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Visit the Legacy Sites, a museum, memorial, and monument in Montgomery, Alabama, that document our country's history of racial injustice.

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8,083,741 views | Bryan Stevenson • TED2012

In an engaging and personal talk -- with cameo appearances from his grandmother and Rosa Parks -- human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson shares some hard truths about America's justice system, starting with a massive imbalance along racial lines: a third of the country's black male population has been incarcerated at some point in their lives. These issues, which are wrapped up in America's unexamined history, are rarely talked about with this level of candor, insight and persuasiveness.

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Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice

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In an engaging and personal talk -- with cameo appearances from his grandmother and Rosa Parks -- human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson shares some hard truths about America's justice system, starting with a massive imbalance along racial lines: a third of the country's black male population has been incarcerated at some point in their lives.

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A national memorial confronts the terror of lynching

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Alabama lynching memorial to confront U.S. history of slavery

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The long, hidden history of headwraps (via Racked)

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To tackle inequality in higher education, the federal government passed the Law of Social Quotas in 2012. The law earmarks half of all admissions spots across the country's federally funded institutions to public high school graduates, regardless of their race. (Public universities, unlike high schools, are more prestigious in Brazil than private ones.) Of those reserved spots, half go to students whose families earn less than 1.5 minimum wage, or about $443 a month. A percentage of the spaces in both categories then gets set aside for black, brown and indigenous students, in proportion to the ratio of white to non-white residents in each given state.

The government gave schools four years, until 2016, to fully comply with the law. The problem is that the law merely asked that candidates report their own race. To many students and professors I spoke with, the only thing that seems to have risen in popular undergraduate programs like law and medicine are the number of white-looking students who gained entry by claiming to be black.

"It's visible to the naked eye," said Luana Padilha, a black medical student who enrolled via affirmative action. "By my count, at least 12 of my classmates should have accessed the program through racial quotas. But I look around and can't recognize any of these people."

"If you look at a photograph of the incoming medical class of 2015, only one of the students looks black," said Georgina Lima, a professor and head of UFPel's Center for Affirmative Action and Diversity. "And he's not even Brazilian. He's from Africa."

The Ethnicity Evaluation Committee, of which Lima is a member, was installed to address this loophole. It interviewed prospective students for the first time ahead of the second semester of 2016. "We saw the most incredible situations unfold," said Rogerio Reis, an anthropology professor and head of the committee. "People would shave their heads, wear beanies, get a tan. Just a series of strategies to turn themselves black." Fabio Goncalves, a lawyer and committee member, was about to put one prospective student down as black, when one of his female colleagues, "who knows more about this kind of thing than I do," told him to note the difference in skin tone between the student's face and body. The student "had darkened her features with make-up!" he told me, in utter bewilderment.

For as long as black activists have demanded affirmative action, they have also stressed the need for monitoring strategies. "Brazil is the country of frauds," said Helio Santos, president of the Brazilian Diversity Institute and a leading figure in the black rights movement. "Civil rights efforts that don't come with any oversight are a joke." But the recent implementation of verification panels across several schools has raised troubling questions about who gets to define race in a country where people don't fall neatly into black and white categories.

"My father is black. My official documents say I'm white. I have firsthand experience with miscegenation. This issue is not so clear-cut," said Kelvin Rodrigues, a second semester medical student at UFPel who is critical of the evaluation committee, even if he supports expelling those who commit blatant racial fraud. Rodrigues looks black, but as someone who graduated from a private high school, he was never eligible for affirmative action spots in the first place.

"If the law stipulates that an applicant's race should be self-reported, then what right does anyone have to tell that person that they're lying?" said Luiz Paulo Ferreira, another second-semester medical student. He told me that he considers himself pardo and enrolled in the medical program through the racial quotas, but that he was not one of the 27 students who were investigated.

"How can members of the committee feel particularly qualified to make these judgment calls?" said Ferreira. "And based on what criteria?"

Eleven experts comprised the panel, among them UFPel administrators, anthropologists, and leaders in the wider black community of Pelotas. They received strict guidelines from the Public Prosecutors Office: "Phenotypical characteristics are what should be taken into account," read the instructions. "Arguments concerning the race of one's ancestors are therefore irrelevant."

The official criteria mirrored the way the issue has played out in the public sector as well. In 2014, the federal government approved a law that set aside 20 percent of public sector jobs to people of color. In Aug. 2016, after it had become clear that the law left room for fraud, the government ordered all departments to install verification committees. But it failed to provide the agencies with any guidance.

The Department of Education in Para, Brazil's blackest state, attempted to fulfill the decree with a checklist, which leaked to the press. Among the criteria to be scored: Is the job candidate's nose short, wide and flat? How thick are their lips? Are their gums sufficiently purple? What about their lower jaw? Does it protrude forward? Candidates were to be awarded points per item, like "hair type" and "skull shape." In response to the leaked test, one college professor from the state wrote on Facebook, "We're going back to the slave trade. During job interviews they're gonna stick their hands in our mouth to inspect our teeth."

But black activists say such measures are unavoidable. "A person who does not look phenotypically black is not the one getting killed by police every 23 minutes," said Santos, the law student and Coletivo Negrada member. "So long as this is how racism manifests itself here, we need to ensure that the people taking up admission spots in universities are the ones with these characteristics."

The expulsion of the UFPel medical students at the tail-end of 2016, while a major victory for the black activist movement, has not settled the debate around quotas, race frauds, and panels. Seven of the 24 expelled students challenged the university's decision, and in February, a court gave them permission to go back to class. UFPel has vowed to appeal the ruling. The evaluation committee, meanwhile, has since interviewed candidates for the race quota slots in the first term of 2017. It has also announced a second investigation beyond the medical school, into the more than one thousand students across UFPel that enrolled via affirmative action since the law first went into effect.

The topic has also galvanized conservative politicians, who have enjoyed renewed political power since the impeachment of Brazil's first female president, Dilma Rousseff, brought an end to 13 years of leftist Workers' Party rule. Fernando Holiday, a black libertarian activist who spearheaded mass protests against Rousseff, won a council seat during October's midterm elections on a campaign platform to repeal race quota measures. The far-right Congressman Jair Bolsonaro, who has long expressed vehement opposition to affirmative action laws, has steadily risen in the polls for the 2018 presidential election.

For the time being, individual students will be obliged to navigate the country's evolving racial codes on their own. Fernando, now expelled from UFPel, remembers his interview with the evaluation committee lasting eight minutes. The panelists started by asking him about when he first recognized himself as pardo. Then, to his surprise, they asked how involved he was with the black activist movement.

