The Blackwashing of President Obama’s Legacy

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2016-12-29 01:45Z by Steven

The Blackwashing of President Obama’s Legacy

The Root
2016-12-27

Daniel Johnson

There is a deeply embedded danger in the collective black American consciousness to defend the cultural and political blackness of President Barack Obama.

On the surface, his very presence  in the Oval Office is an act of political revolution, an unprecedented response to this nation’s inherent anti-blackness. But when his destructive neoliberal politics prioritize white Americans, and his personal politics seem to pathologize blackness, what then, is revolution?

This black family in the White House, while certainly a switch from the lily-white inhabitants of the past years, is only a cosmetic kind of revolution; they just look different from the Clintons and the Bushes and the Kennedys. They exist in a space that both challenges white power and solidifies it.

In Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent piece for The Atlantic, he does an excellent job of positioning the racial nuance of President Obama’s past with his centering of whiteness. Obama himself acknowledges that his working assumption of white benevolence is different from first lady Michelle Obama’s baseline, and that has been evident these past eight years in his willingness to openly castigate or patronize black people—the demographic that has remained the most supportive of him despite being neglected and ignored by “our black president.”…

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