early age-having rocks thrown at you for being on the wrong side of the tracks, for instance-was largely absent from his life. In its place, Obama was gifted with a well-stamped passport and admittance to elite private schools-all of which spoke of other identities, other lives and other worlds where the color line was neither determinative nor especially relevant. Obama could have grown into a raceless cosmopolitan. Surely he would have lived in a world of problems, but problems not embodied by him.

Instead, he decided to enter this world.

"I always felt as if being black was cool," Obama told me while traveling to a campaign event. He was sitting on Air Force One, his tie loosened, his shirtsleeves rolled up. "[Being black] was not something to run away from but something to embrace. Why that is, I think, is complicated. Part of it is I think that my mother thought black folks were cool, and if your mother loves you and is praising you-and says you look good, are smart-as you are, then you don't kind of think in terms of How can I avoid this? You feel pretty good about it."

As a child, Obama's embrace of blackness was facilitated, not impeded, by white people. Obama's mother pointed him toward the history and culture of African Americans. Stanley, his grandfather, who came originally from Kansas, took him to basketball games at the University of Hawaii, as well as to black bars. Stanley introduced him to the black writer Frank Marshall Davis. The facilitation was as much indirect as direct. Obama recalls watching his grandfather at those black bars and understanding that "most of the people in the bar weren't there out of choice," and that "our presence there felt forced." From his mother's life of extensive travel, he learned to value the significance of having a home.

That suspicion of rootlessness extends throughout Dreams From My Father. He describes integration as a "one-way street" on which black people are asked to abandon themselves to fully experience America's benefits. Confronted with a woman named Joyce, a mixed-race, green-eyed college classmate who insists that she is not "black" but "multiracial," Obama is scornful. "That was the problem with people like Joyce," he writes. "They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people." Later in the memoir, Obama tells the story of falling in love with a white woman. During a visit to her family's country house, he found himself in the library, which was filled with pictures of the woman's illustrious relations. But instead of being in awe, Obama realized that he and the woman lived in different worlds. "And I knew that if we stayed together, I'd eventually live in hers," he writes. "Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider."

After college, Obama found a home, as well as a sense of himself, working on the South Side of Chicago as a community organizer. "When I started doing that work, my story merges with a larger story. That happens naturally for a John Lewis," he told me, referring to the civil-rights hero and Democratic congressman. "That happens more naturally for you. It was less obvious to me. How do I pull all these different strains together: Kenya and Hawaii and Kansas, and white and black and Asian-how does that fit? And through action, through work, I suddenly see myself as part of the bigger process for, yes, delivering justice for the [African American community] and specifically the South Side community, the low-income people-justice on behalf of the African American community. But also thereby promoting my ideas of justice and equality and empathy that my mother taught me were universal. So I'm in a position to understand those essential parts of me not as separate and apart from any particular community but connected to every community. And I can fit the African American struggle for freedom and justice in the context of the universal aspiration for freedom and justice."

Throughout Obama's 2008 campaign and into his presidency, this attitude proved key to his deep support in the black community. African Americans, weary of high achievers who distanced themselves from their black roots, understood that Obama had paid a price for checking "black" on his census form, and for living black, for hosting Common, for brushing dirt off his shoulder during the primaries, for marrying a woman who looked like Michelle Obama. If women, as a gender, must suffer the constant evaluations and denigrations of men, black women must suffer that, plus a broad dismissal from the realm of what American society deems to be beautiful. But Michelle Obama is beautiful in the way that black people know themselves to be. Her prominence as first lady directly attacks a poison that diminishes black girls from the moment they are capable of opening a magazine or turning on a television.

The South Side of Chicago, where Obama began his political career, is home to arguably the most prominent and storied black political establishment in the country. In addition to Oscar Stanton De Priest, the first African American elected to Congress in the 20th century, the South Side produced the city's first black mayor, Harold Washington; Jesse Jackson, who twice ran for president; and Carol Moseley Braun, the first African American woman to win a Senate race. These victories helped give rise to Obama's own. Harold Washington served as an inspiration to Obama and looms heavily over the Chicago section of Dreams From My Father.

Washington forged the kind of broad coalition that Obama would later assemble nationally. But Washington did this in the mid-1980s in segregated Chicago, and he had not had the luxury, as Obama did, of becoming black with minimal trauma. "There was an edge to Harold that frightened some white voters," David Axelrod, who worked for both Washington and Obama, told me recently. Axelrod recalled sitting around a conference table with Washington after he had won the Democratic primary for his reelection in 1987, just as the mayor was about to hold a press conference. Washington asked what percentage of Chicago's white vote he'd received. "And someone said, 'Well, you got 21 percent. And that's really good because last time' "-in his successful 1983 mayoral campaign-" 'you only got 8,' " Axelrod recalled. "And he kind of smiled, sadly, and said, 'You know, I probably spent 70 percent of my time in those white neighborhoods, and I think I've been a good mayor for everybody, and I got 21 percent of the white vote and we think it's good.' And he just kind of shook his head and said, 'Ain't it a bitch to be a black man in the land of the free and the home of the brave?'

"That was Harold. He felt those things. He had fought in an all-black unit in World War II. He had come up in times-and that and the sort of indignities of what you had to do to come up through the machine really seared him." During his 1983 mayoral campaign, Washington was loudly booed outside a church in northwest Chicago by middle-class Poles, Italians, and Irish, who feared blacks would uproot them. "It was as vicious and ugly as anything you would have seen in the old South," Axelrod said.

Obama's ties to the South Side tradition that Washington represented were complicated. Like Washington, Obama attempted to forge a coalition between black South Siders and the broader community. But Obama, despite his adherence to black cultural mores, was, with his roots in Kansas and Hawaii, his Ivy League pedigree, and his ties to the University of Chicago, still an exotic out-of-towner. "They were a bit skeptical of him," says Salim Muwakkil, a journalist who has covered Obama since before his days in the Illinois state Senate. "Chicago is a very insular community, and he came from nowhere, seemingly."

Obama compounded people's suspicions by refusing to humble himself and go along with the political currents of the South Side. "A lot of the politicians, especially the black ones, were just leery of him," Kaye Wilson, the godmother to Obama's children and one of the president's earliest political supporters, told me recently.

