Ever mindful of the barrier he broke as the first African American president of the United States, Barack Obama and his staffers remain hopeful about what his historic election will continue to mean for generations down the line.
I think my legacy as the first African American president falls in a few different categories. Number one, it was a measure of the progress we’ve made as a country. And I always joke with my friends—the first time might have been an accident. When they reelected me with the majority, that indicated that at that point, having seen me—warts and all—during some really difficult times, then [be] willing to put me back in office, shows that a majority of the American people really do try to make decisions based on the person’s qualities and merits rather than their race.
Even if President Obama had done nothing in eight years, you’ve still got millions of kids who've never known a white president. That’s a big deal.
Growing up…it was inconceivable to me that in my lifetime there would be an African American president. To my children, who are now teenagers, it seems like the most normal thing in the world.
[His election] made me feel good about our country. My mom grew up in a very segregated Chicago and my dad, same thing here in DC. And I listened to them tell stories about the discrimination they both experienced, even though they came from families that were well-educated and they both had great educations and were accomplished academics. Still, when my mom traveled to Tuskegee, [she] had to stay in people’s homes, you couldn't stay in a hotel. And my father went to Dunbar High School in DC, which was the best high school, one of the best in the country, but it was all black because that was the only option available to him. And so they never thought this could happen.
The history of that election. I mean, it’s hard to comprehend that essentially, thirty-five years before, people like Barack Obama had a hard time eating at lunch counters and riding on buses and participating in the electoral process.
The impact it has on kids, certainly African American kids who, in some cases, have only known an African American president. It gives them, hopefully, a sense that there aren’t ceilings or barriers to what they can achieve. But also, a whole lot of white kids out there who came to feel as if there’s nothing surprising about somebody of color in positions of authority. That creates, hopefully, a set of better understandings and greater unity in generations to come, even if, in the short term, there was also some backlash or pushback to having an African American president in the White House.
I’ll never forget right before he was inaugurated in 2009, the concert on the Lincoln Memorial steps…we were about to have our first African American president there in the shadow of Lincoln. It was an awe-inspiring moment.
In March of 2008, in the heat of the Democratic primary, Obama’s long-time Chicago pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, gave a speech at the National Press Club that was filled with racial invectives and accusations. Some thought it would be the end of Obama’s chances to win the nomination. Then came the candidate’s now-historic speech on race in America—A More Perfect Union—which he delivered in Philadelphia on March 18. As Obama says now, he hoped to show the nation that when it comes to the complicated subject of race, there is no black and no white—just an awful lot of gray.
When I hear criticism of him not raising racial issues, I think back to that speech in Philadelphia during the campaign. What other presidential candidate ever had that forthright a conversation about race? Even before he became president, he set out who he was and what his thoughts were about race and through the course of this administration, he’s been consistent.
The speech was, in part, prompted by crisis. The pastor of our church in Chicago, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, was a brilliant preacher, acknowledged not just within African American circles, but among many people who study theology and the church and the power of sermons that he was one of the best around. And [he] had built this magnificent church that was doing all kinds of good work in the community. But generationally, he came out of the 60s, and still had the anger and frustrations and in some cases, the overly simplistic views borne out of that age. There would be times where his sermons would go into places that were offensive. I wasn’t aware of them, but a couple of those sermons popped up. I hadn’t been sitting there when they happened and, understandably, they raised concerns.
Reverend Wright was like a nuclear bomb dropped on our campaign in Chicago; it was the toughest thing we dealt with. We weren’t prepared for it and we were scrambling. Honestly, I’d say most of us in the campaign didn’t have a lot of great ideas. Some people were in fetal positions. I mean, it was a hit to the main engine.
The thought [was], Let’s send him out on the cable shows, give him some talking points. We’ll have him do a round of interviews and then, hopefully, he can get past it. And I remember watching those interviews and thinking, This is not something you can explain in a quick cable interview. And I think Obama thought that, too, because he told [David] Axelrod [then chief strategist for the campaign] and Plouffe that he wanted to give a speech.
It was unknown and you didn't how it was going to go. And that wasn't a time in the campaign where we were riding high.
