Reading List: December 14, 2016

Halfway through the five day workweek.

Two takes on Obama’s legacy from The Atlantic. First up is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ take, “My President Was Black.”

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.”

Tressie McMillan Cottom has a different take in “The Problem With Obama’s Faith in White America.” It’s a direct retort to Coates’ vision of Obama. Both are worth the read.

The essay is moving. That is because Coates wrote it. And on the eve of Donald Trump’s presidency, the essay is all the more moving. Many black people will never again have a moment when they feel as American, for good or for ill, as many of us have felt the past eight years. Many of us will never again feel safe from history, seeing it reassert its racist, sexist violence so forcefully back into our political sphere. The essay is also infuriating. It attributes so much of Obama’s improbable presidency to his inimitable faith in white Americans’ higher self, something I can only describe as Obama’s painful rejection of black folks’ agency. The theory that Obama could be elected president because his white family had imbued him with an authentic love for and faith in white people that the typical black American does not have is intuitive but wrong

If you can, donate to the fund to help with medical bills for NYC DNB scene godfather Salmon MacFarlane.

Finally, Chapo delivers one of the best interviews I’ve ever heard. It’s with Adam Curtis, British documentarian.

See ya tomorrow.