But even as many in the black political community were skeptical of Obama, others encouraged him-sometimes when they voted against him. When Obama lost the 2000 Democratic-primary race against Bobby Rush, the African American incumbent congressman representing Illinois' First Congressional District, the then-still-obscure future president experienced the defeat as having to do more with his age than his exoticism. "I'd go meet people and I'd knock on doors and stuff, and some of the grandmothers who were the folks I'd been organizing and working with doing community stuff, they weren't parroting back some notion of 'You're too Harvard,' or 'You're too Hyde Park,' or what have you," Obama told me. "They'd say, 'You're a wonderful young man, you're going to do great things. You just have to be patient.' So I didn't feel the loss as a rejection by black people. I felt the loss as 'politics anywhere is tough.' Politics in Chicago is especially tough. And being able to break through in the African American community is difficult because of the enormous loyalty that people feel towards anybody who has been around awhile."

There was no one around to compete for loyalty when Obama ran for Senate in 2004, or for president in 2008. He was no longer competing against other African Americans; he was representing them. "He had that hybridity which told the 'do-gooders'-in Chicago they call the reformers the do-gooders-that he was acceptable," Muwakkil told me.

Obama ran for the Senate two decades after the death of Harold Washington. Axelrod checked in on the precinct where Washington had been so loudly booed by white Chicagoans. "Obama carried, against seven candidates for the Senate, almost the entire northwest side and that precinct," he said. "And I told him, 'Harold's smiling down on us tonight.' "

Ian Allen

Obama believes that his statewide victory for the Illinois Senate seat held particular portent for the events of 2008. "Illinois is the most demographically representative state in the country," he told me. "If you took all the percentages of black, white, Latino; rural, urban; agricultural, manufacturing-[if] you took that cross section across the country and you shrank it, it would be Illinois."

Illinois effectively allowed Obama to play a scrimmage before the big national game in 2008. "When I ran for the Senate I had to go into southern Illinois, downstate Illinois, farming communities-some with very tough racial histories, some areas where there just were no African Americans of any number," Obama told me. "And when we won that race, not just an African American from Chicago, but an African American with an exotic history and [the] name Barack Hussein Obama, [it showed that I] could connect with and appeal to a much broader audience."

The mix of Obama's "hybridity" and the changing times allowed him to extend his appeal beyond the white ethnic corners of Chicago, past the downstate portions of Illinois, and out into the country at large. "Ben Nelson, one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, from Nebraska, would only bring in one national Democrat to campaign for him," Obama recalls. "And it was me. And so part of the reason I was willing to run [for president in 2008] was that I had had two years in which we were generating enormous crowds all across the country-and the majority of those crowds were not African American; and they were in pretty remote places, or unlikely places. They weren't just big cities or they weren't just liberal enclaves. So what that told me was, it was possible."

What those crowds saw was a black candidate unlike any other before him. To simply point to Obama's white mother, or to his African father, or even to his rearing in Hawaii, is to miss the point. For most African Americans, white people exist either as a direct or an indirect force for bad in their lives. Biraciality is no shield against this; often it just intensifies the problem. What proved key for Barack Obama was not that he was born to a black man and a white woman, but that his white family approved of the union, and approved of the child who came from it. They did this in 1961-a time when sex between black men and white women, in large swaths of the country, was not just illegal but fraught with mortal danger. But that danger is not part of Obama's story. The first white people he ever knew, the ones who raised him, were decent in a way that very few black people of that era experienced.

I asked Obama what he made of his grandparents' impressively civilized reception of his father. "It wasn't Harry Belafonte," Obama said laughingly of his father. "This was like an African African. And he was like a blue-black brother. Nilotic. And so, yeah, I will always give my grandparents credit for that. I'm not saying they were happy about it. I'm not saying that they were not, after the guy leaves, looking at each other like, 'What the heck?' But whatever misgivings they had, they never expressed to me, never spilled over into how they interacted with me.

"Now, part of it, as I say in my book, was we were in this unique environment in Hawaii where I think it was much easier. I don't know if it would have been as easy for them if they were living in Chicago at the time, because the lines just weren't as sharply drawn in Hawaii as they were on the mainland."

Obama's early positive interactions with his white family members gave him a fundamentally different outlook toward the wider world than most blacks of the 1960s had. Obama told me he rarely had "the working assumption of discrimination, the working assumption that white people would not treat me right or give me an opportunity or judge me [other than] on the basis of merit." He continued, "The kind of working assumption" that white people would discriminate against him or treat him poorly "is less embedded in my psyche than it is, say, with Michelle."

In this, the first lady is more representative of black America than her husband is. African Americans typically raise their children to protect themselves against a presumed hostility from white teachers, white police officers, white supervisors, and white co-workers. The need for that defense is, more often than not, reinforced either directly by actual encounters or indirectly by observing the vast differences between one's own experience and those across the color line. Marty Nesbitt, the president's longtime best friend, who, like Obama, had positive interactions with whites at a relatively early age, told me that when he and his wife went to buy their first car, she was insistent on buying from a black salesperson. "I'm like, 'We've got to find a salesman,' " Nesbitt said. "She's like, 'No, no, no. We're waiting for the brother.' And I'm like, 'He's with a customer.' They were filling out documents and she was like, 'We're going to stay around.' And a white guy came up to us. 'Can I help you?' 'Nope.' " Nesbitt was not out to condemn anyone with this story. He was asserting that "the willingness of African Americans [in Chicago] to help lift each other up is powerful."

But that willingness to help is also a defense, produced by decades of discrimination. Obama sees race through a different lens, Kaye Wilson told me. "It's just very different from ours," she explained. "He's got buddies that are white, and they're his buddies, and they love him. And I don't think they love him just because he's the president. They love him because they're his friends from Hawaii, some from college and all.

"So I think he's got that, whereas I think growing up in the racist United States, we enter this thing with, you know, 'I'm looking at you. I'm not trusting you to be one hundred with me.' And I think he grew up in a way that he had to trust [white people]-how can you live under the roof with people and think that they don't love you? He needs that frame of reference. He needs that lens. If he didn't have it, it would be ... a Jesse Jackson, you know? Or Al Sharpton. Different lens."

That lens, born of literally relating to whites, allowed Obama to imagine that he could be the country's first black president. "If I walked into a room and it's a bunch of white farmers, trade unionists, middle age-I'm not walking in thinking, Man, I've got to show them that I'm normal," Obama explained. "I walk in there, I think, with a set of assumptions: like, these people look just like my grandparents. And I see the same Jell‑O mold that my grandmother served, and they've got the same, you know, little stuff on their mantelpieces. And so I am maybe disarming them by just assuming that we're okay."

