The Obama legacy on race

President Barack Obama at the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. (Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)

President Obama has now granted more than 900 interviews since taking office. But when future historians look back on Obama’s presidency and try to understand his place in America’s racial evolution, they will almost certainly zero in on the one he gave Marc Maron in the comedian’s Southern California garage last week, in which Obama dared to publicly utter the most explosive racial epithet in American life.

“It is incontrovertible that race relations have improved significantly during my lifetime and yours, and that opportunities have opened up and that attitudes have changed,” Obama told Maron, taking the long view. “Societies don’t overnight completely erase everything that happened two to three hundred years prior.”

Historians will measure that long view against events of the past year, from the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore to the horrific shootings in Charleston, and they will have to consider some complicated questions.

Has Obama’s presidency improved race relations, as we hoped and expected it would? Or have things actually gotten worse?

Obama’s stunning political rise was always premised on the idea that he was a national politician who happened to be African American, as opposed to the kind of African American politician whose political identity was inseparable from his race. But race has been an enduring subtext of his presidency, nonetheless, in ways both overt (as in the persistent questioning of his birthplace) and subtle (as in the constant allusions to his being “arrogant” or “aloof”).

Republicans have long complained that Obama gets special status with the media and can’t be criticized in the same way other politicians can, without allegations of racism following close behind.

Liberals, meanwhile, see insidious racism as a principal reason for Republican intransigence and Obama’s fading support among white voters (despite the fact that Obama actually performed better among working-class white voters than either of the Democratic nominees who immediately preceded him, both of whom were white). They view Obama, even after two elections, as a president whose legitimacy is always under attack.

For most of his first term, Obama resisted the role of racial spokesman. He spoke less openly about race than George W. Bush had (remember the “soft bigotry of low expectations”) and proposed far less of an urban agenda than the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton.

The horse-drawn caisson carrying the casket of state Sen. Clementa Pinckney arrives at the statehouse in Columbia, S.C. Pinckney was one of the nine victims in the June 17 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. (Photo: Richard Ellis/EPA)

You may recall Obama’s not-so-inspiring handling of a racial controversy in 2010, when conservative bloggers got hold of a video in which Shirley Sherrod, an African-American bureaucrat at the Agriculture Department, seemed to brag about refusing to help a white farmer. Obama’s aides rushed to fire her, until it became apparent that Sherrod’s comments had been taken out of context, at which point they rushed to rehire her. Obama personally apologized.

In the rare instances when Obama spoke personally about his own experience as a black man, as he did following the arrest of his friend Henry Louis Gates Jr., he talked about racism as if it were the lingering remnant of another time — like an old basketball injury that flared up some mornings, nagging but clearly in decline.

Politically, Obama’s reticence was understandable. He could not afford to risk being relegated, early in his presidency, to the role of civil rights crusader, which is what a lot of white Americans had come to expect from black elected leaders. His race constrained him in a way it would not have constrained a white president.

Now, though, and with a sudden ferocity, racial ugliness seems to be everywhere in Obama’s America. Cities are in turmoil over police brutality in destitute black neighborhoods where the hope Obama promised has been slow to materialize. The brutal, racist shootings in a Charleston church, where the victims included the pastor, whom Obama had befriended, have led Southerners to openly reconsider the legacy of slavery and its symbols.

Meanwhile, on a more trivial front, the wife of Israel’s interior minister just apologized for a joke in which she compared Obama to coffee — “black and weak.” Even overseas, the president who tried to transcend race finds it, late in his tenure, impossible to escape.

Some black leaders have warned all along that Obama’s neglect in addressing social injustice would ultimately set back the black community. The academic Cornel West has called Obama “counterfeit” and the “black face of the American empire.” The TV host Tavis Smiley, a longtime Obama critic, has accused the president of patronizing African-Americans with lectures about forbearance.

In his interview with Maron, though, Obama made clear that he still subscribes to the idea that race relations are, in the bigger picture, headed in the right direction. He sees his presidency as a major step in that evolution. And though it may be obscured in the current moment, he’s right.

The president didn’t do anything to create the tragedies of the past year, and it’s doubtful he could have done much to prevent them, either. The warlike mentality of urban policing and its racial undertone is a problem spanning several presidencies now, and the sudden awareness of it is less about a failure of federal policy than it is about the new technology that makes such sickening incidents impossible to cover up. The ubiquity of cell phone cameras has reshaped our views on urban policing in the same way that the television camera changed the conversation about Vietnam.

And this neo-Confederate in Charleston didn’t infiltrate a church and kill nine parishioners because of some ascendant, racist uprising afoot in the country under Obama’s watch. On the contrary, his savagery speaks to the last-ditch desperation of an old and discredited ideology, in the same way neo-Nazis still rear their heads in Europe.

The swift reaction across the political spectrum this week, leading to the banishment of the Confederate flag from state capitals and consumer websites, tells you all you need to know about where the mainstream actually is, even in the South.

What remains the most salient and transformative fact about race relations in the Obama era, really, is the existence of the Obama presidency itself. Racism endures, unfortunately, and racial inequality remains a problem that is both structural and cyclical in our economy, posing one of the central policy challenges of our time, and one for which we should demand answers in the coming election campaign.

But almost a generation of children have now either been born into or become politically aware in a country where the face of power is African-American — a reality that was unthinkable a generation ago and that will reverberate in their views on race for years to come. Those of us who have raised children during the Obama years (especially if those children are nonwhite or of mixed race) understand what a profound impact that has.

Lennos Lemon, 12, sits on the South Carolina statehouse steps during a rally urging the government to take down the Confederate flag that still flies there. (Photo: Rainier Ehrhardt/AP)

Obama might find this disappointing, and no doubt his critics will find it maddening, but no matter what he says about race from here on out or what controversies arise from it, historians will almost certainly conclude that his biggest blow for racial equality was to get himself elected twice and to hold the office with integrity and grace, if not universal acclaim.

That achievement isn’t going to erase these last painful months, or the painful moments sure to come. It will ultimately be remembered, however, as the most any politician has done to advance our thinking on race since at least the 1960s, and maybe since 100 years before that.