Farewell to the chief

I always make a point of running over the family’s news for her benefit. We sometimes also talk politics. Last time I was there, shortly after the presidential election, we reflected on Obama’s tenure. I was keen to know what the wise matriarch thought the legacy would be of America’s first black president, who steps down this Friday.

I was pretty sure I already knew what she would have thought about Trump: not much. Like most people born poor and proud, to her, grace and good manners — or a conspicuous lack of them — would always outweigh any political virtues or failings.

My own parents emigrated from British Guiana to the UK in 1950. Sixteen years later, partly driven by the rising tide of racism fuelled by Enoch Powell, they decided to return to the Caribbean, sending me on ahead, while they travelled via New York to visit relatives. They never left: both died in the city. Today, my surviving siblings — I am the 10th of 10 children — have fanned out across the USA. I opted to settle in Britain instead.

Mum didn’t live to see the election of America’s first black president, but I have no doubt that she would have approved of his dignified, professorial mien. Marjorie would have sucked her teeth impatiently when, back in 2008, her younger sister, Joyce, a feisty 91-year-old, opined that Obama needed to be patient and cede the Democratic presidential nomination to Hillary Clinton. “Why should he wait?” Mum would have asked.

But my aunt, a political obsessive, spent her days watching C-Span and CNN. Her logic was that the next eight years would be disastrous economically. Joyce judged that “Miss Clinton” would be better placed to take the heat. Obama, she remonstrated, should take his turn in 2016, when the economics would be easier. I think he might have done well to follow her advice.

Barack Hussein Obama will be remembered by African-Americans and their cousins across the globe for two reasons. One is what he was: the first person to inhabit the White House who was not a white man. For generations to come, black children will remember him in their prayers. Many will hope to emulate him.

However, it’s not just the fact of Obama’s ethnicity that distinguishes him. After the presidency had spent a half century mired in scandal or vulgarity, the Obama family restored some semblance of dignity to it, and even a whiff of Kennedy-era glamour. They changed the way that people all over the world regarded black families.

If that were the whole of Obama’s legacy, you might conclude that he had left America a better, kinder place. But it isn’t. Instead, he will probably be best remembered for his final act in office — handing the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to the living embodiment of the Angry White Man.

It’s not all his fault. In 2008, Hillary Clinton was defeated by an opponent who painted her as the voice of the political machine, the candidate of a tired, elitist Washington establishment. Obama offered hope to Americans shaken by the financial crisis, and deployed social media ruthlessly to get past the Clintons’ stranglehold on the mainstream media.

Hillary failed to learn the lessons of defeat. Ironically, Trump used Obama’s 2008 playbook without shame. At the start of the race it was widely said that Trump would be Clinton’s dream opponent. In fact, the opposite was true — Trump could not have invented a better target for his anti-establishment crusade.

So can we really blame Obama for the legacy of a divided America? Yes, we can. Both by virtue of his office and because of his heritage, he was the one individual who could have changed the deeper reality on which Trump’s victory turned.

This election was about race above everything else, including class and education. Trump, a New Yorker raised in a multiethnic crucible, grasped the underlying truth of a culturally divided America better than anyone else. The Clintons missed the point, as did most of liberal America. They assumed moderate white voters would be put off by Trump’s racial insensitivity, women by his crassness, and the working class by his billionaire lifestyle. Actually, the white working class simply migrated wholesale, including those in hundreds of counties that had voted for Obama twice, in 2008 and 2012.

No one alive can compete with Barack Obama when it comes to the rhetoric of racial unity. But hardly anything illustrates his tin ear for the substance of race relations better than the disastrous handling of his signature healthcare policy in the run-up to the election. He ignored warnings that while the Affordable Care Act looked like a hugely progressive step to minority Americans, to many whites it seemed like a device to make them pay for the welfare of blacks, Hispanics and new immigrants. The announcement, days before the election, that premiums would rise by up to 25% this year, with no increase in the level of cover, probably proved more devastating to Clinton’s prospects than any number of email scandals.