What Obama was able to offer white America is something very few African Americans could-trust. The vast majority of us are, necessarily, too crippled by our defenses to ever consider such a proposition. But Obama, through a mixture of ancestral connections and distance from the poisons of Jim Crow, can credibly and sincerely trust the majority population of this country. That trust is reinforced, not contradicted, by his blackness. Obama isn't shuffling before white power (Herman Cain's "shucky ducky" act) or flattering white ego (O. J. Simpson's listing not being seen as black as a great accomplishment). That, too, is defensive, and deep down, I suspect, white people know it. He stands firm in his own cultural traditions and says to the country something virtually no black person can, but every president must: "I believe you."

IV.
"You Still Gotta Go Back to the Hood"

Just after Columbus Day, I accompanied the president and his formidable entourage on a visit to North Carolina A&T State University, in Greensboro. Four days earlier, The Washington Post had published an old audio clip that featured Donald Trump lamenting a failed sexual conquest and exhorting the virtues of sexual assault. The next day, Trump claimed that this was "locker room" talk. As we flew to North Carolina, the president was in a state of bemused disbelief. He plopped down in a chair in the staff cabin of Air Force One and said, "I've been in a lot of locker rooms. I don't think I've ever heard that one before." He was casual and relaxed. A feeling of cautious inevitability emanated from his staff, and why not? Every day seemed to bring a new, more shocking revelation or piece of evidence showing Trump to be unfit for the presidency: He had lost nearly $1 billion in a single year. He had likely not paid taxes in 18 years. He was running a "university," for which he was under formal legal investigation. He had trampled on his own campaign's messaging by engaging in a Twitter crusade against a former beauty-pageant contestant. He had been denounced by leadership in his own party, and the trickle of prominent Republicans-both in and out of office-who had publicly repudiated him threatened to become a geyser. At this moment, the idea that a campaign so saturated in open bigotry, misogyny, chaos, and possible corruption could win a national election was ludicrous. This was America.

The president was going to North Carolina to keynote a campaign rally for Clinton, but first he was scheduled for a conversation about My Brother's Keeper, his initiative on behalf of disadvantaged youth. Announcing My Brother's Keeper-or MBK, as it's come to be called-in 2014, the president had sought to avoid giving the program a partisan valence, noting that it was "not some big new government program." Instead, it would involve the government in concert with the nonprofit and business sectors to intervene in the lives of young men of color who were "at risk." MBK serves as a kind of network for those elements of federal, state, and local government that might already have a presence in the lives of these young men. It is a quintessentially Obama program-conservative in scope, with impacts that are measurable.

"It comes right out of his own life," Broderick Johnson, the Cabinet secretary and an assistant to the president, who heads MBK, told me recently. "I have heard him say, 'I don't want us to have a bunch of forums on race.' He reminds people, 'Yeah, we can talk about this. But what are we going to do?' " On this afternoon in North Carolina, what Obama did was sit with a group of young men who'd turned their lives around in part because of MBK. They told stories of being in the street, of choosing quick money over school, of their homes being shot up, and-through the help of mentoring or job programs brokered by MBK-transitioning into college or a job. Obama listened solemnly and empathetically to each of them. "It doesn't take that much," he told them. "It just takes someone laying hands on you and saying, 'Hey, man, you count.' "

When he asked the young men whether they had a message he should take back to policy makers in Washington, D.C., one observed that despite their best individual efforts, they still had to go back to the very same deprived neighborhoods that had been the sources of trouble for them. "It's your environment," the young man said. "You can do what you want, but you still gotta go back to the hood."

He was correct. The ghettos of America are the direct result of decades of public-policy decisions: the redlining of real-estate zoning maps, the expanded authority given to prosecutors, the increased funding given to prisons. And all of this was done on the backs of people still reeling from the 250-year legacy of slavery. The results of this negative investment are clear-African Americans rank at the bottom of nearly every major socioeconomic measure in the country.

Obama's formula for closing this chasm between black and white America, like that of many progressive politicians today, proceeded from policy designed for all of America. Blacks disproportionately benefit from this effort, since they are disproportionately in need. The Affordable Care Act, which cut the uninsured rate in the black community by at least a third, was Obama's most prominent example. Its full benefit has yet to be felt by African Americans, because several states in the South have declined to expand Medicaid. But when the president and I were meeting, the ACA's advocates believed that pressure on state budgets would force expansion, and there was evidence to support this: Louisiana had expanded Medicaid earlier in 2016, and advocates were gearing up for wars to be waged in Georgia and Virginia.

Obama also emphasized the need for a strong Justice Department with a deep commitment to nondiscrimination. When Obama moved into the White House in 2009, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division "was in shambles," former Attorney General Eric Holder told me recently. "I mean, I had been there for 12 years as a line guy. I started out in '76, so I served under Republicans and Democrats. And what the [George W.] Bush administration, what the Bush DOJ did, was unlike anything that had ever happened before in terms of politicized hiring." The career civil servants below the political appointees, Holder said, were not even invited to the meetings in which the key hiring and policy decisions were made. After Obama's inauguration, Holder told me, "I remember going to tell all the folks at the Civil Rights Division, 'The Civil Rights Division is open for business again.' The president gave me additional funds to hire people."

The political press developed a narrative that because Obama felt he had to modulate his rhetoric on race, Holder was the administration's true, and thus blacker, conscience. Holder is certainly blunter, and this worried some of the White House staff. Early in Obama's first term, Holder gave a speech on race in which he said the United States had been a "nation of cowards" on the subject. But positioning the two men as opposites elides an important fact: Holder was appointed by the president, and went only as far as the president allowed. I asked Holder whether he had toned down his rhetoric after that controversial speech. "Nope," he said. Reflecting on his relationship with the president, Holder said, "We were also kind of different people, you know? He is the Zen guy. And I'm kind of the hot-blooded West Indian. And I thought we made a good team, but there's nothing that I ever did or said that I don't think he would have said, 'I support him 100 percent.'

"Now, the 'nation of cowards' speech, the president might have used a different phrase-maybe, probably. But he and I share a worldview, you know? And when I hear people say, 'Well, you are blacker than him' or something like that, I think, What are you all talking about? "

For much of his presidency, a standard portion of Obama's speeches about race riffed on black people's need to turn off the television, stop eating junk food, and stop blaming white people for their problems. Obama would deliver this lecture to any black audience, regardless of context. It was bizarre, for instance, to see the president warning young men who'd just graduated from Morehouse College, one of the most storied black colleges in the country, about making "excuses" and blaming whites.

This part of the Obama formula is the most troubling, and least thought-out. This judgment emerges from my own biography. I am the product of black parents who encouraged me to read, of black teachers who felt my work ethic did not match my potential, of black college professors who taught me intellectual rigor. And they did this in a world that every day insulted their humanity. It was not so much that the black layabouts and deadbeats Obama invoked in his speeches were unrecognizable. I had seen those people too. But I'd also seen the same among white people. If black men were overrepresented among drug dealers and absentee dads of the world, it was directly related to their being underrepresented among the Bernie Madoffs and Kenneth Lays of the world. Power was what mattered, and what characterized the differences between black and white America was not a difference in work ethic, but a system engineered to place one on top of the other.