"I shouldn't have to be an activist to be considered black," said Fernando. Although the Law of Social Quotas is extended to mixed-race candidates, he left the interview feeling like he was being singled out for having light skin. "None of the interviewers were pardo. There was no one there that could identify with me."

Cleuci de Oliveira is a journalist based in Brasília, Brazil. (@CLEUCl)

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To tackle inequality in higher education, the federal government passed the Law of Social Quotas in 2012. The law earmarks half of all admissions spots across the country's federally funded institutions to public high school graduates, regardless of their race. (Public universities, unlike high schools, are more prestigious in Brazil than private ones.)

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White Privilege for DUMMIES. "iloveyou" at www.archdukedostuff.com Donate at www.gofundme.com/archduke Shot by: Domi V Edwards

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president obama farewell address: full text

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President Obama farewell address: full text

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President Barack Obama's farewell address in Chicago, as prepared for delivery.

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CHARLESTON, S.C. - Dylann S. Roof, the unrepentant and inscrutable white supremacist who killed nine African-American churchgoers in a brazen racial rampage almost 19 months ago, an outburst of extremist violence that shocked the nation, was condemned to death by a federal jury on Tuesday.

The jury of nine whites and three blacks, who last month found Mr. Roof guilty of 33 counts for the attack at this city's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, returned their unanimous verdict after about three hours of deliberations in the penalty phase of a heart-rending and often legally confounding trial.

Mr. Roof, who had said in a closing argument hours earlier that he could ask jurors "to give me a life sentence, but I'm not sure what good that would do," showed no expression as Judge Richard M. Gergel of Federal District Court announced the verdict.

Melvin Graham, whose sister Cynthia Hurd, 54, a librarian, died in the attack, welcomed the decision.

"It's a hard thing to know that someone is going to lose their life, but when you look at the totality of what happened, it's hard to say that person deserves to live when nine others don't," Mr. Graham said at a news conference. "How do you justify saving one life when you took nine, and in such a brutal fashion?"

The Rev. Anthony B. Thompson, the widower of another victim, Myra Thompson, said in an interview on Tuesday that while he remained "in awe" at how much Mr. Roof enjoyed doing what he did, he would not relinquish his forgiveness. "I forgave him, and I'm not going to take that back ever," he said.

Members of Mr. Roof's family, who have been mostly silent since his arrest, said in a statement on Tuesday that they would "struggle as long as we live to understand why he committed this horrible attack, which caused so much pain to so many good people."

The jury's decision offered some vindication for the Justice Department, which sought the death penalty over the misgivings of the attack's adult survivors and the relatives of many victims. During a two-hour closing argument on Tuesday, Julius N. Richardson, an assistant United States attorney, urged jurors to "hold this defendant fully accountable for his crimes."

The guilt of Mr. Roof, who coolly confessed to the killings and then justified them without remorse in a jailhouse manifesto, was never in serious doubt during the first phase of the proceedings in December. And by the time jurors began their sentencing deliberations on Tuesday, it seemed inevitable that they would lean toward death, not only because of the heinous nature of the crimes but because Mr. Roof, 22, insisted on denying any psychological incapacity, called no witnesses, presented no evidence in his defense and mostly sidelined his court-appointed lawyers.

The jury's sentencing decision effectively capped Mr. Roof's federal trial for the killings on June 17, 2015, the Wednesday when he showed up in Emanuel's fellowship hall and was offered a seat for Bible study by the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney. Mr. Roof sat quietly, his head hung low, for about 40 minutes while the group considered the Gospel of Mark's account of the Parable of the Sower.

Then, with the parishioners' eyes clenched for a benediction, Mr. Roof brandished the .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun he had smuggled into the church in a waist pouch. First taking aim at Mr. Pinckney, a state senator and the youngest African-American elected to South Carolina's legislature, he began to fire seven magazines of hollow-point rounds.

The reverberation of gunfire and clinking of skittering shell casings subsided only after more than 70 shots. Each victim was hit repeatedly, with the eldest, Susie Jackson, an 87-year-old grandmother and church matriarch, struck at least 10 times.

During the brief siege, the youngest victim, Tywanza Sanders, 26, pleaded with Mr. Roof not to kill. "You blacks are killing white people on the streets everyday and raping white women everyday," Mr. Roof said during the rampage, according to the jailhouse manifesto written within seven weeks of his arrest.

Before leaving the church, Mr. Roof told one of three survivors, Polly Sheppard, that he was sparing her so she could "tell the story." He stepped over one minister's bleeding body on his way out a side door, Glock pistol at his side. The killer said later that he had expected to find officers waiting for him and had saved ammunition to take his own life.

But the police, alerted by 911 calls from Ms. Sheppard and Mr. Pinckney's wife, Jennifer, who was hiding with their 6-year-old daughter, had not yet arrived. Mr. Roof got into his black Hyundai Elantra and drove into the night.

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The courthouse in downtown Charleston, S.C., where a federal jury on Tuesday condemned Dylann S. Roof to death. Credit Logan R. Cyrus for The New York Times

Officers in Shelby, N.C., detained Mr. Roof the next morning. After his extradition, prosecutors refused his offer to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence.

In addition to Ms. Hurd, Ms. Jackson, Mr. Pinckney, Mr. Sanders and Ms. Thompson, four other people were killed: Ethel Lee Lance; the Rev. DePayne Middleton Doctor; the Rev. Daniel L. Simmons Sr.; and the Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton.

They were familiar, frequent presences at the church known as Mother Emanuel, the oldest A.M.E. congregation in the Deep South and one with a storied history of resistance to slavery and civil rights advocacy over nearly 200 years. During the trial, family members filled reserved seats in the courtroom each day, and 23 relatives and friends delivered emotional testimonials.

Ms. Hurd had adopted a simple motto for life: "Be kinder than necessary." Ms. Lance was a perfume aficionado with a gentle smile that unified her family. Ms. Middleton Doctor's first sermon was titled "The Virtuous Woman." Mr. Simmons, a Vietnam War veteran, had been among the first blacks in South Carolina hired to drive a Greyhound bus. Ms. Coleman-Singleton was a beaming mother whose ebullient preaching made her popular in Charleston's churches. Ms. Thompson was a workhorse of Emanuel who served on many committees. Mr. Sanders, whose parents found hundreds of poems in his bedroom, aspired to become a lawyer.

Although Mr. Roof declined to testify or present any evidence, his trial was unusual for the jury's ability to hear from an accused mass murderer in his own unapologetic words. They watched video of his two-hour confession and heard readings of his online essays, a journal found in his car, letters to his parents and his jailhouse manifesto.

The trial became a duel of competing narratives on the defendant, a slightly built ninth-grade dropout. In the prosecution's depiction, Mr. Roof was the personification of evil, a racist ideologue, radicalized on the internet, who plotted an intensely premeditated assault over more than six months, waiting only until he was 21 and old enough to buy a weapon.