I remember trying to put all of this together into one statement, and none of us could get it right. We did the best that we could. We got a draft down and it was okay, it wasn't great. I remember [Obama] walked in and he looked at the statement and he said, “Guys…you have to tell the American people the truth. And you have to let the chips fall where they may. And if people decide that I should not be their president because of the things that my pastor has said, then that’s the decision that they’ll make. But in times like this when everything is on the line you just can't spin.”
The reaction, initially, of a lot of my team was to simply disown [Reverend Wright] and not try to speak in a complicated way to the American people. The notion was that in this sound bite age, that was a losing proposition. I decided that, actually, this was a useful moment to try to put in context the complexities of race relations in modern America.
It was Barack Obama who calmly decided that the only way to deal with this [was] to sail right into it—“I’m going to work on a speech and…deliver it and try to put this in context. And it may not satisfy people and I may lose, but I’m not just going to do this by going out and giving some interviews and pretending it’s not going to happen. I’ve got to deal with it head on.” My admiration for him really grew in that moment.
It was something he’d clearly thought about for a very, very long time. [We] talked for about an hour on the phone...and I sat there and I typed every single word he said. Then I went to bed and I woke up at 6 am, went to Starbucks and wrote the first draft. And sent it to him that night and at 3 am I get an email back with all track changes. On Monday I made all those changes and I sent it back to him Monday night and then again at 3 in the morning, he sent an email to me, Axelrod, Plouffe and Valerie [Jarrett] and it says “here’s the final speech. Favs, you can make edits for grammar or rhythm or change words here and there, but the substance of this, I don’t want anyone to change. This is what I want to say”.
The calmness, the deliberate way he dealt with that, the courageous way he dealt with that, that’s what you want in someone sitting in the Oval Office in the Situation Room, but that was all Barack Obama. I mean, he came up with our strategy. He decided what we were going to do.
I remember he stayed up all night writing, trying to get this thing perfect. I kept the copy of it, all the edits he made, and there were pages and pages of edits.
I did my best to try to describe how it is that you could have somebody who is very intelligent and did wonderful work and had all kinds of great white friends and had served in our military and yet still spoke with great bitterness about American racism in American history. [I] also tried to explain why there might be white people who were wonderful and thoughtful and cared deeply about their African American friends—and I included in that my own grandmother, the person who loved me as much as anybody and had as much to do with my success as anybody – but could still have their own blind spots and biases.
I went to a small Baptist church in Charlotte called Friendship Missionary Baptist Church. The community was such a strong piece of it. It helps to define you, it gives you hope, and sometimes it gives you opportunity that you don’t necessarily get in a normal social context of the entire country. Reverend Wright had helped [the president] to grow and to develop. I’m sure everyone has had someone who’s been close to them who has said something that wasn’t politically correct. Everyone’s got the old grandmother who has an opinion about someone who doesn’t look like them or sound like them. And you don’t kick them out at Christmas dinner because they say something nutty.
Reverend Wright’s comments didn't just have a racial element to them. There was also an issue of patriotism, because he said some pretty disparaging things about America. When you combine toxic comments about race and patriotism, it’s hard to imagine how that ends well. The instinct of so many political figures would have been to downplay it, to hope it would go away or to just say, “I disavow this, I disavow this guy, and I'm moving on.” I don't think that would've worked as well, actually.
The topic of race—it makes people uncomfortable. And in the context of the toxicity with which the press and everyone was covering what Reverend Wright had said, [the question was] Could he come in there and make sense in the chaos? And his view was, That’s when you most need to speak up.
The novel idea that Obama had was, Let me go out there and actually explain the whole context of everything that happened, offer some perspective, offer some sense of history. And I'm going to trust that the American people will understand it. And that bet paid off.
His willingness to say: “Look, if I want the American people to vote for me as president, they have to really understand who I am. And so let me tell them a story at a time when many of them are troubled about who I am.”
