What Is Obama's Legacy? Was There Hope and Change in A "Post-Racial" America| Jelani Cobb| Big Think

What Is Obama's Legacy? Was There Hope and Change in A "Post-Racial" America

Watch the newest video from Big Think

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Journalist Jelani Cobb considers the impact of Obama’s presidency on race in America. Did he make good on the promise of change that got him elected? As President Obama leaves the White House, the post-mortems on his term and predictions on his legacy are starting to emerge. Particularly, what did Obama do for race politics in America – did he turn out to be the beacon hope liberals saw, or the expensive liability handing out reparations and redistributing power, as some conservatives feared?

Journalist Jelani Cobb notes that, in hindsight, the former was naïve and the latter paranoid. Obama proved to be somewhat moderate and often reluctant to directly engage in issues of race, but the gesture of having an African American in the highest office in the country brought race to the foreground in a way that no one anticipated. Even if he lacked direct action himself, Obama’s presidency reverberated and mobilized grassroots activists; it gave confidence to the black and liberal communities, which had previously been publicly insecure and unsupported. Perhaps Black Lives Matter would have emerged under a white president – it’s impossible to say. But with Obama in office, the movement carried (and still carries) a relevance and received a national platform that made people outside just the affected community take note. Symbolically, if not substantively, Obama’s race legacy is colossal.

The national conversation about race is happening, but there’s a lot missing from it, says Cobb. He notes that when we talk about race it’s in an emotional context, expressed as a cultural mythology or a social anxiety stemming from mistrust between communities, and that it could potentially all be solved by just looking at each other as humans. It would almost be easier if it was just a case of mistaken approaches between individuals; individual viewpoints can change in an instant – with one book, a good teacher, a single interaction. Systemic repairs takes much longer.

The issues at the root of racial tension today are the byproducts of institutionalized racism like slavery, segregation, economic discrimination – all of which happened willfully and intentionally to serve one party’s interests, not by some accident of misunderstanding. Cobb points to the events in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014: "It wasn’t simply a matter of implicit bias or stereotypes or… well-intentioned individuals whom happen to have arrested or pulled over more African Americans than whites. We saw that there was an institutional structural approach to particular communities that were being fleeced by a police department. And so we can find those kind of dynamics again and again and again."

Jelani Cobb is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His latest book is The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

JELANI COBB :

William Jelani Cobb writes about the enormous complexity of race in America. In 2015, he received the Sidney Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism for his New Yorker columns, in which he combined "the strengths of an on-the-scene reporter, a public intellectual, a teacher, a vivid writer, a subtle moralist, and an accomplished professional historian."

His articles include "The Anger in Ferguson," "Murders in Charleston," and "What We Talk About When We Talk About Reparations." In awarding him the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, the jury wrote, "No one has done a better job of placing [the events in Ferugson, MO]—and similar happenings in other places like Sanford, Florida, Cleveland, Ohio and Staten Island, New York—in their broader context than Jelani Cobb." Further: "Cobb met the challenge of describing the turmoil in Ferguson in a way that cut through the frantic chaos of 'breaking news' and deepened readers’ understanding of what they were seeing, hearing, and feeling. Ferguson was not an aberration, he showed, but a microcosm of race relations in the United States—organically connected to the complicated legacy of segregation and the unpaid debts of slavery itself. "

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT :

Jelani Cobb: President Obama’s administration has brought about change. I don’t think that can be debated. There is everything from the symbolic to the substantive levels of what it would mean to have an African American president.

Read the full transcript at