In his closing argument on Tuesday, Mr. Roof said, "I felt like I had to do it, and I still feel like I had to do it."

But in the portrayal suggested by defense lawyers, Mr. Roof was a deeply disturbed delusionist who most demonstrated his incapacity by denying it. Indeed, Mr. Roof insisted on representing himself during the sentencing phase to prevent his experienced capital defense team from introducing potentially mitigating evidence about his family, educational background or mental health.

The results of at least two psychiatric evaluations have been kept under seal by Judge Gergel, who ruled Mr. Roof competent to stand trial and to represent himself.

Mr. Roof's rampage, which the authorities said was not coordinated with any organized groups, staggered this area, which was already reeling from the shooting death two months before of an unarmed black man by a white police officer in North Charleston.

But two days after the church killings, with a blank-faced Mr. Roof standing in the Charleston County jail, five relatives of the victims publicly offered him forgiveness during an extraordinary bond hearing. The following week, President Obama argued in a soaring eulogy for Mr. Pinckney, which culminated in an a cappella rendition of "Amazing Grace," that the attack's lessons offered a way forward for race relations.

The Rev. Sharon Risher, a daughter of Ms. Lance, said she harbored a deep opposition to the death penalty, but found her stand tested by Mr. Roof and his lack of remorse.

"I don't believe in the death penalty, but I'm my mother's child and with everything that's happened sometimes I want him to die," Ms. Risher, who watched the entire trial, said in an interview on Monday. "It's like, you know what, this fool continues to just be evil. I'm just glad that they didn't leave that decision to me. I just reconciled myself that whatever they decided he will never see the light of day again."

Federal law classifies the jury's decision as a binding "recommendation," and Judge Gergel scheduled a sentencing hearing to begin Wednesday morning.

Yet the verdict confers no certainty that Mr. Roof will ever be put to death. His case will probably go through years of appeals - the courts could well consider his mental competency and even the tearful tenor of the sentencing phase - and the scarcity of lethal injection drugs could hinder his execution.

That it at times seemed more important to Mr. Roof to not be depicted as mentally ill than to avoid execution prompted some in the courtroom to question whether he simply preferred to die than to serve a long life in prison. But his commitment to his cause - the restoration of white power through violent subjugation - never publicly flagged.

Mr. Graham reflected Tuesday that someday Mr. Roof could adopt a strong Christian faith.

"He decided the day, the hour and the moment that my sister was going to die, and now someone is going to do the same to him," he said. "But unlike my sister, he has another chance. He's in God's hands, and if he turns his life around, and if he makes a humble confession to God, when he gets there, when he gets there, he can join my sister and the others in heaven."

Chris Dixon contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Charleston Church Killer Is Sentenced to Death. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Dylann Roof Is Sentenced to Death in Charleston Church Massacre

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CHARLESTON, S.C. - Dylann S. Roof, the unrepentant and inscrutable white supremacist who killed nine African-American churchgoers in a brazen racial rampage almost 19 months ago, an outburst of extremist violence that shocked the nation, was condemned to death by a federal jury on Tuesday.

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MILWAUKEE - Their daughter was sick and they needed family around to help care for her, so JoAnne and Maanaan Sabir took an unexpected detour.

They had spent years blowing past mileposts: earning advanced degrees and six-figure incomes, buying a 2,500-square-foot Victorian with hardwood floors. Yet here they were, both 37, moving to a corner of town pocked by empty lots, cramming into an apartment above Ms. Sabir's mother, in the very duplex that Ms. Sabir's grandparents had bought six decades earlier.

Their new dwelling was in a part of the Lindsay Heights neighborhood where more than one in three families lives in poverty; gunshots were too often a part of the nighttime soundtrack. They planned to leave once their daughter, Ameera, was healthy.

But then, reminding them of why they feel at home in communities like this one, their new neighbors started frequently checking on Ameera: Is she doing O.K.? And on their son, Taj: When's his next basketball game? Mr. Sabir's car stalled in the middle of the street one night, and it was the young men too often stereotyped as suspicious who helped him push it home. So many welcoming black faces like their own, they thought.

"It felt like that's where we should be," Ms. Sabir said.

Now, two years later, Ameera, 14, is healthy. And the Sabirs have not left. They have, in fact, only strengthened their resolve to stay after a fatal police shooting last weekend led to fiery unrest that was also fueled by frustrations over race and segregation. Rooted where they are, the Sabirs point to a broad yet little explored fact of American segregation: Affluent black families, freed from the restrictions of low income, often end up living in poor and segregated communities anyway.

It is a national phenomenon challenging the popular assumption that segregation is more about class than about race, that when black families earn more money, some ideal of post-racial integration will inevitably be reached.

In fact, a New York Times analysis of 2014 census figures shows that income alone cannot explain, nor would it likely end, the segregation that has defined American cities and suburbs for generations.

The choices that black families make today are inevitably constrained by a legacy of racism that prevented their ancestors from buying quality housing and then passing down wealth that might have allowed today's generation to move into more stable communities. And even when black households try to cross color boundaries, they are not always met with open arms: Studies have shown that white people prefer to live in communities where there are fewer black people, regardless of their income.

The result: Nationally, black and white families of similar incomes still live in separate worlds.

In many of America's largest metropolitan areas, including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, black families making $100,000 or more are more likely to live in poorer neighborhoods than even white households making less than $25,000. This is particularly true in areas with a long history of residential segregation, like metropolitan Milwaukee.

In one neighborhood on Milwaukee's predominantly black north side, that means the appearance of a new 4,000-square-foot home owned by a black energy executive and her husband, who host political fund-raisers with valet parking. Nearby, a financial adviser and his wife are stuck in the starter home they bought about 10 years ago, because it lost value and they couldn't sell it. Up the street, there's an engineer, living with her family, who said she stayed in the city for its amenities and to send the message, "We didn't want to run away."

The Sabirs share that mix of civic-minded motivation, and limitations. They are successful small-business owners with college degrees, yet even their choices have been circumscribed. The Victorian home they bought a decade ago, which they are now renting out, is in a majority black neighborhood where poverty has increased, damaging their investment. Their current neighborhood, where the duplex is, has a median household income of just $34,000 a year, or around $20,000 less than what's typical for the region.

It's one of many ways that living around people whom they best relate to means wrestling day and night with the cumulative effects of racism.

Decades of Hostility

The burning cars and buildings, the people throwing rocks and bottles at police officers in riot gear - it was all happening last Saturday as Maanaan and JoAnne Sabir were settling in for the night just a few miles down the road.