There were parts of the country that saw this candidacy as a way to move the country forward. Others were trying to use it as a moment—whether it was a dog whistle or flat out playing on racial fears and anxieties. For him to step out and talk in a personal way about his history, his family, his experience, what that meant, and, as a result, what it meant to be an American, and to exist in the country and deal with these issues. It was a critical and transformative moment, not just for the campaign. We had never, ever had a moment where you had someone running for office at that level who was an African American man talking about issues of race in that way. To do it at such a pivotal moment, when he knew his candidacy was on the line. But [he] felt, in spite of advice he was getting from lots of different quarters, that he had to do it.
I really took a step back and recognized, I am a white woman working on the campaign of an African American man. And more important than gender is race. I can't possibly understand everything he’s been through or people who have grown up dealing with discrimination based on race. That’s not an experience I had. So there are moments, like the race speech, where I have to take a step back and recognize, I actually can't relate and understand the thinking. And that’s unique to this presidency.
[The president] called to check in and I said, “You know, man. I think this whole Jeremiah Wright thing could be a blessing in disguise.” And he started laughing, then he told Valerie, who was sitting next to him, and she started laughing, and they were just rolling and laughing and I said, “Look, there’s a hurdle in front of you that no other candidate has an opportunity to clear. You clear this hurdle, you’re president of the United States.” And he stopped laughing and he said, “‘I guess I’ve got to give the speech.’ And I said, “I guess you’ve got to give the speech.”
He really wanted to talk about what was in his heart. He wrote the speech. It was a remarkable moment and we didn’t know if he’d survive it.
The idea was to try to get America to see these issues, not in simple black and white terms—pun intended—but to see that how we’ve evolved in race is complicated; it doesn’t travel in a straight line, but that the trajectory is good. The trajectory is positive, and that rather than hunker down in our own respective corners, we need to be more generous and try to assume the best in people as opposed to the worst, even as we stand up for principles that we think are important.
There are two elements that he got absolutely right, which is that today, things are not perfect. But we’ve come a really long way in a very short period of time, when you look at the history of our country and the history of rights and equality.
I remember standing there waiting for the speech to begin, and knowing how much work had gone into it and not really knowing how people would perceive it. Then hearing [it] was a moment that I thought, I knew this guy was special because I moved to Chicago to work for him, but this is a moment so unique that I don’t think has happened in history and may not happen in the future.
It was a powerful moment, just hearing these issues addressed in a personal way from your friend, but in a way that everybody in America could relate to.
I think people want to see their presidents tested, particularly someone like Barack Obama, who was young, hadn’t been on the national scene. People were watching him very carefully. And so people kicked his tires and I think a lot of people might have withered under that, but he rose. I don’t want to suggest we turned it into an opportunity. We survived it. But I think people very much respected the way he dealt with that.
He was probably the only person in the universe who could give that speech at that moment and he did it so powerfully and eloquently, in plain English, and allowed people to really have a perspective on race in America that I don’t think had ever been articulated.
He gave it in the middle of the day on a Tuesday. Is anyone going to be paying attention? It certainly broke through. The president called me right afterwards and he said, “I don't know if I can get elected saying the things I did about race today. But I also know that if I was too afraid to say them, I don’t deserve to be elected.”
Despite Barack Obama’s willingness to tackle the issue of race head on in Philadelphia, over the years, some said that the issue of race was too much submerged, that the president was reluctant to directly address the issue of race in America in his agenda.
A lot of us are defensive about the notion that he’s new to these issues or that he’s been late to these issues. These have been the very issues that have animated his career, from his first voter registration drive on the south side of Chicago or his first time organizing people in housing projects in Chicago. People who have had to live in less forgiving environments—that’s been his cause throughout.
I focused on what needed to be focused on in my first term: making sure we rescued the economy from a Great Depression, following through on my promise to provide healthcare to people who didn’t have it, making sure we were expanding opportunities for students to go to college. There were just a series of urgent issues that had to be addressed that were important to everybody—black, white, Hispanic, Asian. What is true is that I did not focus my policy initiatives on issues that would help African Americans alone. Primarily, the most important thing I could do for the African American or Latino community at that time was to make sure they had a job and a home and weren’t losing everything they’d worked so hard for.
The president often said: If America caught a cold, communities of color got the flu. If he started to attack issues of poverty, healthcare, education…to reform the most troubled schools that are predominantly educating students of color, he was addressing the issues in the policy.
