No, but seriously; Thanks Obama
Over the last few days, weeks, and months many people have said many more thoughtful things about Barack Obama and his presidency than I will certainly be able to. Here are just two that I have really really loved. If you want to read real writers writing about President Obama, I would highly recommend them. This is more my own personal thank you.
I often jokingly called him Barry Obams, I heard Tracy Morgan do it once on 30 Rock, and I wondered if people would let me get away with it. I stopped (mostly) when my boyfriend (before he was my boyfriend) looked at me, shocked by my pronouncement and asked if I thought it was a touch disrespectful. See, the thing is that I have tremendous respect for President Obama. I cried in 2008, like many others did, the night he was elected our first black president. I was turning 23 the next day, and I hoped that my 24th year was being ushered in by the kind of hopeful change tha thet young senator from Illinois had been promising all throughout the campaign.
See, I had lived through the Bush years, the wars, the economy, the whole thing. But there in 2008, my first year at President Obama’s alma mater, a mixed kid raised by a white mom couldn’t help but feel something when sitting in Harvard Law School’s hallowed halls and hearing the excited talk about another mixed kid raised by a white mom who had sat in the same classrooms becoming president.
I’m not going to pretend that his presidency was perfect because it wasn’t. There were glaring issues. I’m looking at you drones, surveillance state, deportations, and treatment of native peoples…just to name a few. There were low lows, but there were also high highs. Remember that time he named Sonia Sotomayer to the Supreme Court or anytime ever in the whole 8 years that Michelle Obama did anything. “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Ended” and his administration refused to defend an unequal and homophobic law like DOMA. There was also the time that he told insurance companies that being a woman was not a fucking pre-existing condition, or the time he let a little black boy touch his hair to see if it felt the same as his. I will admit that the famous photo of that moment makes me tear up every single time I think about it.
I lived through the Clinton presidency too. Those years gave me less to be excited about. Those years saw entitlements gutted and the rise of such racist rhetoric as “welfare queen” & “super predator”. I’ll admit they were better for a young liberal kid than the Bush years and almost assuredly were better than the Trump years will be, but looking back, there are a lot of mixed feelings. Honestly, more bad than good, 60/40 maybe.
My boyfriend and I joke about how black communities will refer to “our children” and “our community”. I’ll often tease him that they are “our children” not his children. I think it is hard as person of color not to feel a little like Barack Obama is “our president”. I mean sure he was the President of the United States of America, and that makes him everybody’s president, but he is the only president with hair that might feel like my dad’s hair. His daughters look like my sisters when they were young. His son, if he had one, would have looked like Trayvon Martin, or my dad in his youth, or my half-brother when he was younger, or what my kids will maybe look like some day. So, thank you Michelle Obama, thank you Obama daughters, and truly from the bottom of my heart: Thanks Obama, for everything.