The 23-year-old man who had been shot by a black officer had ignored orders to drop a gun as he fled on foot after being pulled over in his car, the police said.

As his wife flicked through accounts of the raucous uprising on social media, Mr. Sabir could not help but think that the public response was years in the making. It was Milwaukee's - America's - history and maintenance of racist policies, through housing discrimination, divestment of black communities, and policing, all coming to a head.

"You're asking us to do the impossible, which is to tolerate a systemic demoralization of our own livelihood," Mr. Sabir said.

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Black families in Milwaukee have been confronting hostility for decades. Zeddie Quitman Hyler directly challenged housing segregation in 1955 when he began laying the foundation for a house on an open patch of land in the white western suburb of Wauwatosa.

A postal worker and World War II veteran from rural Mississippi, Mr. Hyler was the first black man to try to build there, and his efforts were not appreciated. He returned to his construction site one day to find the frame damaged. He fixed it, but when he came back again, it had burned.

So he enlisted several friends to camp out with him at the construction site one evening, rifles in hand, ready to turn away intruders. The vandals never returned, and Mr. Hyler finished building his house, which he lived in for nearly half a century until his death in 2004.

While Mr. Hyler was branching out, Ms. Sabir's grandparents found themselves falling into the familiar cycle of segregation. Migrants from the South, they spent about 10 years trying to buy a house at a time when black families were overtly steered to particular blocks. Eventually, a family member who was a real estate agent worked her connections, and they landed the duplex on the corner of North 17th Street and North Avenue in the mid-1950s. The neighborhood was evolving from one that had been flush with synagogues and restaurants selling matzo ball soup.

They were caught in the middle of white flight.

The census tract where Ms. Sabir's grandparents settled was entirely white in 1950 except for the two people that the census listed as black and the six listed as "other." By 1960, however, 2,344 black people called the area home, accounting for 65 percent of its population.

Within a few years, Milwaukee's economy would start tanking. Tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the city were eliminated. Property values fell, while housing policies made it nearly impossible for black families to obtain loans and move to the suburbs, where many jobs were being relocated.

That same pattern of redlining, in which banks choke off lending to minorities and minority communities, has shaped New York, Chicago and other cities, but the impact in Milwaukee proved especially severe, in part because black migrants began arriving in droves just as the economic structure that was supposed to buoy them was disappearing. The shifts ensured that no enclave for affluent black people was ever developed here.

Black residents and leaders tried to fight back. In 1962, Vel Phillips, the city's first black alderwoman, proposed a fair housing ordinance. Her colleagues voted unanimously against it four times in the 1960s.

Activists took to the streets in the summer of 1967 for 200 consecutive days of fair housing protests, and were sometimes greeted with racial slurs, eggs and rocks as they crossed the Menomonee River, via the 16th Street Viaduct, into the white South Side.

The Common Council eventually ratified a fair housing law in 1968, weeks after the federal government passed its landmark measure.

The racial dividing lines were already drawn, however, and barriers to black upward mobility remained. Even the neighborhood where the baseball slugger Hank Aaron moved in the late 1950s could not avoid a downward spiral. While the black population in the Rufus King area grew from 0.4 percent in 1960 to 89 percent in 1980, its median home value dropped from 9 percent above the city's median to 23 percent below it, according to "Milwaukee: City of Neighborhoods," a book by John Gurda.

Those historic dynamics of race and housing have not disappeared, either. As recently as 2006, a city government report found that affluent, nonwhite Milwaukeeans were 2.7 times likelier to be denied home loans than white people with similar incomes.

Many black people here still view the suburbs as hostile toward them. Just six years ago, the New Berlin mayor's initial support for an affordable housing project in the nearly 93 percent white suburb was met with threats, including a sign in his yard that read, " nigger lover."

New Berlin blocked the housing development, and was sued by the federal government, which accused the city of racial bias.

Few people around here are surprised, then, that only 11.1 percent of African-Americans in the region live in the suburbs, the lowest rate of black suburbanization among the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the country, according to a soon-to-be released study by Marc V. Levine, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Milwaukee itself, which is nearly two-thirds nonwhite, has never elected a black mayor. As for Wauwatosa, the suburb that Mr. Hyler changed a generation ago, it is still 90 percent white.

Where to Feel at Home?

The Sabirs are trying to help their children maneuver through this complicated racial landscape.

Taj and Ameera go to a Catholic private school in Milwaukee where most of the students are white, but return to a Muslim household in a neighborhood where most people look like them. Both environments present difficulties.

At school, the Sabir children have heard a teacher play down slavery, and classmates stereotype black neighborhoods as bad and drug infested. On their block, where the sidewalks are cracked and some empty lots have been turned into gardens, they occasionally see drugs and fights.

They often find their worldviews out of sync with those around them. When Taj was visiting a white classmate in Wauwatosa in May, the friend wanted to go outside to play with Nerf guns. But Taj recalled the police killing another black boy with a toy gun - 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland - and said that he had to be cautious about what he did outside. The police did not always have his best interests at heart, Taj explained, prompting his friend's mother to respond that the police were good.

It's at times like those when JoAnne and Maanaan Sabir are happy that their children can come home, see the nuance of the black struggle and work to change it - as when Ameera helped petition to prevent a liquor store from opening in the neighborhood. Or when the children volunteer at a food bank down the block.

Still, their parents can't help but flirt with the possibilities of another life. That's what they were doing one evening in late June as they cruised through the plush suburbs, partaking in a semiregular ritual of soaking in the Lake Michigan mansions and manicured lawns and wondering about life there. They rolled past children riding their bicycles alone at around 9 p.m., and Ms. Sabir marveled that they could do that.

She thought back to when Taj, 12, had confronted her a few days earlier. He had asked for permission to ride his eight-speed bike around the block. Ms. Sabir could not go out to supervise him, so she said no.

"Are you finally going to admit that we live in a dangerous community?" he said.

Ms. Sabir pondered the question. She is trained for these moments, with a bachelor's degree in psychology and a master's in administrative social work, but she struggled. "We have challenges like every other community has challenges," she told him, adding, "You're going to have to figure out the best way to negotiate those challenges."

A Sense of Otherness

Managing sometimes means moving on. And in Milwaukee's circle of affluent black professionals, that sometimes means decamping for majority white areas in the city or the suburbs.

That's where Latisha Spence-Brookens and X'antony Brookens Sr. found themselves five years ago after their North Milwaukee neighborhood rapidly deteriorated during the housing crash.

They rolled into their new bungalow-style rental house in the village of Whitefish Bay, a suburb perched on Lake Michigan with a population so white (90 percent) that it has earned the moniker Whitefolks Bay. And then they looked around in amazement. People were walking. Everywhere.