Historically, when minority groups have done best in this country and when we’ve made the most progress on race, it’s been because we spoke to the entire country about universal values, universal principles initiated universal programs designed to provide opportunity, because minority groups are the ones who are most likely to suffer from lack of opportunity or poverty or lack of health insurance. They benefit disproportionately, and it helps level the playing field.
In hindsight, people will see that his administration did great things for people of color. This notion that somehow he was reluctant to engage in a conversation about racial matters [or] won’t take a position is belied by the accomplishments of his administration.
What didn’t get a lot of attention was we reinvigorated the Office of Civil Rights and Voting Rights in the Justice Department. To initiate policies and agencies like the Agricultural Department or the Education Department, that addressed what might have been inequities or lack of fairness. We did it the old fashioned way, not with a lot of fanfare, but, rather, by fixing problems and grinding away. And so, I continue to believe that was the right strategy for us to accomplish everything we accomplished.
The shooting death of Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012, heightened racial tensions in the country at the beginning of president Obama’s second term. The 17-year-old African American high school student was killed by George Zimmerman, who was “neighborhood watch captain” for the gated community where Martin had been walking, heading home to his father’s house.
I remember being in the Oval Office right before he went out to a press conference on a different subject and he was so upset about this young boy—“He was just walking down the street with some Skittles in his hand. How could this happen to him? Where have we gone as a civilization that this poor child, who wasn't in the wrong place, he was heading home, how could this happen to him?”
I’ve got a son. He was younger than [Trayvon Martin], but I had the talk with my son to tell him how he is supposed to interact with the police. You know, somebody comes to you with a gun, how you’re supposed to interact with those people.
[The president and I] were having a conversation about it and he said, “You know, if I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” And everyone sort of sat back, and he said, “I'm going to say that.” And everyone was kind of quiet because people were [wondering], Should he say that or not? But no one was going to tell him not to say that.
And he had said to us, “If I had a son, he would look just like him. That’s why I'm so upset about this, because all of our children deserve to be safe.” And it was very deeply personal to him. That’s what caused him to go out and address the press and make that comment to try to get people to understand that even the son of the president of the United States might not be safe unless we make some progress here.
In my second term, what you ended up seeing are issues so specific to race relations—most notably, the police shootings of African American men or boys. It became more urgent to speak directly to how do we address those issues. It wasn’t that those issues were avoided in the first term. It’s just that they did not surface.
I remember being in church shortly after [the shooting of Martin] and the sermon was about how you prepare your sons to deal in a world where this could happen to them. It was hard not to have a very personal reaction. More as a citizen than as White House staffer, I viewed the president’s remarks as, That’s right what he says, and it’s right for him to give that context to this.
I’ve heard stories [from him] about cabs not stopping, women moving to the side of an elevator, and the whole range of things you have to deal with as an African American man. He, the president of the United States, certainly had to deal with those things.
What the president really understood is that part of the hurt and anger and disappointment and sadness that so many were feeling in the African American community was a sense that for young men of color, this is increasingly an all-too-common aspect of life—being suspected of being a criminal of some kind. Being caught up in these situations with the criminal justice system. Not having certain opportunities, whether educational or economic…The president felt like the difference between his circumstances and a lot of these young men that he had such empathy for, was that he grew up in a more forgiving environment. He could make mistakes, he was surrounded with support systems. He was given second chances. And he wanted to think about how we make this environment more forgiving for more young men of color. How can we get at some of these issues that are really at the bottom [of] the anger and the hurt and the sadness and the grief?
Do people know what it’s like to be in New York and have…a cab not pull over and pick you up? Or for somebody to assume you’re security because you’re African American and tall, or whatever? Granted, none of that stuff hurts his feelings, but I think a lot of people don’t have that perspective on what it’s like to be an African American male in this country. And if you don’t have that perspective, it’s hard to understand why some of this race stuff looks and feels the way it does.
In an address in the Rose Garden, on March 23, 2012, the president weighed in on the Trayvon Martin shooting, talking about race in a more personal way than he had since before he’d taken office.
