Episode 27: Barack Obama

The Past, the Promise, the Presidency

Today’s episode is all about Barack Hussein Obama, the 44th president of the United States. Also, the first in more than two centuries who didn’t identify as white. Obama’s tenure remains fresh, yet hard to fully evaluate given the tumult that followed in his wake—and to some minds, the tumult that arose in direct response to his presidency. If we were taping this podcast a decade ago, in 2010 or 2011 during Obama’s first term, we might well have talked about his presidency as a culmination, a victory in the long march of progress towards a more equitable and free American society that has with every generation expanded the bounds of liberty and citizenship. Imagine what Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, or even Ronald Reagan would say to know that a black man had become president. The Whig interpretation of American history is right, we’d have said. Ours is a story of progress.

Well, it isn’t 2011. It’s 2021, and as we’ve been discussing all season, that feel-good narrative of struggle leading to inevitable progress doesn’t quite jive with America’s actual history. Or, its present.
Obama came to office in 2009, frankly, at an awful moment in American history. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, and the economy had tanked. It became known as the Great Recession, with foreclosures on housing and unemployment on the rise, and the roster of huge banks dwindle. Things didn’t feel as desperate as in 1933 when FDR took office. But the problems appeared so huge and arguably insolvable that it was worth asking, was it 1930? The satirical magazine, the Onion, perhaps captured the mood of his election, and its historic nature, with the following headline: “America gives worst job in country to black man.”
Thankfully we have great guests to help guide us through this maze. We first spoke to Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who teaches at Princeton University, writes for The New Yorker, and authored a truly pathbreaking book, a finalist for the Pulitzer prize in fact, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership.

We then spoke with Alison Landsberg, who directs the Center for Humanities Research at George Mason University, where she works on the fascinating, and sometimes confusing, question of not necessary what happened in the past, but how we remember it.

These were compelling discussions indeed, which highlighted two themes in particular:

• First, that perhaps no one was fully happy with Barack Obama’s presidency, if for not other reason than the entirely unreasonable hope and dreams it seemed to represent when he first took office.
• Second, that race clearly helped Obama politically, but perhaps hindered him even more.

To learn more, visit pastpromisepresidency.com.
Join us LIVE for the season 1 finale of “The Past, the Promise, the Presidency: Race & the American Legacy,” the CPH’s inaugural podcast season. If you’ve been with us from the start, or for any period of time since then, we’re sure you’ve got questions! And comments. Critiques and thoughts.

Join your podcast hosts Lindsay Chervinsky, Sharron Conrad, Jeffrey Engel, and the CPH team for an interactive discussion of what we’ve learned about the intersection of racial and presidential politics. YOUR questions answered. YOUR voice heard.

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