Review of Obama's Volume 1

Recalling the arduous 2008 path that ultimately led to his first term in the White House, Barack Obama writes in his new presidential memoir, A Promised Land,that his campaign was careful to avoid leaning into any issues that might be construed as “racial grievance.” By this, of course, he means Black concerns about the lethal consequences of institutional white supremacist power.

“[T]oo much focus on civil rights, police misconduct or other issues considered specific to Black people risked triggering suspicion, if not a backlash from the broader electorate,” Obama writes. “You might decide to speak up anyway as a matter of conscience, but you understood there’d be a price.”

White feelings matter, in other words. More specifically, the white majority’s fears of Black equality, even as a mere political proposition, can sink Black electoral aspirations. This was implicitly understood by Black American voters, who forgave the candidate for avoiding full-throated advocacy for racial justice on the campaign trail, considering it a necessary calculation to quell the anti-Black imaginings of those “for whom the image of me in the White House involved a big psychological leap.” Like Obama, many believed “the immediate formula for racial progress” would be getting the first Black president into office, where change could happen.

But Obama’s public reticence on race—and more specifically, on anti-Black racism—would turn out not to be just a campaign strategy, but one of the defining characteristics of his years in office, and especially his first term. Yet even as he avoided the topic, white grievance festered, an expression of rage at a Black man occupying a seat of power that had been marked “whites only.” Long before his primary win, for the perceived affront of even joining the presidential race, “the number of threats directed my way exceeded anything the Secret Service had ever seen before” and the candidate was assigned a 24-hour security detail. The rise of the Tea Party, the obstructionism of Republicans who seized control of Congress in 2010, the birtherism of Donald Trump—all these signaled “an emotional, almost visceral reaction to my presidency, distinct from any differences in policy or ideology. It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted.”

Those words were published in 2020, and there’s no way Obama could have predicted in 2009 that white resentment would run so deep as to send Trump into office on a wave of racism and xenophobia—that, as he writes, “millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in White House” would elect as his successor an incompetent lying conman who boasts about sexual assault to soothe “their racial anxiety.” But what is clear is that during the first three years of his presidency, Obama recognized the seething white racist reaction to his election and the ways that Republicans lawmakers stoked that anger to their own political ends.

This recognition is part of what prompted Obama to designate Joe Biden as his deal-maker with the Senate, since “in McConnell’s mind, negotiations with the Vice President didn’t inflame the Republican base in quite the same way that any appearance of cooperating with (Black, Muslim socialist) Obama was bound to do.” Obama saw, in then-House Majority Leader John Boehner’s false depiction of him as “angry” during budget talks, more evidence that the racism on full display during “the Tea Party summer had migrated from the fringe of the GOP to the center.” He writes of his frustration in warring with Republicans dedicated to “undoing whatever I’d done,” as the Grand Old Party “increasingly seemed to consider opposition to me to be its unifying principle, the objective that superseded” everything else. “Cooperate with the Obama administration at your own peril” became an unwritten rule among GOP lawmakers, he writes. “And if you have to shake his hand, make sure you don’t look happy doing it.”

What he did not do in response to any of this was respond in kind, rhetorically or otherwise. Writing about the Tea Party, whose blatantly racist protest signs, “enraged flag waving and inflammatory slogans” became a fixture on the nightly news, Obama notes that he “didn’t believe a president should ever publicly whine about criticism from voters,” which, fair point. But he also cites his team’s “reams of data telling us that white voters, including many who supported me, reacted poorly to lectures about race,” ultimately concluding, “I knew I wasn’t going to win over any voters by labeling my opponents racist