Some strolled past the two-story homes with red, white and blue bunting on the balconies. Others strolled along the main thoroughfare with a Starbucks, a sidewalk cafe, a store selling handblown glass, and a supermarket featuring live lobster, a full-service florist and Champagne caper vinaigrette.

The Milwaukee neighborhood they had left behind, which was nearly 93 percent black, wasn't much for this kind of leisure. After they bought a two-bedroom home in 2008 for $98,000, the effects of the housing market collapse spread through the area. Homes were abandoned. Crime took over.

Their son, X'antony Jr., now 18, was walking home one afternoon, toting a plastic Walmart bag with a Barbie he had just bought for his little sister, Zaria, when a man approached him with a large rock in his hand.

"Give me all your money or I'm going to bash your head in with this rock," the man told him.

X'antony Jr. hesitated.

"I didn't know what to do," he recalled. "This was my first time being robbed."

So he offered $5 to the robber, who took it and let X'antony Jr. keep the Barbie.

For X'antony Sr., 48, the last straw came when a neighbor was held up at gunpoint as she came home with her two toddlers. It was too dangerous to stay, he thought.

Their home value had plummeted by some 75 percent by then. They had no equity to buy up. So they walked away from the mortgage and rented a house in Whitefish Bay for $1,450 a month, nearly one and a half times what they had been paying for the home they owned.

But finally, they thought, Zaria could ride her bicycle freely. X'antony Jr. could enroll in a high-performing school district.

Over the years, the Brookenses genuinely enjoyed their time in Whitefish Bay. Ms. Spence-Brookens, 39, worked as a college administrator and Mr. Brookens as a job counselor for food stamp recipients, and they sometimes would make it a point to get home early from work so they could spend time in the community. But it was hard to shake that feeling of otherness - especially for X'antony Sr.

About a week after the family moved there, a police officer pulled him over as he rolled up in his red 1994 Mercedes-Benz to the family's modest clapboard.

He was pulled over, the officer said, because of the plastic cover over his license plate. Back in his old neighborhood, Mr. Brookens said, people often stole license plates, so the cover was for security. Here it was illegal, the officer told him. He let Mr. Brookens off with a warning, but not before asking if he lived around there.

"Yeah, this is my house right here," Mr. Brookens told him.

The stops were a routine occurrence early on - about once a week for a month and a half, Mr. Brookens said. He called it getting registered.

"They're going to keep doing that until they become comfortable with who you are and why you're here," said Mr. Brookens, more resigned than angry.

He had more disgust, however, when he took Zaria around the block on her bicycle and a mother rushed her white children inside as they approached.

Mr. Brookens and his wife also worried about Zaria's sense of self. She always wanted to straighten her hair. She once bawled when her hair got wet in the bathtub and became frizzy. Zaria's school friends called her their black friend. Her musical tastes gravitated toward Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift.

"I thought she was getting lost," Mr. Brookens said.

That was not necessarily in the front of the Brookenses' minds when, two years ago, a friend asked them to rent her cream-colored brick home in Milwaukee. It was surrounded by quiet bungalows and curved streets. It was bigger than their Whitefish Bay rental, and the rent was $350 cheaper.

They thought of how the savings would allow them to do more of the things they like, such as travel. Although the house was in a neighborhood with a poverty rate 12 times higher and a median home value about one-third of that in their suburban neighborhood, they saw it as a place they could call home.

So they returned to Milwaukee, to a different black neighborhood, joining the cluster of families like their own on the city's north side.

Some of the old challenges re-emerged.

About a month after moving there in 2014, Mr. Brookens forgot to lock his car door, and his charger and computer hard drive were stolen.

Still, like many black families who have made similar choices, they say they feel more comfortable. Zaria, who recently turned 9, relishes seeing more children at school who look like her, and has come to embrace her blackness, going so far as to get dreadlocks. X'antony Jr. has spent the summer working for an activist organization.

The Brookenses now interact more frequently with their neighbors. They host cookouts regularly in their backyard, and they have decorated their shelves with plaques reminding them: "Hope is believing" and "Faith is endless."

Faith in the Neighborhood

Hope and faith, and determination, drive the Sabirs, too.

That's what brought JoAnne Sabir's ancestors up here from Tennessee and Arkansas. It's why Mr. Sabir, a fourth-degree black belt in karate, is constantly pushing to help the young men he sees roaming the streets - "You got that résumé?" he asks - and it's why the family is staking its business interests just a block from their apartment.

They bet on the neighborhood by opening the Juice Kitchen in October. They both work there, often rising before 6 a.m., because they want to be a beacon of black success and help prevent drugs, alcohol and poverty from consuming the community.

Last Tuesday morning, after a weekend of destructive protests, Ms. Sabir posted a message on the cafe's Facebook page, encouraging a collective black uplift.

"Strategically placed on North 17th Street," she wrote. "Strategically available to love and nurture."

A few hours later, she herded her children into her black sport-utility vehicle and slowly rolled past the remnants of the two nights of clashes between protesters and the police. Past the BP gas station, melted into an ashy heap. "It's horrible," Taj said. Past the people barbecuing on a grassy knoll. "That's the young man's brother over there that was killed," Ms. Sabir said. Past a boarded-up bank. "They broke in this bank and then set it on fire," she said.

"My initial thought," Ms. Sabir told her children, "was that on this evening, all these young people were so powerful." But imagine, she added, if they could channel that anger in a positive direction, "if we took that power and that energy and put it toward our greater good."

Everyone in the car fell silent.

Focusing on the bigger picture can be difficult.

The following evening, on Wednesday night, as Mr. Sabir reclined on his front stoop, he shook his head as car after car whizzed through red lights at the corner. He mentioned a man from the neighborhood who was left in a vegetative state when an S.U.V. plowed into his car a few weeks earlier. "It aches," Mr. Sabir said.

He rolled his eyes when a car pulled up to a house across the street at about 10:30 p.m. and started honking loudly. "Every night," Mr. Sabir said.

And he just looked away when a man strolling in front of his house ditched a knife behind a parked car, only to be confronted by two police officers, with Tasers drawn, who arrested him. "Mass incarceration," Mr. Sabir said.

But just as it seemed that the burdens of living here were converging, Mr. Sabir's phone buzzed with a reminder of why it was all worth it. The alderman representing the area where most of the past week's vandalism had occurred wrote that his battered neighborhood could really use a Juice Kitchen.

"Help us," the alderman wrote, "be the Phoenix that rises from the ashes."

Follow John Eligon @jeligon on Twitter. For breaking news and in-depth reporting, follow @NYTNational on Twitter.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Segregation, the Neighbor That Won't Leave. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Affluent and Black, and Still Trapped by Segregation

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MILWAUKEE - Their daughter was sick and they needed family around to help care for her, so JoAnne and Maanaan Sabir took an unexpected detour. They had spent years blowing past mileposts: earning advanced degrees and six-figure incomes, buying a 2,500-square-foot Victorian with hardwood floors.