The mark of that system is visible at every level of American society, regardless of the quality of one's choices. For instance, the unemployment rate among black college graduates (4.1 percent) is almost the same as the unemployment rate among white high-school graduates (4.6 percent). But that college degree is generally purchased at a higher price by blacks than by whites. According to research by the Brookings Institution, African Americans tend to carry more student debt four years after graduation ($53,000 versus $28,000) and suffer from a higher default rate on their loans (7.6 percent versus 2.4 percent) than white Americans. This is both the result and the perpetuator of a sprawling wealth gap between the races. White households, on average, hold seven times as much wealth as black households-a difference so large as to make comparing the "black middle class" and "white middle class" meaningless; they're simply not comparable. According to Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University who studies economic mobility, black families making $100,000 a year or more live in more-disadvantaged neighborhoods than white families making less than $30,000. This gap didn't just appear by magic; it's the result of the government's effort over many decades to create a pigmentocracy-one that will continue without explicit intervention.

Obama had been on the record as opposing reparations. But now, late in his presidency, he seemed more open to the idea-in theory, at least, if not in practice.

"Theoretically, you can make obviously a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps," Obama said, referencing the gulf in education, wealth, and employment that separates black and white America. "That those were wrongs to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it's not in the form of individual reparations checks but in the form of a Marshall Plan."

The political problems with turning the argument for reparations into reality are manifold, Obama said. "If you look at countries like South Africa, where you had a black majority, there have been efforts to tax and help that black majority, but it hasn't come in the form of a formal reparations program. You have countries like India that have tried to help untouchables, with essentially affirmative-action programs, but it hasn't fundamentally changed the structure of their societies. So the bottom line is that it's hard to find a model in which you can practically administer and sustain political support for those kinds of efforts."

Obama went on to say that it would be better, and more realistic, to get the country to rally behind a robust liberal agenda and build on the enormous progress that's been made toward getting white Americans to accept nondiscrimination as a basic operating premise. But the progress toward nondiscrimination did not appear overnight. It was achieved by people willing to make an unpopular argument and live on the frontier of public opinion. I asked him whether it wasn't-despite the practical obstacles-worth arguing that the state has a collective responsibility not only for its achievements but for its sins.

"I want my children-I want Malia and Sasha-to understand that they've got responsibilities beyond just what they themselves have done," Obama said. "That they have a responsibility to the larger community and the larger nation, that they should be sensitive to and extra thoughtful about the plight of people who have been oppressed in the past, are oppressed currently. So that's a wisdom that I want to transmit to my kids ... But I would say that's a high level of enlightenment that you're looking to have from a majority of the society. And it may be something that future generations are more open to, but I am pretty confident that for the foreseeable future, using the argument of nondiscrimination, and 'Let's get it right for the kids who are here right now,' and giving them the best chance possible, is going to be a more persuasive argument."

Obama is unfailingly optimistic about the empathy and capabilities of the American people. His job necessitates this: "At some level what the people want to feel is that the person leading them sees the best in them," he told me. But I found it interesting that that optimism does not extend to the possibility of the public's accepting wisdoms-such as the moral logic of reparations-that the president, by his own account, has accepted for himself and is willing to teach his children. Obama says he always tells his staff that "better is good." The notion that a president would attempt to achieve change within the boundaries of the accepted consensus is appropriate. But Obama is almost constitutionally skeptical of those who seek to achieve change outside that consensus.

Early in 2016, Obama invited a group of African American leaders to meet with him at the White House. When some of the activists affiliated with Black Lives Matter refused to attend, Obama began calling them out in speeches. "You can't refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position," he said. "The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then start trying to figure out how is this problem going to be solved. You then have a responsibility to prepare an agenda that is achievable-that can institutionalize the changes you seek-and to engage the other side."

Opal Tometi, a Nigerian American community activist who is one of the three founders of Black Lives Matter, explained to me that the group has a more diffuse structure than most civil-rights organizations. One reason for this is to avoid the cult of personality that has plagued black organizations in the past. So the founders asked its membership in Chicago, the president's hometown, whether they should meet with Obama. "They felt-and I think many of our members felt-there wouldn't be the depth of discussion that they wanted to have," Tometi told me. "And if there wasn't that space to have a real heart-to-heart, and if it was just surface level, that it would be more of a disservice to the movement."

Tometi noted that some other activists allied with Black Lives Matter had been planning to attend the meeting, so they felt their views would be represented. Nevertheless, Black Lives Matter sees itself as engaged in a protest against the treatment of black people by the American state, and so Tometi and much of the group's leadership, concerned about being used for a photo op by the very body they were protesting, opted not to go.

When I asked Obama about this perspective, he fluctuated between understanding where the activists were coming from and being hurt by such brush-offs. "I think that where I've gotten frustrated during the course of my presidency has never been because I was getting pushed too hard by activists to see the justness of a cause or the essence of an issue," he said. "I think where I got frustrated at times was the belief that the president can do anything if he just decides he wants to do it. And that sort of lack of awareness on the part of an activist about the constraints of our political system and the constraints on this office, I think, sometimes would leave me to mutter under my breath. Very rarely did I lose it publicly. Usually I'd just smile."

He laughed, then continued, "The reason I say that is because those are the times where sometimes you feel actually a little bit hurt. Because you feel like saying to these folks, '[Don't] you think if I could do it, I [would] have just done it? Do you think that the only problem is that I don't care enough about the plight of poor people, or gay people?' "

I asked Obama whether he thought that perhaps protesters' distrust of the powers that be could ultimately be healthy. "Yes," he said. "Which is why I don't get too hurt. I mean, I think there is a benefit to wanting to hold power's feet to the fire until you actually see the goods. I get that. And I think it is important. And frankly, sometimes it's useful for activists just to be out there to keep you mindful and not get complacent, even if ultimately you think some of their criticism is misguided."

