Benjamin Balthaser in the Boston Review:
An anecdote at the end of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power (2017) neatly condenses the felt contradictions of Barack Obama’s legacy. In early 2016, as Black Lives Matter was growing rapidly, Ayọ Tometi, one of the movement’s founders, relayed the group’s decision to refuse a meeting with Obama. Without the “space to have a real heart-to-heart,” she said, a meeting would be “a disservice to the movement.” Obama responded by scolding BLM’s leaders, insisting the goal of activism is “to get you at the table” and “prepare an agenda that is achievable.” In an interview with Coates, he expressed a more personal frustration: “You feel like saying to these folks, ‘Don’t you think if I could do it, I [would] have just done it? Do you think that the only problem is that I don’t care enough about the plight of poor people, or gay people, or immigrants?’”
The tension between a presidency bound simultaneously by the half-imposed, half-embraced strictures of neoliberalism—an “achievable” agenda, given the limits of office—and the mantle of representation not only of the left, but specifically a Black left, is one that I carried with me as I visited the Barack Obama Presidential Center a week before its official opening in June.
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