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One of the most powerful, heartfelt... - Harvard Graduate School of Education | Facebook

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One of the most powerful, heartfelt student speeches you will ever hear! Thank you Ed.M. candidate Donovan Livingston for today's spoken word poetry. And for those who did not see it -- take 5 minutes and enjoy.

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Where do America's most racist people live? "The rural Northeast and South," suggests a new study just published in PLOS ONE.

The paper introduces a novel but makes-tons-of-sense-when-you-think-about-it method for measuring the incidence of racist attitudes: Google search data. The methodology comes from data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. He's used it before to measure the effect of racist attitudes on Barack Obama's electoral prospects.
[Data suggest Republicans have a race problem]
"Google data, evidence suggests, are unlikely to suffer from major social censoring," Stephens-Davidowitz wrote in a previous paper. "Google searchers are online and likely alone, both of which make it easier to express socially taboo thoughts. Individuals, indeed, note that they are unusually forthcoming with Google." He also notes that the Google measure correlates strongly with other standard measures social science researchers have used to study racist attitudes.

This is important, because racism is a notoriously tricky thing to measure. Traditional survey methods don't really work -- if you flat-out ask someone if they're racist, they will simply tell you no. That's partly because most racism in society today operates at the subconscious level, or gets vented anonymously online.

For the PLOS ONE paper, researchers looked at searches containing the N-word. People search frequently for it, roughly as often as searches for "migraine(s)," "economist," "sweater," "Daily Show," and "Lakers." (The authors attempted to control for variants of the N-word not necessarily intended as pejoratives, excluding the "a" version of the word that analysis revealed was often used "in different contexts compared to searches of the term ending in '-er'.")
[An entrenched racial slur is now more prevalent than ever]
It's also important to note that not all people searching for the N-word are motivated by racism, and that not all racists search for that word, either. But aggregated over several years and several million searches, the data give a pretty good approximation of where a particular type of racist attitude is the strongest.

Interestingly, on the map above the most concentrated cluster of racist searches happened not in the South, but rather along the spine of the Appalachians running from Georgia all the way up to New York and southern Vermont.
[Three quarters of whites don't have any non-white friends]
Other hotbeds of racist searches appear in areas of the Gulf Coast, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and a large portion of Ohio. But the searches get rarer the further West you go. West of Texas, no region falls into the "much more than average" category. This map follows the general contours of a map of racist Tweets made by researchers at Humboldt State University.

So some people are sitting at home by themselves, Googling a bunch of racist stuff. What does it matter? As it turns out, it matters quite a bit. The researchers on the PLOS ONE paper found that racist searches were correlated with higher mortality rates for blacks, even after controlling for a variety of racial and socio-economic variables.

"Results from our study indicate that living in an area characterized by a one standard deviation greater proportion of racist Google searches is associated with an 8.2% increase in the all-cause mortality rate among Blacks," the authors conclude. Now, of course, Google searches aren't directly leading to the deaths of African Americans. But previous research has shown that the prevalence of racist attitudes can contribute to poor health and economic outcomes among black residents.

"Racially motivated experiences of discrimination impact health via diminished socioeconomic attainment and by enforcing patterns in racial residential segregation, geographically isolating large segments of the Black population into worse neighborhood conditions," the authors write, summarizing existing research. "Racial discrimination in employment can also lead to lower income and greater financial strain, which in turn have been linked to worse mental and physical health outcomes."
[White people are winning the 'war on whites']

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The most racist places in America, according to Google

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Where do America's most racist people live? "The rural Northeast and South," suggests a new study just published in PLOS ONE. The paper introduces a novel but makes-tons-of-sense-when-you-think-about-it method for measuring the incidence of racist attitudes: Google search data. The methodology comes from data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.

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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.

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One of the US government's largest private aid-delivery partners last month agreed to pay damages to more than a hundred African American job applicants for racial discrimination.

Chemonics International, one of the largest private development groups partnering with the US Agency for International Development (USAid), has agreed to pay $482,243 (£389,000) to job applicants who faced discrimination in the company's hiring process.

A Department of Labor review of the hiring practices of Chemonics in 2011 found that its Regional Business Unit, which supports the company's development work in Africa, Asia, Europe and Eurasia, Latin American, the Caribbean, and the Middle East, discriminated based on race when hiring for entry-level positions. Of the 124 African Americans who applied for jobs at Chemonics, none were hired.

The company agreed last month to pay back wages, interest and benefits to the applicants, but the terms of the settlement allow Chemonics to deny liability.

Jane Gotiangco, director of communications at Chemonics, attributes the pattern of discrimination to a manual application system that, she says, did not allow the firm to track diversity data. Chemonics has since upgraded the system and renewed its commitment to diversity, Gotiangco says.

Chemonics supports international economic development projects with USAid, including education, healthcare and agriculture programmes. It has been awarded some of largest aid contracts by the US government, from supporting the White Helmets in Syria to supplying medicine and health supplies around the globe.

In 2015, Chemonics received a contract of $9.5bn over eight years from USAid - the largest contract ever from the government agency Devex reports. Only one other contractor receives more USAid awards, the Partnership for Supply Chain Management, which is a conglomerate of 13 companies.

Chemonics has come in for criticism on other issues too. An audit of a $62m project it carried out in 2006 in Afghanistan found that the company "fell considerably short of intended results" and was followed up by the US press. Chemonics said that the reports "provided an incomplete picture". In 2010, in the wake of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Chemonics was awarded more than $196m to help rebuild the country, making it the largest recipient of post-earthquake funds from USAid. But just a few months later, auditors discovered [pdf] that the company had hired only one-third the number of Haitians it was supposed to.

"Winning federal contracts, paid for with US taxpayer dollars, is a privilege, not a right," Patricia A Shiu, director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), said in a statement. "With that privilege comes the obligation to practice equal employment opportunity towards all demographic groups of workers in this country."

Joanna Hawkins, a representative for the Department of Labor, says that each company working with government agencies is evaluated on a neutral case-by-base basis.

"On the other hand," she tells the Guardian, "the agency does believe this settlement will send a message to other contractors, including those working in the international development arena, that employment discrimination is unacceptable and will not be tolerated."

The Department of Labor also found that Chemonics violated rules about maintaining required records and conducting internal audits, which the company has now agreed to fix.

In addition to paying the settlement, Chemonics will hire eight of the applicants who previously did not get jobs.

This article was amended on 23 November 2016 to clarify that the hiring discrimination was identified at Chemonic International's regional business units, not the entire company.