Those remarks, I thought, were really revealing. They were extemporaneous. They were from the heart. That was something he personally felt, something I personally felt, and I thought those remarks were really a view into the soul of this president.
I admit, I've been one of those people where sometimes I say, “I think this might go too far, push too many buttons.” And usually he’s the one who says, “If we don’t say it, who will?” I think his kind of self-imposed fear of talking about it openly and honestly has diminished over time.
George Zimmerman’s acquittal, in July of 2013, sparked protests across the country, as President Obama initially called for calm. Soon after, the president spoke about the matter in a more passionate, very personal way, in an unscheduled briefing at the
White House.
The first response was sort of traditional—a statement on the verdict and support for the family of Trayvon Martin. And that, to a lot of people, was not satisfactory. Part of that was because the president had spoken so personally and honestly about it when Trayvon was first killed. I think a lot of people thought, Is this really going to be it?
And it became immediately clear to us that the president intended to speak about this. He hadn't really discussed it with us, so I don't think many of us really knew what he was going to say. We knew that he wanted to find an opportunity to offer some reflections on the verdict.
The president went into the briefing room and he was very emotional. He didn't comment on the verdict itself but really focused on what is happening in our society, that a young black man can't walk down the street without creating fear and a sense of danger. And he said we should all do some soul-searching and figure out what we can do collectively and individually to change that, so that all of our children can grow up and get that fair shot at life and not have their life snuffed out early.
Presidents like to present a very clearly thought-out proposal before they tell you that they're going to propose something. But in his case, it was really an honest and open thought. In the briefing room, he said, “I think there are things we can do…And he started to outline a series of things. And I got a notepad out and was actually writing down a lot of what he was saying.
That conversation led to him challenging his team: What can we do, particularly for boys and young men of color who are disproportionally not reading by third grade? Who are being expelled and suspended from school at a higher rate? Who are entering the juvenile justice system and then the criminal justice system at disproportionally high rates? The deck is stacked against them. What can we do to change that paradigm?
It was really about, How do we take this tragedy and turn it into an opportunity? How do we make sense of the senseless? I think the president really, really wanted this not to just be another young black man who was murdered and we’d forget his name and whatever lessons we could learn, we didn't learn.
And that led to the creation of My Brother’s Keeper.
The president said, “If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago and that child is struggling, that matters to me even if it’s not my child. I am my brother’s keeper.” And he recalled that line right there from his 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention. And it became clear to me instantly that that’s what we were going to call what we were trying to do. We’re just going to call it My Brother’s Keeper.
When we were thinking about designing the initiative, we thought about it on two planes: What can the government do? What can the private sector and the NGO sector and the philanthropic sector…do through resources or research or data? And one of the things that happened was establishing My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, which is an outside entity divorced from the White House. It’s not just the work of government, this is the work of all of us. And I would imagine the president will pick up that baton when he leaves the White House.
Another unarmed African American teenager, Michael Brown, was shot and killed on August 9, 2014, by a white police officer, Darren Wilson, in Ferguson, Missouri. As with the Trayvon Martin shooting, protests broke out, taking on renewed intensity when a St. Louis grand jury failed to indict Wilson a few months later.
There were street demonstrations that were growing larger and larger, day by day. We were all up at Martha’s Vineyard on vacation and we had a couple of meetings at the house where the president was staying.
The more we were hearing about the frustration and anger on the ground, it felt as though someone’s presence was necessary. And I said, “Who better than Eric Holder to go? He’s the chief law enforcement officer for the country and so has respect of law enforcement, yet he’s an African American man who has devoted his life to civil rights and has the respect of the community there. And so the president agreed that it made sense for Eric to go.
The vice president let me use his plane. I flew out there on Air Force Two and I remember walking down the stairs and thinking, “Alright, here we go. We’ll see what happens.”
The only times [the president has] held back on race are a situation like Ferguson, where speaking out may enflame tensions. There are times as president where he had to take into account the safety of a city or an open investigation and so he couldn't just sort of go out there and say whatever he wanted or shoot from the hip. He had to very carefully calibrate his words.