Obama himself was an activist and a community organizer, albeit for only two years-but he is not, by temperament, a protester. He is a consensus-builder; consensus, he believes, ultimately drives what gets done. He understands the emotional power of protest, the need to vent before authority-but that kind of approach does not come naturally to him. Regarding reparations, he said, "Sometimes I wonder how much of these debates have to do with the desire, the legitimate desire, for that history to be recognized. Because there is a psychic power to the recognition that is not satisfied with a universal program; it's not satisfied by the Affordable Care Act, or an expansion of Pell Grants, or an expansion of the earned-income tax credit." These kinds of programs, effective and disproportionately beneficial to black people though they may be, don't "speak to the hurt, and the sense of injustice, and the self-doubt that arises out of the fact that [African Americans] are behind now, and it makes us sometimes feel as if there must be something wrong with us-unless you're able to see the history and say, 'It's amazing we got this far given what we went through.'

"So in part, I think the argument sometimes that I've had with folks who are much more interested in sort of race-specific programs is less an argument about what is practically achievable and sometimes maybe more an argument of 'We want society to see what's happened and internalize it and answer it in demonstrable ways.' And those impulses I very much understand-but my hope would be that as we're moving through the world right now, we're able to get that psychological or emotional peace by seeing very concretely our kids doing better and being more hopeful and having greater opportunities."

Obama saw-at least at that moment, before the election of Donald Trump-a straight path to that world. "Just play this out as a thought experiment," he said. "Imagine if you had genuine, high-quality early-childhood education for every child, and suddenly every black child in America-but also every poor white child or Latino [child], but just stick with every black child in America-is getting a really good education. And they're graduating from high school at the same rates that whites are, and they are going to college at the same rates that whites are, and they are able to afford college at the same rates because the government has universal programs that say that you're not going to be barred from school just because of how much money your parents have.

"So now they're all graduating. And let's also say that the Justice Department and the courts are making sure, as I've said in a speech before, that when Jamal sends his résumé in, he's getting treated the same as when Johnny sends his résumé in. Now, are we going to have suddenly the same number of CEOs, billionaires, etc., as the white community? In 10 years? Probably not, maybe not even in 20 years.

"But I guarantee you that we would be thriving, we would be succeeding. We wouldn't have huge numbers of young African American men in jail. We'd have more family formation as college-graduated girls are meeting boys who are their peers, which then in turn means the next generation of kids are growing up that much better. And suddenly you've got a whole generation that's in a position to start using the incredible creativity that we see in music, and sports, and frankly even on the streets, channeled into starting all kinds of businesses. I feel pretty good about our odds in that situation."

The thought experiment doesn't hold up. The programs Obama favored would advance white America too-and without a specific commitment to equality, there is no guarantee that the programs would eschew discrimination. Obama's solution relies on a goodwill that his own personal history tells him exists in the larger country. My own history tells me something different. The large numbers of black men in jail, for instance, are not just the result of poor policy, but of not seeing those men as human.

When President Obama and I had this conversation, the target he was aiming to reach seemed to me to be many generations away, and now-as President-Elect Trump prepares for office-seems even many more generations off. Obama's accomplishments were real: a $1 billion settlement on behalf of black farmers, a Justice Department that exposed Ferguson's municipal plunder, the increased availability of Pell Grants (and their availability to some prisoners), and the slashing of the crack/cocaine disparity in sentencing guidelines, to name just a few. Obama was also the first sitting president to visit a federal prison. There was a feeling that he'd erected a foundation upon which further progressive policy could be built. It's tempting to say that foundation is now endangered. The truth is, it was never safe.

V.
"They Rode the Tiger"

Obama's greatest misstep was born directly out of his greatest insight. Only Obama, a black man who emerged from the best of white America, and thus could sincerely trust white America, could be so certain that he could achieve broad national appeal. And yet only a black man with that same biography could underestimate his opposition's resolve to destroy him. In some sense an Obama presidency could never have succeeded along the normal presidential lines; he needed a partner, or partners, in Congress who could put governance above party. But he struggled to win over even some of his own allies. Ben Nelson, the Democratic senator from Nebraska whom Obama helped elect, became an obstacle to health-care reform. Joe Lieberman, whom Obama saved from retribution at the hands of Senate Democrats after Lieberman campaigned for Obama's 2008 opponent, John McCain, similarly obstructed Obamacare. Among Republicans, senators who had seemed amenable to Obama's agenda-Chuck Grassley, Susan Collins, Richard Lugar, Olympia Snowe-rebuffed him repeatedly.

The obstruction grew out of narrow political incentives. "If Republicans didn't cooperate," Obama told me, "and there was not a portrait of bipartisan cooperation and a functional federal government, then the party in power would pay the price and they could win back the Senate and/or the House. That wasn't an inaccurate political calculation."

Obama is not sure of the degree to which individual racism played into this calculation. "I do remember watching Bill Clinton get impeached and Hillary Clinton being accused of killing Vince Foster," he said. "And if you ask them, I'm sure they would say, 'No, actually what you're experiencing is not because you're black, it's because you're a Democrat.' "

But personal animus is just one manifestation of racism; arguably the more profound animosity occurs at the level of interests. The most recent Congress boasted 138 members from the states that comprised the old Confederacy. Of the 101 Republicans in that group, 96 are white and one is black. Of the 37 Democrats, 18 are black and 15 are white. There are no white congressional Democrats in the Deep South. Exit polls in Mississippi in 2008 found that 96 percent of voters who described themselves as Republicans were white. The Republican Party is not simply the party of whites, but the preferred party of whites who identify their interest as defending the historical privileges of whiteness. The researchers Josh Pasek, Jon A. Krosnick, and Trevor Tompson found that in 2012, 32 percent of Democrats held antiblack views, while 79 percent of Republicans did. These attitudes could even spill over to white Democratic politicians, because they are seen as representing the party of blacks. Studying the 2016 election, the political scientist Philip Klinkner found that the most predictive question for understanding whether a voter favored Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump was "Is Barack Obama a Muslim?"

In our conversations, Obama said he didn't doubt that there was a sincerely nonracist states'-rights contingent of the GOP. And yet he suspected that there might be more to it. "A rudimentary knowledge of American history tells you that the relationship between the federal government and the states was very much mixed up with attitudes towards slavery, attitudes towards Jim Crow, attitudes towards antipoverty programs and who benefited and who didn't," he said.

"And so I'm careful not to attribute any particular resistance or slight or opposition to race. But what I do believe is that if somebody didn't have a problem with their daddy being employed by the federal government, and didn't have a problem with the Tennessee Valley Authority electrifying certain communities, and didn't have a problem with the interstate highway system being built, and didn't have a problem with the GI Bill, and didn't have a problem with the [Federal Housing Administration] subsidizing the suburbanization of America, and that all helped you build wealth and create a middle class-and then suddenly as soon as African Americans or Latinos are interested in availing themselves of those same mechanisms as ladders into the middle class, you now have a violent opposition to them-then I think you at least have to ask yourself the question of how consistent you are, and what's different, and what's changed."