Topics

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Top US government aid partner to pay $500k damages to African American job applicants

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One of the US government's largest private aid-delivery partners last month agreed to pay damages to more than a hundred African American job applicants for racial discrimination. Chemonics International, one of the largest private development groups partnering with the US Agency for International Development (USAid), has agreed to pay $482,243 (£389,000) to job applicants who faced discrimination in the company's hiring process.

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If you're a white person who has been in many activist spaces, then you've probably experienced a specific, often unspoken ground rule: There's no room for white tears in this space.

This sort of rule is instilled because oftentimes, in other spaces, your emotions, and the emotions of other white people, are constantly centered, nurtured, and coddled when it comes to conversations about race.

Rather than focusing on the lived experiences and traumas of People of Color when talking about racism, the focus is placed on the host of emotions that white people go through when confronted with racism.

Rather than focusing on how People of Color feel on an everyday basis from having to deal with racist institutions, interpersonal relationships, and ideologies, the focus goes to white people just beginning to confront how they benefit from racism on many levels.

As a Woman of Color, I'm a pretty big fan of the "no white tears" rule.

It's nice to be in spaces where I can feel free to say what I want, talk about complex systems of white supremacy, and express my frustrations without having to worry about the feelings of the white people in the room.

However, I also think that if you're a white person, it can leave you without the space to fully deal with you emotions. I know many white people who do anti-racism work. They commit endless time and energy to be in full solidarity with People of Color. However, many of them often bury their own emotions or aren't taught to fully deal with their feelings about their whiteness.

As a white person who does this kind of work, chances are you have encountered the same kinds of issues. In your work, you might not have had room to confront your emotions of guilt, fear, anger, or confusion.

While it's important for all folks to stop centering the emotions of white people in our activism and in our lives, it's also important for you, and all white people, to be able to process your emotions.

Because while most of the white activists I interact with know that discomfort is a part of the anti-racism process, they also don't give themselves space to navigate facing their privileges, negative emotions, and deconstructing white supremacy. Chances are that you don't either.

Below is a list of some of the ways that can help you to not center yourself in conversations about race and to process your own emotions.

1. Pause Before Contributing to the Conversation

I had this one white friend who would constantly send me links that would have explicit videos, photos, and commentary about racism.

Sometimes, she would add her own two cents to these links, saying things like "OMG! Isn't this terrible!" and "My aunt said the most racist thing about this article." But sometimes she would just send me the links with no warning, exposing me to incredibly violent and triggering images.

I finally had to tell her to stop sending me articles because I didn't need to see them.

I was already aware of the things that were going on, and even if I wasn't, I didn't need to hear her commentary about how awful things were. What my friend thought she was doing was showing solidarity with me by starting conversations about racism and activism.

She wanted to show me that she was aware of what was going on, and that she actively condemned violence against communities of color. What she was actually doing was making me vastly uncomfortable and making me wonder why she felt the need to constantly prove how not racist she was.

By her always passing on painful content and making sure I knew how she felt about it, it did nothing more but give me negative feelings. At best, I was annoyed because it felt like she was trying to educate me about issues in my own community.

At worst, I had panic attacks and got very angry that she wasn't even thinking about how her actions would affect me.

I see this happen often in conversations, seminars, and other situations. White people will sometimes just continuously share their own thoughts, experiences, and knowledge about a certain issue without ever pausing to see that this can negatively impact People of Color.

I know that you do it in order to prove that you're a "good white person," but it comes off as if you are patronizing everyone in the room.

It also comes off as a weird sort of competition - where you're trying to prove how much you know about racism, often to the point of speaking over the People of Color in the room.

What you need to do is understand that your voice does not always need to be heard. Part of white supremacy as a larger system is the idea that white people are "objective" and authorities over everyone else in the room.

This kind of socializing can - and does - carry over even for white folks who do active anti-racism work. Remember that while your experiences shape your worldview, they're not the most important experiences in the room.

Anti-racism is a learning process. And when you're learning, it's always important to pay attention more to what others are saying and how they are feeling than it is to prove how much you know.

2. Check the Other White People in the Room

A white friend of mine shared something I had written about racialized misogyny on his Facebook page, which I was definitely okay with.

What I wasn't okay with, however, was when one of his white, male friends posted a comment that began with "Well, I don't think that's correct, my opinion is..." and ended with "...and that's just what I think. I mean, I didn't read the whole thing."

I waited a few hours for my friend to call out this other white person for the many harmful, reductive things he wrote in his post, but that never came.

I know it's "just" Facebook, but I'm gonna be real: I felt hurt and betrayed. This white friend of mine is someone who I trust and would label an ally.

But in that moment, all I could think was: O h, so you can talk a big game to my face, but you can't even defend me or check your white friends? What, is he just waiting for me to go off so that he can "like" my comment to look like he's showing up for me?

Unfortunately, this wasn't the first or last time I'd felt that way about a white person who I know does anti-racism work. I've noticed that sometimes, white people who do really great work just don't talk to the other white people in their lives.

It's like you're all fine preaching at and talking to and listening to People of Color, but just stay silent when it comes to other white people.

And look, I get it.

When it's your family members or old friends or co-workers that say or uphold racist ideas, it can be hard to confront them.

There are many folks in my life, both white and People of Color, that have internalized oppressive ideologies. Sometimes it's too hard for me to get into conversations with them, either because I'm exhausted or I just can't handle their emotional backlash in the moment.

And that's okay - sometimes you just can't handle educating someone in the moment.

But the thing is, as a white person, you have to constantly educate other white people. If you are truly committed to anti-racism work, it has to be part of your everyday life.

I know that whiteness isn't a protection. When you confront conservative family members who are blatantly racist or your liberal boss who "totally isn't racist, but," there are consequences. Personal safety has to come into account when talking to people about unlearning and dismantling racism.

But when you don't confront other white people, the onus always - and I literally mean always - falls on People of Color.

And whether that means we have to constantly exhaust ourselves teaching the white people who are willing to at least half listen or whether that means we become the victims of white people who exert violence on us, we are the ones who have to bear the brunt of white supremacy.

While you might have to have an uncomfortable conversation for a few minutes, we'll have to deal with racism for the rest of our lives.

When you stay silent in the face of racism, it tells other white people, "What I'm doing is actually okay, cause if this person isn't calling me out, then it must be okay!"

Because the truth is, the system of white supremacy teaches us all that People of Color are too emotional, are just complaining about things, and don't know what we're talking about. Many white people just don't, or won't, listen to People of Color when we talk about our experiences with racism.

We need you to put aside your own reasons for not wanting to confront other white people. We need you link to our articles, share our stories, and explain why racism is an actual thing.

