Being the first black President is a hard job, Congressman Keith Ellison said last week, at The New Yorker Festival. This makes analyzing President Obama’s two terms in office an especially delicate endeavor. Ellison joined Jelani Cobb, Alicia Garza, Margo Jefferson, and Khalil Gibran Muhammad for a panel discussion that looked back on the Obama years, weighing his accomplishments and failures against the challenges he faced because of his race.
The promises of 2008, Garza said, were followed by an Administration that often lacked substance. “What I felt over the first term was that there was way too much accommodation and very little return,” she said. “It was very clear that there were factions of the Republican Party that had consolidated to insure that they were not going to be led by a black man.” The so-called beer summit of 2009, organized by the White House in the aftermath of the wrongful arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., outside his home in Cambridge was, according to Muhammad, a failed opportunity that underscored the President’s unwillingness to deal with racism in America, or his handicap. “He demurs, backs off, and we don’t hear another word from him” until 2012, after the death of Trayvon Martin, Muhammad said.
“I get the sense that he never really thoroughly embraced the fact that the people who hated him truly hated him,” Ellison said. “And there was nothing, nothing, nothing he could do to change them.”
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