Racism greeted Obama in both his primary and general-election campaigns in 2008. Photos were circulated of him in Somali garb. Rush Limbaugh dubbed him "Barack the Magic Negro." Roger Stone, who would go on to advise the Trump campaign, claimed that Michelle Obama could be heard on tape yelling "Whitey." Detractors circulated emails claiming that the future first lady had written a racist senior thesis while at Princeton. A fifth of all West Virginia Democratic-primary voters in 2008 openly admitted that race had influenced their vote. Hillary Clinton trounced him 67 to 26 percent.

After Obama won the presidency in defiance of these racial headwinds, traffic to the white-supremacist website Stormfront increased sixfold. Before the election, in August, just before the Democratic National Convention, the FBI uncovered an assassination plot hatched by white supremacists in Denver. Mainstream conservative publications floated the notion that Obama's memoir was too "stylish and penetrating" to have been written by the candidate, and found a plausible ghostwriter in the radical (and white) former Weatherman Bill Ayers. A Republican women's club in California dispensed "Obama Bucks" featuring slices of watermelon, ribs, and fried chicken. At the Values Voter Summit that year, conventioneers hawked "Obama Waffles," a waffle mix whose box featured a bug-eyed caricature of the candidate. Fake hip-hop lyrics were scrawled on the side ("Barry's Bling Bling Waffle Ring") and on the top, the same caricature was granted a turban and tagged with the instructions "Point box toward Mecca for tastier waffles." The display was denounced by the summit's sponsor, the Family Research Council. One would be forgiven for meeting this denunciation with guffaws: The council's president, Tony Perkins, had once addressed the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens with a Confederate flag draped behind him. By 2015, Perkins had deemed the debate over Obama's birth certificate "legitimate" and was saying that it "makes sense" to conclude that Obama was actually a Muslim.

By then, birtherism-inflamed in large part by a real-estate mogul and reality-TV star named Donald Trump-had overtaken the Republican rank and file. In 2015, one poll found that 54 percent of GOP voters thought Obama was a Muslim. Only 29 percent believed he'd been born in America.

Still, in 2008, Obama had been elected. His supporters rejoiced. As Jay-Z commemorated the occasion:

My president is black, in fact he's half-white,
So even in a racist mind, he's half-right.

Not quite. A month after Obama entered the White House, a CNBC personality named Rick Santelli took to the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and denounced the president's efforts to help homeowners endangered by the housing crisis. "How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills?," Santelli asked the assembled traders. He asserted that Obama should "reward people that could carry the water" as opposed to those who "drink the water," and denounced those in danger of foreclosure as "losers." Race was implicit in Santelli's harangue-the housing crisis and predatory lending had devastated black communities and expanded the wealth gap-and it culminated with a call for a "Tea Party" to resist the Obama presidency. In fact, right-wing ideologues had been planning just such a resistance for decades. They would eagerly answer Santelli's call.

One of the intellectual forerunners of the Tea Party is said to be Ron Paul, the heterodox two-time Republican presidential candidate, who opposed the war in Iraq and championed civil liberties. On other matters, Paul was more traditional. Throughout the '90s, he published a series of racist newsletters that referred to New York City as "Welfaria," called Martin Luther King Jr. Day "Hate Whitey Day," and asserted that 95 percent of black males in Washington, D.C., were either "semi-criminal or entirely criminal." Paul's apologists have claimed that he had no real connection to the newsletters, even though virtually all of them were published in his name ("The Ron Paul Survival Report," "Ron Paul Political Report," "Dr. Ron Paul's Freedom Report") and written in his voice. Either way, the views of the newsletters have found their expression in his ideological comrades. Throughout Obama's first term, Tea Party activists voiced their complaints in racist terms. Activists brandished signs warning that Obama would implement "white slavery," waved the Confederate flag, depicted Obama as a witch doctor, and issued calls for him to "go back to Kenya." Tea Party supporters wrote "satirical" letters in the name of "We Colored People" and stoked the flames of birtherism. One of the Tea Party's most prominent sympathizers, the radio host Laura Ingraham, wrote a racist tract depicting Michelle Obama gorging herself on ribs, while Glenn Beck said the president was a "racist" with a "deep-seated hatred for white people." The Tea Party's leading exponent, Andrew Breitbart, engineered the smearing of Shirley Sherrod, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's director of rural development for Georgia, publishing egregiously misleading videos that wrongly made her appear to be engaging in antiwhite racist invective, which led to her dismissal. (In a rare act of cowardice, the Obama administration cravenly submitted to this effort.)

In those rare moments when Obama made any sort of comment attacking racism, firestorms threatened to consume his governing agenda. When, in July 2009, the president objected to the arrest of the eminent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. while he was trying to get into his own house, pointing out that the officer had "acted stupidly," a third of whites said the remark made them feel less favorably toward the president, and nearly two-thirds claimed that Obama had "acted stupidly" by commenting. A chastened Obama then determined to make sure his public statements on race were no longer mere riffs but designed to have an achievable effect. This was smart, but still the invective came. During Obama's 2009 address on health care before a joint session of Congress, Joe Wilson, a Republican congressman from South Carolina, incredibly, and in defiance of precedent and decorum, disrupted the proceedings by crying out "You lie!" A Missouri congressman equated Obama with a monkey. A California GOP official took up the theme and emailed her friends an image depicting Obama as a chimp, with the accompanying text explaining, "Now you know why [there's] no birth certificate!" Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin assessed the president's foreign policy as a "shuck and jive shtick." Newt Gingrich dubbed him the "food-stamp president." The rhetorical attacks on Obama were matched by a very real attack on his political base-in 2011 and 2012, 19 states enacted voting restrictions that made it harder for African Americans to vote.

Yet in 2012, as in 2008, Obama won anyway. Prior to the election, Obama, ever the optimist, had claimed that intransigent Republicans would decide to work with him to advance the country. No such collaboration was in the offing. Instead, legislation ground to a halt and familiar themes resurfaced. An Idaho GOP official posted a photo on Facebook depicting a trap waiting for Obama. The bait was a slice of watermelon. The caption read, "Breaking: The secret service just uncovered a plot to kidnap the president. More details as we get them ..." In 2014, conservatives assembled in support of Cliven Bundy's armed protest against federal grazing fees. As reporters descended on the Bundy ranch in Nevada, Bundy offered his opinions on "the Negro." "They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton," Bundy explained. "And I've often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn't get no more freedom. They got less freedom."