One of the things that really struck me as we went through the series of meetings, talking to students, community groups, talking to Michael Brown’s parents, was a consistent theme about how the criminal justice system there was being used inappropriately: directed largely at people of color, poor people as a way in which they could raise money through fines and through bench warrants, to raise money so that the government could run itself. And people talked about how they were mistreated by the police. It was a constant theme I remember hearing hour after hour during the course of that day, and the feelings expressed to me by those people [were] certainly found to be true in the report the Justice Department issued about the criminal justice system in Ferguson.
The division in how people see the world—the sense on the part of African Americans that the criminal justice system isn’t fair, and it’s not a matter of paranoia to be concerned about it. And the perception on the part of whites: Why are you attacking the police that keep us safe? We have great trust in them. That was and continues to be a very difficult issue to bridge.
During a Bible study session at Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof, a local landscaper, shot and killed nine African American participants there in the church basement. Later, Roof’s journal entries said he hoped to start a “race war.” Roof was found guilty of all 33 charges against him, and in January 2017, he was formally sentenced to death.
It began as mass shootings do around here, this horrible routine where you get an email from the Situation Room and cable news starts covering, there’s been a shooting at a church in Charleston…[and] you find out that a white person went to the basement of a black church and killed a bunch of people.
At the time the president decided to speak in Charleston, the country was still reeling from this atrocious act. How could a young man walk into a black church, [be] welcomed into that black church, participate in a prayer study group, then at the end of that study group, pull out a weapon and shoot so many people? And 21 years old, basically just beyond childhood himself. What could make a person hate that much at such a relatively young age? And that’s the question I think America was grappling with.
And then something extraordinary happened. The relatives of the deceased, one by one in a courtroom [at a bond hearing for the accused], forgave the murderer. And the president heard that and said, “Wow. That’s what we can talk about.”
For those who worship in a black church, I think it was an opportunity for [the president] to describe what they know every day, which is notwithstanding a horrible history of attacks and bombings and murders in the black church, part of what makes it strong is its willingness to keep the door open. And he thought he could take that horrendous act and teach about the grace that comes from the black church. And the people who were so shocked at how forgiving the family members were just a couple days after they lost the most important person in their life, that they could go and say we forgive you, that was stunning to so many people. Except the people who worship in a black church. They understood that.
I give him a draft [of the speech] the night before and went home, put on some jeans, ordered pizza. I get a call at 9 o'clock asking if I could come back to the office. So I go back to the office. He’d crossed out the entire back two pages of the speech, not even made edits, just crossed them out. He kept the first three pages intact, largely, then I'd written in just the first couple of lines of Amazing Grace, some passages we’d been talking about. How…in the courtroom was grace. And he took that and made it the rest of the speech. He’d done it in about five hours on yellow legal paper and it just made me feel like a chump that he’s that good.
His willingness to go into an emotionally raw and painful situation and his ability to lift us all up, not just to feel better but to be inspired to act. Because if you'll remember, it was just at the time that [South Carolina] Governor [Nikki] Haley decided to take down the Confederate flag [from the State House grounds], right after this horrible act. And [the president] said, “Yes, that’s an important symbolic gesture.” It was a reminder to so many African Americans about a time in our history where we were slaves. Taking that down, yes, that symbolism is important but it’s also important to improve our education system. It’s also important to make sure that people get jobs. It’s also important to revamp our criminal justice system. There’s a lot of things we can do if we feel the same grace those folks worshipping around that basement felt.
We get on the helicopter, Air Force One, and fly down to Charleston. On the plane, he says, “You know, there’s another stanza of Amazing Grace toward the back of the eulogy and if I'm feeling it, I might sing it.” And he did. And just on its own, that’s an extraordinary moment.
Going into the remarks, he wasn't sure if he could find the words to say what he wanted to say, and yet he did. And I think it will go down in history as one of his most important speeches, because he doesn't ever give in to the hate. It’s his job to move us beyond the hate and to not just feel better but to be better.
On July 7, 2016, a lone African American sniper shot and killed five police officers and injured nine others during a peaceful protest in Dallas, Texas, of the recent white-on-black police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota. Once again, the president was called on to speak at a memorial service.