Deadly serious: a protester against Obamacare outside the White House

ALAMY

Trump won by a huge margin among whites — 63% to 31% among white men, 53% to 43% among white women. His appalling sexism made little difference: he led 62% to 34% among non-graduate white women. Even among the quarter of white men who hold a degree, he led by 14 points. By contrast, he lost in every category of black, Hispanic and Asian voter.

Out in California, Trump’s anti-immigration stance has businesses that depend on Mexican labour fuming. A nephew who runs his own consulting firm near Los Angeles snorts in derision at the mention of the president-elect. He says: “This wasn’t about the economics. Trump doubled down on identity issues, and that’s why he won. He is dumb, no doubt about it, but he’s also amazingly cunning.”

For the moment, white America is ready to give Trump “the chance to lead”. But black America has already made up its mind, I think. And that, of course, is because African-Americans have been here before.

Three years after Obama was born in 1961, a bitterly fought presidential campaign pitted a moderate, seasoned Southern Democrat who had spent years working in the White House against a maverick Republican not even his own party establishment could stomach, and who had acquired the enthusiastic backing of the Ku Klux Klan. Just as in 2016, America’s racial divisions lay at the heart of the contest.

Lyndon Baines Johnson, the former Democratic vice-president, inherited the White House on the death of John F Kennedy. Within a year he had passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, outlawing racial discrimination, and promised to open the gates of opportunity for black Americans. His Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater, opposed the legislation.

Goldwater, like Trump, loathed the liberal, peacenik Washington establishment. In his most famous soundbite, he opined that “extremism in defence of liberty is no vice”. The loathing was mutual: most of the Republican party’s leaders rebuffed him. The result was inevitable. Johnson parodied Goldwater’s slogan — “In your heart you know he’s right” — with a scornful putdown: “In your guts you know he’s nuts.” LBJ won in a landslide, with a higher percentage of the popular vote than any Democrat before or since. Within months African-Americans had been legally guaranteed equal voting rights and the long march to the “postracial” America had begun.

Changing face of aspiration: from Barack Obama in 2008 to Donald Trump in 2016

REX; GETTY

Last April, America’s first real black president recalled that 1964 election, hosting International Jazz Day at the White House. It was a bold stroke to turn the entire White House over to a celebration of the quintessential American art form, born out of the genius of black slaves.

He drew laughter by quoting the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who had run a mock presidential campaign in 1964, selling T-shirts and posters at his concerts to raise funds for the civil-rights movement. Obama announced that, just for the day, he would honour Gillespie’s pledge “to change the name of the White House to the Blues House”.

Back then the president could afford to be light-hearted. The Democrats believed that God had blessed them with another Goldwater: gaffe-prone, allied with racists and repudiated by his own party leaders. Always hypersensitive about being seen as too “black” during his presidency, he thought he could finally relax about race.

As it turned out, the president was wrong. He no doubt wanted to be remembered by his fellow African-Americans for his soaring rhetoric, historic firsts and progressive social policies, not least providing affordable healthcare for 20m Americans. But I suspect his main legacy will be summed up in seven words: Donald Trump, America’s first white-nationalist president.

Everyone is furious and baffled by the election result; no group more so than the liberal New Yorkers who, over the past two decades, have transformed Harlem. I’ve had relatives here for a century, and it’s where my parents first settled when they decamped to the USA in the late 1960s. Back then it was the model for scores of blaxploitation movies, notably Shaft — crime-ridden, drug-infested, run-down.

Today, Harlem is reborn. Bill Clinton moved his post-White House office to its famed 125th Street; and America’s equivalent of Waitrose, the upscale Whole Foods brand, has won its battle to open a store at the corner of 125th and Malcolm X Boulevard for the yummy mummies who now occupy the elegant multimillion-dollar brownstones nearby.