That same year, in the wake of Michael Brown's death, the Justice Department opened an investigation into the police department in Ferguson, Missouri. It found a city that, through racial profiling, arbitrary fines, and wanton harassment, had exploited law enforcement for the purposes of municipal plunder. The plunder was sanctified by racist humor dispensed via internal emails among the police that later came to light. The president of the United States, who during his first year in office had reportedly received three times the number of death threats of any of his predecessors, was a repeat target.

Much ink has been spilled in an attempt to understand the Tea Party protests, and the 2016 presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, which ultimately emerged out of them. One theory popular among (primarily) white intellectuals of varying political persuasions held that this response was largely the discontented rumblings of a white working class threatened by the menace of globalization and crony capitalism. Dismissing these rumblings as racism was said to condescend to this proletariat, which had long suffered the slings and arrows of coastal elites, heartless technocrats, and reformist snobs. Racism was not something to be coolly and empirically assessed but a slander upon the working man. Deindustrialization, globalization, and broad income inequality are real. And they have landed with at least as great a force upon black and Latino people in our country as upon white people. And yet these groups were strangely unrepresented in this new populism.

Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto, political scientists at the University of Washington and UCLA, respectively, have found a relatively strong relationship between racism and Tea Party membership. "Whites are less likely to be drawn to the Tea Party for material reasons, suggesting that, relative to other groups, it's really more about social prestige," they say. The notion that the Tea Party represented the righteous, if unfocused, anger of an aggrieved class allowed everyone from leftists to neoliberals to white nationalists to avoid a horrifying and simple reality: A significant swath of this country did not like the fact that their president was black, and that swath was not composed of those most damaged by an unquestioned faith in the markets. Far better to imagine the grievance put upon the president as the ghost of shambling factories and defunct union halls, as opposed to what it really was-a movement inaugurated by ardent and frightened white capitalists, raging from the commodities-trading floor of one of the great financial centers of the world.

That movement came into full bloom in the summer of 2015, with the candidacy of Donald Trump, a man who'd risen to political prominence by peddling the racist myth that the president was not American. It was birtherism-not trade, not jobs, not isolationism-that launched Trump's foray into electoral politics. Having risen unexpectedly on this basis into the stratosphere of Republican politics, Trump spent the campaign freely and liberally trafficking in misogyny, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. And on November 8, 2016, he won election to the presidency. Historians will spend the next century analyzing how a country with such allegedly grand democratic traditions was, so swiftly and so easily, brought to the brink of fascism. But one needn't stretch too far to conclude that an eight-year campaign of consistent and open racism aimed at the leader of the free world helped clear the way.

"They rode the tiger. And now the tiger is eating them," David Axelrod, speaking of the Republican Party, told me. That was in October. His words proved too optimistic. The tiger would devour us all.

VI.
"When You Left, You Took All of Me With You"

One Saturday morning last May, I joined the presidential motorcade as it slipped out of the southern gate of the White House. A mostly white crowd had assembled. As the motorcade drove by, people cheered, held up their smartphones to record the procession, and waved American flags. To be within feet of the president seemed like the thrill of their lives. I was astounded. An old euphoria, which I could not immediately place, gathered up in me. And then I remembered, it was what I felt through much of 2008, as I watched Barack Obama's star shoot across the political sky. I had never seen so many white people cheer on a black man who was neither an athlete nor an entertainer. And it seemed that they loved him for this, and I thought in those days, which now feel so long ago, that they might then love me, too, and love my wife, and love my child, and love us all in the manner that the God they so fervently cited had commanded. I had been raised amid a people who wanted badly to believe in the possibility of a Barack Obama, even as their very lives argued against that possibility. So they would praise Martin Luther King Jr. in one breath and curse the white man, "the Great Deceiver," in the next. Then came Obama and the Obama family, and they were black and beautiful in all the ways we aspired to be, and all that love was showered upon them. But as Obama's motorcade approached its destination-Howard University, where he would give the commencement address-the complexion of the crowd darkened, and I understood that the love was specific, that even if it allowed Barack Obama, even if it allowed the luckiest of us, to defy the boundaries, then the masses of us, in cities like this one, would still enjoy no such feat.

These were our fitful, spasmodic years.

We were launched into the Obama era with no notion of what to expect, if only because a black presidency had seemed such a dubious proposition. There was no preparation, because it would have meant preparing for the impossible. There were few assessments of its potential import, because such assessments were regarded as speculative fiction. In retrospect it all makes sense, and one can see a jagged but real political lineage running through black Chicago. It originates in Oscar Stanton De Priest; continues through Congressman William Dawson, who, under Roosevelt, switched from the Republican to the Democratic Party; crescendos with the legendary Harold Washington; rises still with Jesse Jackson's 1988 victory in Michigan's Democratic caucuses; rises again with Carol Moseley Braun's triumph; and reaches its recent apex with the election of Barack Obama. If the lineage is apparent in hindsight, so are the limits of presidential power. For a century after emancipation, quasi-slavery haunted the South. And more than half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, schools throughout much of this country remain segregated.

There are no clean victories for black people, nor, perhaps, for any people. The presidency of Barack Obama is no different. One can now say that an African American individual can rise to the same level as a white individual, and yet also say that the number of black individuals who actually qualify for that status will be small. One thinks of Serena Williams, whose dominance and stunning achievements can't, in and of themselves, ensure equal access to tennis facilities for young black girls. The gate is open and yet so very far away.

I felt a mix of pride and amazement walking onto Howard's campus that day. Howard alumni, of which I am one, are an obnoxious fraternity, known for yelling the school chant across city blocks, sneering at other historically black colleges and universities, and condescending to black graduates of predominantly white institutions. I like to think I am more reserved, but I felt an immense satisfaction in being in the library where I had once found my history, and now found myself with the first black president of the United States. It seemed providential that he would give the commencement address here in his last year. The same pride I felt radiated out across the Yard, the large green patch in the main area of the campus where the ceremony would take place. When Obama walked out, the audience exploded, and when the time came for the color guard to present arms, a chant arose: "O-Ba-Ma! O-Ba-Ma! O-Ba-Ma!"

He gave a good speech that day, paying heed to Howard's rituals, calling out its famous alumni, shouting out the university's various dormitories, and urging young people to vote. (His usual riff on respectability politics was missing.) But I think he could have stood before that crowd, smiled, and said "Good luck," and they would have loved him anyway. He was their champion, and this was evident in the smallest of things. The national anthem was played first, but then came the black national anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing." As the lyrics rang out over the crowd, the students held up the black-power fist-a symbol of defiance before power. And yet here, in the face of a black man in his last year in power, it scanned not as a protest, but as a salute.