I used my speech at Dallas, probably one of the most sorrowful and tragic episodes during my presidency…to again, try to bridge these divides. In some ways, it was a corollary to the speech I gave in Philadelphia.
He wanted to address a bunch of different things in the Dallas remarks. First and foremost was violence against police officers, not okay ever under any circumstances. But also, what leads to the kind of hatred to [cause] someone to do that. And what real fear and anger there is in communities that feel like they’ve been disrespected or treated unfairly. He’s one of the only people in our public life right now who can try to speak to all sides, to get them to see something in each other, as uncomfortable as it might be, and at least try to do something good.
What I said in the Dallas speech continues to be true—that in some ways, no matter how heartfelt or elegant the words, bridging these divides takes time and, more importantly, requires actions, actions at the local level. Actions involving police chiefs and community activists and clergy and mayors and people of goodwill coming together and really trying to do practical things.
Dallas is what gave him the capacity to do that because of what that city had done after those horrific assassinations, with the black police chief and the white mayor…how the city had come together, how there had been 500 new applications to be on the police force after that happened. That’s the America he knows and sees and believes in, a perfect backdrop to give a speech like that, where you’ve got your Republican predecessor next to you, and a black police chief and white mayor, and this is exactly the kind of thing that’s possible in a civilized democracy when it’s working properly.
Rather than simply react to these events with the proverbial conversation on race, what we’ve tried to do is really dig in and say, “All right, what builds trust? Are there ways in which investigations of these shootings can make communities feel as if they’re being treated fairly? Can we train police differently? Are we able to provide police with the tools so that they feel safer when they go in these communities, and are less likely to react too quickly in circumstances where they might be able to deescalate?” All those issues end up over time having more of a lasting effect than any conversation or speech I might engage in.
He knew he’d take some heat from parts of the sermon. We’re going in to eulogize police officers, [and] to actually talk openly and honestly about race and the problems that police officers face. And he sees no conflict in doing that. In fact, he sees it as an integral part of democracy, where if we’re unwilling to speak uncomfortable truths, nothing is going to get better. You know, race relations haven't suddenly gotten worse because we’re daring to talk about them. It’s what gives us the capacity and the space to do something about it.
The whole question of race is still something this nation is going to have to grapple with, that the next president is going to have to grapple with. How the next president deals with the question of race will be a defining moment for America in the 21st century, given the demographic changes this country is going through. The diversity can either be a very positive force or it can be made to be a divisive thing. And what the next president does…will really go a long way to decide what America is going to look like in the 21st century.
Despite the president’s occasional penchant for, some would say, minimizing the racial component of certain events, there were many moments, days, weeks, and months during Barack Obama’s eight-year administration when racial hatred reared its head.
No other president has had his very citizenship questioned. No other president has faced a member of the House of Representatives standing up in the House Chamber and shouting “You lie!” during a national address. These are acts of disrespect that reflected something that was, without question, rooted in race, as far as I was concerned. And some of the really vehement opposition out in the country was, as well. I don't think it’s a majority of people, but it certainly was there.
I’m surprised by the degree to which some of the animosity in the opposition comes from a place of racism and intolerance and a belief that someone like [Obama] shouldn’t be our president. That surprised me. In the campaigns, it really wasn’t front and center for us.
From the perspective [of] the media, it was the minority vote that elected him president. The black vote. Well, black people are like 11 percent of the population. Nobody is becoming president of this country if white people don’t vote for them, right?
The way they talk about him is almost like the other, he’s not American. I think there’s no question that’s been [an issue]. He won by seven points, a landslide in modern proportions, [with] support from all walks of life. He won the white vote in many states, particularly outside of the south. But I think that some people in America just weren’t ready for him. There’s a real sense that, this is not what our president is supposed to look like. And you see a lot of the comments on social media, they’re very hateful and they’re tinged with race. I think that is a loud minority. It’s not the majority, but it’s been part of the resistance, I believe that.
This is a man whose faith and patriotism and character has been attacked, and citizenship, in a way no other president’s has been attacked. His very legitimacy has been questioned for years.