January 20, 2009: Barack and Michelle gaze into each other’s eyes in a lift on the evening of his inauguration day. “It was quite chilly, so the president removed his jacket and put it over the shoulders of his wife,” says Souza, who witnessed the semi-private momen

OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY PETE SOUZA

One of my sisters, who lives off Malcolm X Boulevard, runs one of America’s main black-oriented film festivals. She takes me uptown for the opening of a new show at the Harlem Stage. Can I Get a Witness? The Gospel of James Baldwin is less a play and more a meditation on contemporary America, set in a recreation of a typical black church. The bitterness among the young African-Americans in the audience is palpable. Baldwin’s exhortation that “it is time to raise more than an eyebrow in protest … this is not a time for the sweet by-and-by” is greeted with cries of “Yes!” For Harlem’s blacks, 2016 tore aside the “postracial” curtain to reveal that the old, pre-civil rights America is still alive and kicking.

African-Americans now confront a post-Obama America that congratulates itself on putting a black president in the White House, but still refuses to allow more than the odd black face at the top of its Fortune 500 companies. Research by the Center for Talent Innovation, a widely respected business-leaders’ think tank, shows that black executives, no matter how well qualified, are far less likely to be sponsored on the corporate ladder in America than any other group.

Black Americans, on average, earn less and hold a 10th of the wealth of white Americans. Study after study reveals continued discrimination in housing, finance and medical care. Black people are nearly six times as likely to be jailed as whites; almost 1m African-Americans are behind bars. Even in liberal New York, segregation remains rife. Though the city’s population is only just over 50% non-white, more than half its schools are over 90% black or Hispanic; and, according to a 2014 study, its white schools are getting whiter. Meanwhile, rich and famous African-American celebrities complain that America will celebrate their past with a prestigious new museum in the heart of the capital, just steps from the White House, yet still cannot bring itself to honour the present — not even the black actors, writers or directors who make its biggest movies. Check out #OscarsSoWhite.

African-American resentment is universal. After a spate of police shootings of unarmed black men, you will search far and wide to find a black family that does not insist that every young man receives “the talk” — how to behave if approached by a police officer: keep your hands in view, make no sudden moves, be uber-respectful in your speech. An African-American executive in a Fortune 500 company told me that she had had to give “the talk” to her 17-year-old before handing over the keys to the top-of-the-range sports car she had just bought for him.

The latest innovation in black protest is “taking the knee”. Inspired by the example of Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback with the San Francisco 49ers, many African-Americans are refusing to stand for the national anthem. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of colour ... there are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder,” said a defiant Kaepernick. He has taken to kneeling instead to show his respect for the victims. The protest has steadily gained support and is spreading to colleges and high schools. Black America, it seems, is about to “get woke”.

Even Caribbean-Americans are abandoning the natural caution of immigrants — make trouble and you could be on the first boat home — and being swept up in the protests.

We Caribbeans tend to take a more tolerant view of America than our cousins. Last month, ER Braithwaite, the most distinguished alumnus of my old school in Guyana, Queen’s College, passed away near his home in Washington. The 104-year-old author of the classic novel To Sir, with Love always compared America favourably with the UK: “[America] has granted to its Negro citizens more opportunities for advancement and betterment, per capita, than any other nation in the world.” Caribbean-Americans can afford to be generous: on average, Guyanese-Americans earn about $20,000 more than other blacks.

Many, like my brother, settled in Florida, and the impact of the election is being felt here just as strongly as in the big cities of the north. The Florida chapter of the alumni of our sister school in Guyana, Bishops’, voted to withdraw an event from a Trump venue. Wow, I thought, something must be really wrong if Bishops’ is getting militant.

My brother Junior spent most of his working life in New Jersey, with a career in healthcare: first as a union boss, then as an executive, awarding lucrative contracts in the fiendishly complicated American system. He retired to the South, remarking that there are only so many times you can turn down a mafia invitation to spend the weekend in Las Vegas before you need to start checking your bed for a horse’s head.

Palm Coast, the small city where he settled in the northeast of Florida, could hardly be more different from the metropolis. Four out of five residents are white. One in 10 is black, a similar number Hispanic. Many of its people are retirees, mostly from out of state, some from Canada.

This is not the backwoods; these people are moderate citizens who have supported the gradual liberalisation of American mores and customs. Palm Coast voted narrowly for Obama in 2008; narrowly for Romney in 2012. And yet in the surrounding small towns, such as the far more racially mixed Bunnell, something unpleasant is stirring. The county plumped for Trump by a huge margin: almost 60-40.

