As we sit poised on the edge of a new year and a new decade, former President Barack Obama’s annual list of his favorite films, television shows, books, and music landed like a missive from an alien civilization. It was a painful reminder that less than a decade ago, we had a president whose leadership was informed by a genuine love of people and enthusiasm for what we create, rather than the intemperate Philistine squatting in the Oval Office today.
We should contemplate what we missed over the past decade while we were busy congratulating ourselves for having elected such an urbane Black man. The portents of our present were all around us, if we’d been willing to look. They were there in the emergence of the “Tea Party,” an Astroturf operation that mobilized malcontents acting as if we’d elected H. Rap Brown instead of a center-left Democrat whose signature healthcare legislation shared key aspects with the Heritage Foundation plan first rolled out by Massachusetts’ Republican Governor, Mitt Romney, (Source: “Obamacare: The Republican Waterloo,” by David Frum, TheAtlantic.com, 3/24/17). It was there in the “Obama in the watermelon patch,” and “Michelle Obama as a gorilla” memes that proliferated. It was there in the “birther” conspiracies of people who literally couldn’t believe that a Black man could legitimately be president. It was evident in the Republicans who jettisoned decades of customs and practice to block any legislation Obama proposed and every person he nominated, in order to deny a democratically elected President the powers to which he was Constitutionally entitled (Source: “Senate obstructionism handed a raft of judicial vacancies to Trump—what has he done with them?” by Russell Wheeler, Brookings.edu, 6/4/18). It was there when Chief Justice Roberts neutered the Voting Rights Act by decreeing that preclearance was unconstitutional on the theory that the existence of a Black President was proof it wasn’t needed, (Source: Shelby Cty. v.Holder, 570 U.S. ____ (2013)).
Every one of these things was evidence that for many people, Black Americans and other non-white people have no legitimate claim to American citizenship, the Constitution notwithstanding. Of course, this is nothing new. Students of history know that we have gone through cycles of progress and backlash since the end of the Civil War. It is understandable that people might have missed the harbingers of things to come during the halcyon days of Obama’s presidency, but the dismissal that greeted the Black people and women who warned of the danger Trump would pose is unforgivable. Lazy pundits with nothing at stake blathered mindlessly about the “danger” of identity politics. Editors sent scores of reporters into the heartland to write profiles of Trump voters, as if there were no displaced Black and Latinx workers in the Rust Belt and as if Black women didn’t even exist.
As you reflect on the last decade, think long and hard about what you missed because of who you weren’t willing to listen to. As we enter a new year and a new decade, make it your resolution not let that happen twice.
Happy New Year!