Six months later the awful price of a black presidency would be known to those students, even as the country seemed determined not to acknowledge it. In the days after Donald Trump's victory, there would be an insistence that something as "simple" as racism could not explain it. As if enslavement had nothing to do with global economics, or as if lynchings said nothing about the idea of women as property. As though the past 400 years could be reduced to the irrational resentment of full lips. No. Racism is never simple. And there was nothing simple about what was coming, or about Obama, the man who had unwittingly summoned this future into being.

It was said that the Americans who'd supported Trump were victims of liberal condescension. The word racist would be dismissed as a profane slur put upon the common man, as opposed to an accurate description of actual men. "We simply don't yet know how much racism or misogyny motivated Trump voters," David Brooks would write in The New York Times. "If you were stuck in a jobless town, watching your friends OD on opiates, scrambling every month to pay the electric bill, and then along came a guy who seemed able to fix your problems and hear your voice, maybe you would stomach some ugliness, too." This strikes me as perfectly logical. Indeed, it could apply just as well to Louis Farrakhan's appeal to the black poor and working class. But whereas the followers of an Islamophobic white nationalist enjoy the sympathy that must always greet the salt of the earth, the followers of an anti-Semitic black nationalist endure the scorn that must ever greet the children of the enslaved.

Much would be made of blue-collar voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan who'd pulled the lever for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then for Trump in 2016. Surely these voters disproved racism as an explanatory force. It's still not clear how many individual voters actually flipped. But the underlying presumption-that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could be swapped in for each other-exhibited a problem. Clinton was a candidate who'd won one competitive political race in her life, whose political instincts were questioned by her own advisers, who took more than half a million dollars in speaking fees from an investment bank because it was "what they offered," who proposed to bring back to the White House a former president dogged by allegations of rape and sexual harassment. Obama was a candidate who'd become only the third black senator in the modern era; who'd twice been elected president, each time flipping red and purple states; who'd run one of the most scandal-free administrations in recent memory. Imagine an African American facsimile of Hillary Clinton: She would never be the nominee of a major political party and likely would not be in national politics at all.

Pointing to citizens who voted for both Obama and Trump does not disprove racism; it evinces it. To secure the White House, Obama needed to be a Harvard-trained lawyer with a decade of political experience and an incredible gift for speaking to cross sections of the country; Donald Trump needed only money and white bluster.

In the week after the election, I was a mess. I had not seen my wife in two weeks. I was on deadline for this article. My son was struggling in school. The house was in disarray. I played Marvin Gaye endlessly-"When you left, you took all of me with you." Friends began to darkly recall the ghosts of post-Reconstruction. The election of Donald Trump confirmed everything I knew of my country and none of what I could accept. The idea that America would follow its first black president with Donald Trump accorded with its history. I was shocked at my own shock. I had wanted Obama to be right.

I still want Obama to be right. I still would like to fold myself into the dream. This will not be possible.

By some cosmic coincidence, a week after the election I received a portion of my father's FBI file. My father had grown up poor in Philadelphia. His father was struck dead on the street. His grandfather was crushed to death in a meatpacking plant. He'd served his country in Vietnam, gotten radicalized there, and joined the Black Panther Party, which brought him to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover. A memo written to the FBI director was "submitted aimed at discrediting WILLIAM PAUL COATES, Acting Captain of the BPP, Baltimore." The memo proposed that a fake letter be sent to the Panthers' co-founder Huey P. Newton. The fake letter accused my father of being an informant and concluded, "I want somethin done with this bootlikin facist pig nigger and I want it done now." The words somethin done need little interpretation. The Panthers were eventually consumed by an internecine war instigated by the FBI, one in which being labeled a police informant was a death sentence.

A few hours after I saw this file, I had my last conversation with the president. I asked him how his optimism was holding up, given Trump's victory. He confessed to being surprised at the outcome but said that it was tough to "draw a grand theory from it, because there were some very unusual circumstances." He pointed to both candidates' high negatives, the media coverage, and a "dispirited" electorate. But he said that his general optimism about the shape of American history remained unchanged. "To be optimistic about the long-term trends of the United States doesn't mean that everything is going to go in a smooth, direct, straight line," he said. "It goes forward sometimes, sometimes it goes back, sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it zigs and zags."

I thought of Hoover's FBI, which harassed three generations of black activists, from Marcus Garvey's black nationalists to Martin Luther King Jr.'s integrationists to Huey Newton's Black Panthers, including my father. And I thought of the enormous power accrued to the presidency in the post-9/11 era-the power to obtain American citizens' phone records en masse, to access their emails, to detain them indefinitely. I asked the president whether it was all worth it. Whether this generation of black activists and their allies should be afraid.

"Keep in mind that the capacity of the NSA, or other surveillance tools, are specifically prohibited from being applied to U.S. citizens or U.S. persons without specific evidence of links to terrorist activity or, you know, other foreign-related activity," he said. "So, you know, I think this whole story line that somehow Big Brother has massively expanded and now that a new president is in place it's this loaded gun ready to be used on domestic dissent is just not accurate."

He counseled vigilance, "because the possibility of abuse by government officials always exists. The issue is not going to be that there are new tools available; the issue is making sure that the incoming administration, like my administration, takes the constraints on how we deal with U.S. citizens and persons seriously." This answer did not fill me with confidence. The next day, President-Elect Trump offered Lieutenant General Michael Flynn the post of national-security adviser and picked Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama as his nominee for attorney general. Last February, Flynn tweeted, "Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL" and linked to a YouTube video that declared followers of Islam want "80 percent of humanity enslaved or exterminated." Sessions had once been accused of calling a black lawyer "boy," claiming that a white lawyer who represented black clients was a disgrace to his race, and joking that he thought the Ku Klux Klan "was okay until I found out they smoked pot." I felt then that I knew what was coming-more Freddie Grays, more Rekia Boyds, more informants and undercover officers sent to infiltrate mosques.

And I also knew that the man who could not countenance such a thing in his America had been responsible for the only time in my life when I felt, as the first lady had once said, proud of my country, and I knew that it was his very lack of countenance, his incredible faith, his improbable trust in his countrymen, that had made that feeling possible. The feeling was that little black boy touching the president's hair. It was watching Obama on the campaign trail, always expecting the worst and amazed that the worst never happened. It was how I'd felt seeing Barack and Michelle during the inauguration, the car slow-dragging down Pennsylvania Avenue, the crowd cheering, and then the two of them rising up out of the limo, rising up from fear, smiling, waving, defying despair, defying history, defying gravity.

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A history of the first African American White House-and of what came next "They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby In the waning days of President Barack Obama's administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party, the full import of which no one could then grasp.