Junior tells me that the Ku Klux Klan, which has a long history in the area, is once again mobilising. In a society where guns are pervasive, the KKK can’t be regarded as just a bunch of harmless nutjobs nostalgic for segregation. On the freeway into the city, I see a poster for a two-day gun festival. The owner of a local gun shop pokes his head out of the door suspiciously as I take a photograph of his frontage. He says: “We’re right back here, if there’s anything you want, anything at all.” Twenty years ago, I suspect the sentence would have ended with the dismissive word “boy”.

Another relative recounts a story she had been told by her (white) pastor. He had visited a nearby town for a meeting. At the end of this, a woman had turned to him to ask whether he might be interested in supporting her society. When asked which society, she replied, without a flicker of embarrassment: “The Ku Klux Klan. We are recruiting.” The story speaks of the burgeoning self-confidence of the KKK in many of its historic strongholds across America. Suddenly, the prospect of jogging around the local area acquires a shimmering patina of danger. Down here, the sight of a black stranger running across your front lawn is more likely to have you reaching for your rifle than to evoke the reassuring thought “harmless Brit”.

Back in New York, another nephew, this one from Harlem, has just returned from a 20th-anniversary reunion with his fraternity brothers from Johns Hopkins — a top-10 college — in Baltimore. They are the first generation of black Americans to be born into a nation free of legal discrimination. They have grown up with the expectation of equality, and they have all succeeded in what remains a largely white professional world as doctors, lawyers and businessmen. But they are dismayed by what they think the Trump victory reveals: that under Obama, life for black America has not changed at all.

However, what disturbs them much more is the new resentment that seems to have entered the soul of mainstream white America. “You’ve got to make a distinction between the white supremacists and the white nationalists,” my nephew tells me. “There’s a lot of people out there who don’t have a problem with black rights. They voted for Obama, and they might even support Black Lives Matter. But they are also saying that if we’ve got a right to a black identity, then they should have the right to a white identity. It’s dangerous — it’s setting us against them.”

Ten days after the election, a professor at Columbia University, Mark Lilla, published an essay in The New York Times titled The End of Identity Liberalism. He called on progressives to drop their pursuit of “identity politics” because it was alienating white Americans, and to focus on class instead. Lilla’s blunt assertion that “those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it” sparked a furious row among his fellow intellectuals. He was denounced by minority and feminist academics, and called a closet racist.

I don’t agree with Lilla’s view. The key dividing line in the USA remains racial, not economic. But there are real reasons for the sharp growth of white resentment. Already, whites are in a minority in America’s schools. In 17 states there are more whites dying than are being born. Nationally, the white share of the electorate is predicted to fall from 69% this year to 46% in 2060. On the other hand, the Hispanic share of America’s population is predicted to rise to 27% from 13%; and the share that is Asian or “other” is expected to double to 14% from 7%. By the time a baby born this year can vote, whites will be on the verge of becoming another ethnic minority, albeit the largest, in the country they think they created.

It’s not just demographics. Over the past decade, blacks and Hispanics have filled 1m extra jobs, while whites have lost 700,000. The social mobility that might have promised white children better lives than their parents has ground to a halt. Whites are more likely to be depressed and more prone to suicide than other Americans. And they are being compelled to compete for jobs for the first time. Before the elections, 49% of Trump supporters told pollsters that America’s increasing diversity means fewer opportunities for whites, and 66% said that the election was the last chance to halt the “decline of America”.

The psychological shock is palpable. In another poll, half of white Americans — including 60% of white working-class respondents — told researchers for the Public Religion Research Institute that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.

The one man who should have been alive to the growing chasm in his nation was either deaf to white voices or, worse, just turned his back on people too often decried as redneck bigots. The president elected as a symbol of national unity allowed a cultural war to rampage across the USA.

It could have been so different. The one thing that African-Americans hoped was that their biracial president would try to become a bridge to their fellow countrymen. Yet he seemed unable to interpret white Americans’ deep and growing anger as anything other than coded racism. Dismissing angry whites as “the basket of deplorables”, in Clinton’s phrase, was not only wrong, it was politically foolish. Obama and Clinton effectively surrendered the white working class to Trump’s populism.