There’s no doubt that among some circles, among some constituencies, the reaction to my policies or proposals might have been in some ways colored by my race. And that cuts both ways. I think African Americans were so proud that they probably were willing to be less critical of me, in some cases, than they might otherwise for a white president. What’s also true is that some of my critics were a little faster to jump on certain issues in certain ways than they might otherwise have been, and that is part of the process of the evolution of the country’s attitudes.
Is there backlash to him being the first African American president? Absolutely. Is race a part of this backlash? Absolutely. Is it the only reason for it? No.
The last eight years is a reaction of the status quo to hold on to the power that it has. It’s a reaction to the threat that they see Barack Obama embodying. He is a harbinger of what America is going to be. And I think it is America at its best: a more diverse America, a progressive America, a tolerant America. And there were a lot of people who were threatened by that vision. It meant displacing people who had held power, and institutions that had held power for long periods of time. People, institutions are wary of change. And if nothing else, this president was a significant change agent.
In Selma, Alabama, on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, where Martin Luther King Jr. and hundreds of unarmed marchers were attacked by state troopers, the president spoke of a brighter, more united future for the country, despite a year of race-related killings across the country.
Selma was [the president’s] most unabashedly patriotic love song to America. Anyone could go to Selma and just pay a nice tribute to what happened there, to the marchers crossing the bridge and retell the story. But he wants to do something bigger with every speech.
So he told the story of Selma and what could possibly be more American than what happened on that bridge? You know, plain and humble people, the downtrodden, people without high station changing the course of a super power at great, great risk to themselves, without help from others. And these were people whose patriotism had been questioned and faith and they were called mongrels and all sorts of terrible things and had no rights, and often, no hope. But they did something about it. They changed the world.
People look back and say, “In the 50's, in racial things, things were pretty quiet. Everything was okay.” Well, I guess we didn’t talk about it as much as we do now. It was before the Civil Rights Movement. If you talk to black folks in the south, black folks in the north, ask, “What’s your life like?” We’re in a far better place now…and unless we recognize that, we do a real disservice to people who sacrificed a great deal, who risked a great deal to make Barack Obama president, and Eric Holder attorney general. We still have a long way to go. I think this president…just by his presence…really engendered a necessary conversation about things racial.
It’s what he’s been talking about his entire career: People who love their country can change it against impossible odds. And we decided to say that is what America is. And he said, “You know what? At the end, let’s just let ‘er rip. Give me a whole list of what America is. You know, “We’re the slaves that built the White House and the economy of the south. The immigrants that came on ships and across the Rio Grande. The cowboys who settled the West, and the hucksters who followed 'em. Astronauts, soldiers, first responders, Jackie Robinson stealing home in the World Series, even though people were throwing pitches straight to his head.”
People have said I had to endure a lot as attorney general and I often thought a lot of it wasn’t pleasant, but when things got really bad, I’d think about my sister-in-law, Vivian Malone, who was one of the two black students who integrated the University of Alabama in 1963. And I thought [about] what she had to endure that day to get past [then Alabama Governor] George Wallace, what she had to endure during the two years she was on campus there with bomb threats and living with U.S. Marshalls. I thought about Dr. King, things he had to deal with, civil rights workers who were killed in Mississippi. If you keep that kind of perspective, it made all the things that I had to deal with quite endurable.
It was this big bold vision of America, America as it actually is today, not one where somebody says one part of America is more American than the other, but one where we all have a part to play here.
If you look at a country that was deeply mired in slavery; fought an ugly, bloody war and came out of it to move forward to pass constitutional amendments, to pass civil rights legislation. We did those things. There was no magic fairy dust. The problems are still significant. The promise of the legislation and even those constitutional amendments still remains to be fulfilled, but at the same time, we do move forward.
[The president] has a belief and a faith in America and the American people…Forty years before [Obama] was elected president, Bobby Kennedy predicted, almost to the day, there would be an African American president of The United States. Change is constant and sometimes it’s slow and imperceptible but it’s happening. And I think we sometimes get caught up in the moment rather than have perspective over time. America is still changing. It’s still getting better. It takes time and you just got to grind it out. I think that’s how he views this moment in time in his presidency. It is part of a continuum of change that’s been coming a long time and will continue long after his presidency.