3. Excuse Yourself If You're Having Strong Emotions

A few months ago, I was in a professional setting with a few other folks, some white and some People of Color. We had been discussing police brutality. Many of the Black folks and other People of Color in the room were having a very difficult time. It was a hard but healing kind of conversation.

That is, until one of the white women in the room began to cry.

She began to speak, mentioning that she knows police violence doesn't affect her directly, but that she was having a hard time dealing with everything.

The tone of the conversation shifted. Half of the people in the room went to comfort her. The other half, myself included, began to roll our eyes, cross our arms over our chests, and completely tune the discussion out. The only thing going through my mind was, W hy do we have to deal with her right now?

Everyone was having a tough time. I don't want to fault this woman for feeling overwhelmed. But it was also deeply inappropriate for her to be crying in that space.

She took a conversation that predominately affected the Black folks in the room and made it about her white woman tears. It forced half of the room to cater to her, and alienated the other half.

As a white person in an anti-racist conversation or space, it's important to be in touch with your emotions. You need to be aware of yourself, especially when you experience strong emotions like sadness, anger, and guilt.

If you find yourself having a strong emotional reaction during conversations about racism and there are folks in the room who experience that violence firsthand, excuse yourself from the situation.

This is especially important if you're finding your emotions manifesting themselves in physical ways - including crying, shouting, needing to be hugged, and other reactions. Just remove yourself from the situation. Have a few rituals or practices planned to help you calm down before you reenter the situation.

Your emotions and reactions are valid. You as a person are allowed to experience and work through whatever is happening for you.

But you also need to understand it should not be anyone's place to have to comfort you when you're confronted with your own whiteness and white supremacy.

Too often, People of Color are pushed aside so that white people feel safe and calmed. This is racism in itself. So understand where you're at emotionally, gauge the situation that you're in, and think about the ways you can make sure you deal with your emotions in an appropriate setting.

4. Have a Support System of Other White People

A few months ago, I remember a close white friend of mine commenting, "I need to make more white friends that I can have anti-racism conversations with."

To be completely honest: I had looked at them incredulously and blurted out, " But why? "

My friend stared back at me and said, "Because I need to talk about my emotions sometimes, and it's not things that are appropriate to say to you or my other friends of color."

I had never really thought about that before, but I realized they were totally right. Everyone needs to vent once in a while. Everyone needs to have their emotions validated. Everyone needs space to work through what they're feeling.

Anti-racism work isn't a one-and-done type of deal. It's a lifelong learning process. It's only natural that you'll make mistakes, feel burnt out, or just question why everything feels so difficult all the time.

And the truth is that if you're feeling this way, then that's good - it means that you're constantly pushing yourself to understand the ways in which white supremacy is an incredibly violent system.

But feeling those kinds of emotions isn't necessarily good for you personally. What I mean is that your hurt, guilty, or angry feelings are valid. And you need to have room to deal with those feelings in a constructive way.

Unfortunately, you dealing with those feelings by unloading or processing with People of Color can do more harm then good.

When you work through these feelings with a Person of Color, it can be silencing to the emotions that we are feeling.

People of Color should not have to listen to your feelings about racism. Having to do so forces us to put aside our own complex emotions. It is also exhausting - because intentionally or not, you unloading on a Person of Color says, "My having to face my whiteness and the complex emotions that come with that is more important then the ways in which whiteness is a tool of violence against you."

One of the healthiest things you can do is create a support group of other white people who are going through similar things.

Talking with, complaining to, and brainstorming with other white people helps all people involved. It gives you a sounding board to work through your guilt, discomfort, and uncertainty. It helps to understand that your emotions are valid, and that you're not alone in your feelings.

And it also creates a space where you can recommit to anti-racism work without harming the folks who actually experience racism. It gives you space to brainstorm with other white people and figure out how you can be better allies.

***

I know this is all hard stuff to process.

These are all small, tangible steps that you as a white person can take to continue your anti-racism work.

It's important to remember that your feelings are valid, and that being anti-racist is always going to be hard work. Showing up as effective allies means recognizing your own limitations and emotions. No one can do good work if they aren't taking care of themselves.

But it's also important to recognize that anti-racism work is always going to be hard. It will make you uncomfortable, and that's okay. This is all a part of a true liberation process.
Jennifer Loubriel is a Contributing Writer for Everyday Feminism and a mixed race Afro-Puerto Rican from the Bronx. She is also a queer mujerista and child abuse survivor. She earned her B.A. from Oberlin College in Religion and English, and identifies as an amateur Latinx ethicist and a speculative fiction enthusiast. She is a co-founder and moderator over at the Tumblr Women of Color, in Solidarity, a safe space for and by women of color. You can usually find her writing about apocalypse and diaspora, rewatching her favorite TV shows, or taking selfies with her family's cat.

Filed Under: Tagged With: Articles, Race & Ethnicity Posts

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4 Ways White People Can Process Their Emotions Without Bringing the White Tears - Everyday Feminism

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If you're a white person who has been in many activist spaces, then you've probably experienced a specific, often unspoken ground rule: There's no room for white tears in this space. This sort of rule is instilled because oftentimes, in other spaces, your emotions, and the emotions of other white people, are constantly centered, nurtured, and coddled when it comes to conversations about race.

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MTV - Franchesca "Chescaleigh" Ramsey squashes the 4... | Facebook

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Franchesca "Chescaleigh" Ramsey squashes the 4 responses you'll probably hear when talking about Black Lives Matter.

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- Anonymous members of an anarchist group covered the Hollywood Walk of Fame stars with names of African Americans who have been killed by police. ( )

Hollywood Walk of Fame covered with names of blacks killed by police

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Hollywood Walk of Fame covered with names of blacks killed by police

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Anonymous members of an anarchist group covered the Hollywood Walk of Fame stars with names of African Americans who have been killed by police. ( ) Hollywood Walk of Fame covered with names of blacks killed by police

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platform with many articles

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Black Lives Matter movement | US news | The Guardian

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Walter 'Hawk' Newsome has built a campaign on encouraging black people to withhold their votes until black issues are addressed. Will it change this year's election?

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Radical Brownies: berets, badges and social justice - video

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The Radical Monarchs is an alternative to the Girl Scout movement for young girls carrying the torch of radical black youth activism in Oakland, California

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Biracial Cheerios Girl and Parents Interview  'Excited' About Negative Comments    6 12 13

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Cheerios super bowl commercial 2014 - Cheerios interracial family 2014 Game Day Ad | "Gracie"

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Cheerios super bowl commercial 2014 - Cheerios interracial family 2014 Game Day Ad | "Gracie" Cheerios super bowl commercial 2014 - When families eat breakfast together, amazing things can happen.