Clinton made her own errors, but it was the president who set the template. In 2011 he publicly humiliated Trump at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. It went down well in DC, but looked snobbish to blue-collar families. He allowed Trump’s infantile questioning of his birthplace to get under his skin. And he let speculation run wild about the prospect of Michelle Obama running for office in 2024. Hugely popular as she is, Americans will not have taken kindly to the prospect of another dynasty using the White House as a timeshare with the Bushes and the Clintons.

In the end, I am glad that Obama was there. No one can take away the fact that he was “the first”. For my children he will have opened doors that can never be closed again, whatever the president-elect hopes to do. But for all too many of my cousins across the Atlantic, the America that might have been on that bright, sunlit inauguration day in Washington eight years ago will now seem further away than ever.

As I prepare to leave Queens, one of my elderly relatives drops by to bid farewell. He tells me that because his usual barber is away, he has just been to a nearby barbershop in a white part of the district. Asked how much a trim would cost, the barber cited a ridiculously high price. The message is clear: “We don’t need your custom here.”

A new, coarse and hostile tone has entered America’s racial dialogue. Or maybe it’s an old tune, refreshed. It reminds me of what one of my nephew’s frat brothers had said: “We all hoped it had gone — but it was just hidden for a while.”

To be black in America right now is to be very angry. And very, very afraid.

A LIFE DEDICATED TO EQUALITY
Trevor Philips, 63, is the former head of the Commission for Racial Equality and former chairman of its successor, the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Born in Britain, he spent much of his childhood in British Guiana (later Guyana) before returning to London to study. In 1999 he got an OBE for services to broadcast journalism. He is co-chair of the US-based Center for Talent Innovation.

Obama’s impact? It’s huge
Says Paul Beatty, whose satire on race won the Man Booker prize

Paul Beatty offers a cynical chuckle when asked if life changed for African-Americans when Obama was elected. “In the days after his victory, I met a white media executive from California who boasted, ‘I love Obama, I’m so proud of him. He’s smarter than I am. How many white people do you know who are prepared to admit that?’ ” he recalls. “It was one of the most racist comments I’d ever heard. He’s saying every black person ever is dumber than me except for Obama. And the fact I recognise this makes me progressive.”

Last October, Beatty’s lacerating satire, The Sellout, made him the first American winner of English literature’s top award, the £50,000 Man Booker prize. It follows a black watermelon-and-weed grower as he introduces “resegregation” and slavery to a Los Angeles ghetto whose reputation is so bad, it has literally been erased from the map to avoid further embarrassment. His campaign delivers amazing results; he restores the area’s identity and its black residents’ self-worth, even as he smashes every liberal orthodoxy to smithereens.

Beatty, who grew up in LA before becoming a poet and academic, started writing its dark, twisted plot the year after Obama was elected. Millions of African-Americans had spent the night of that event out on the streets in a fit of hopeful and messianic fervour. Beatty had watched the coverage at home. “I was pleased Obama won,” he says, “he was the right man for the job.” But he was also sceptical that one man, one night, could erase hundreds of years of painful history.

Does he think Obama did enough to address America’s long-standing racial issues? Beatty says the president’s approach has been one of less is more, but says that, watching that in action, “I have sometimes felt a kind of weird emptiness”. Rather than calling out systemic racism against black men, he has responded to police shootings as individual atrocities. Rather than introducing race-specific programmes, he has ushered in policies such as Obamacare, which helps black people more than others. Obama himself says he cares about what actually “improved black people’s lives”, more than what allays “the self-doubt that arises out of the fact that [African-Americans] are behind now”. But his unwillingness to speak out, particularly on police shootings, has angered movements such as Black Lives Matter and at times made Beatty “uncomfortable”.

Yet he isn’t entirely pessimistic about the exiting president’s legacy. “Look, I’m old and sort of set in my ways. I look at my students. They’ve had a black president for the best part of their lives. That is a huge thing. That has to make an impact.”
Interview by Gabriel Pogrund