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Moving Forward: Reflections on the Obama Administration and Myself | | | I. Why I Cared So Much | |
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< | Several facts converged to make President Obama’s election and administration especially interesting to me. As a result of my increased attention to the politics taking place, and the expectations I had of the Obama Administration in the wake of the election, it made this administration especially disillusioning. When President Obama was campaigning I was in complete awe of a Black person coming from an experience that paralleled my own in several key ways who was able to effectively motivate young people about politics and give out hope like Oprah gives out cars on her “My Favorite Things” episode. To start at the beginning, when I was in 5th grade, my teacher told me, “Beulah, I think you’re smart enough to be the President and you need to go to law school.” I was incredibly pleased with myself and with Mrs. Willis’ comment, but I also thought lawyers and police were bad people despite my genuine enjoyment of watching Law and Order SVU with my Auntie Liz. (I thought Detective Stabler, Detective Benson, Ice Tea and Munch were exceptions to that rule.) I took Mrs. Willis’ words to heart, but I didn’t know what to do with them at the time so I just put them in my pocket until I figured out what I thought my life plan would be. So the first fact is that I thought I wanted to be the President of the United States of America for longer than I care to get into the specifics of. The second fact that converged to make me so interested in the 2008 election and the Obama Administration was that President Obama was Black-American with a Kenyan father who didn’t play a significant role in his upbringing. While my absentee father is Nigerian, at the time I thought it was absolutely incredible that while I was trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do as a sophomore in high school, someone was making a difference in politics like I wanted to. Someone who also felt that their identity was shaped much more by the absence of one parent than the very brief periods of presence. The third fact that contributed to peaking my special interest was being at an age where I could better understand and appreciate the nuances of the election in a family that followed politics pretty closely. This was the first election that I felt I could really participate in (yes, I phone-banked for the Obama ‘08 campaign). Because I felt like I could make a real contribution to politics through this campaign, I thought I was making one. And because I could see more of this President in myself, I felt a strong sense of ownership over the Obama campaign. When it came time to vote for him in the fall of 2008, my mama took my sister and I in the voting booth with her, let me mark her ballot, and then we all nervously smiled at each other before we went home to wait for the results with the rest of our extended family. | >
> | Several facts converged to make President Obama’s election and administration especially interesting to me. As a result of my increased attention to the politics taking place, and the expectations I had of the Obama Administration in the wake of the election, it made this administration especially disillusioning. When President Obama was campaigning I was in complete awe of a Black person coming from an experience that paralleled my own in several key ways who was able to effectively motivate young people about politics and give out hope like Oprah gives out cars on her “My Favorite Things” episode. To start at the beginning, when I was in 5th grade, my teacher told me, “Beulah, I think you’re smart enough to be the President and you need to go to law school.” I was incredibly pleased with myself and with Mrs. Willis’ comment, but I also thought lawyers and police were bad people despite my genuine enjoyment of watching Law and Order SVU with my Auntie Liz. (I thought Detective Stabler, Detective Benson, Ice Tea and Munch were exceptions to that rule.) I took Mrs. Willis’ words to heart, but I didn’t know what to do with them at the time so I just put them in my pocket until I figured out what I thought my life plan would be. So the first fact is that I thought I wanted to be the President of the United States of America for longer than I care to get into the specifics of. The second fact that converged to make me so interested in the 2008 election and the Obama Administration was that President Obama was Black-American with a Kenyan father who didn’t play a significant role in his upbringing. While my absentee father is Nigerian, at the time I thought it was absolutely incredible that while I was trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do as a sophomore in high school, someone was making a difference in politics like I wanted to. Someone who also felt that their identity was shaped much more by the absence of one parent than the very brief periods of presence. The third fact that contributed to peaking (piquing) my special interest was being at an age where I could better understand and appreciate the nuances of the election in a family that followed politics pretty closely. This was the first election that I felt I could really participate in (yes, I phone-banked for the Obama ‘08 campaign). Because I felt like I could make a real contribution to politics through this campaign, I thought I was making one. And because I could see more of this President in myself, I felt a strong sense of ownership over the Obama campaign. When it came time to vote for him in the fall of 2008, my mama took my sister and I (me) in the voting booth with her, let me mark her ballot, and then we all nervously smiled at each other before we went home to wait for the results with the rest of our extended family. | | |
II. Deep Disillusionment | | | When I started college and nearly all of the people I associated with in the student of color activist community had nothing but criticisms for President Obama I was crushed. Then when I brought those criticisms home to my mother, sister, and extended family and they intimated that I was a sell out who had forgotten my roots I was left in a catch-22. I needed to find a way to bring criticisms against the President and articulate my profound sense of loss at recognizing that I would probably not be able to make the systematic change I wanted to see, and alter the American zeitgeist about the way we treat people and consider humanity in others in federal or high-level state politics. Understanding that newer, more positive laws on the books don’t necessarily mean ability to change unjust application of old ones, that many laws are too problematic to salvage, and that horrific judicial precedent ruins everything else was foundation shaking. All of that was also wrapped up in the Obama Administration for me. Falling back on criticisms of Congress and disrespect of President Obama was an easy way out. I could look at the record-breaking number of filibusters during President Obama’s two terms, and the legislation he proposed that was quickly quashed along partisan lines without a true review of the merits of the law and its potential for positive impacts on the lives of the American citizenry to cope with my personal pain at being disappointed. And I did. | |
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The first draft captured a feeling of anger, while this
captures two feelings: aspiration and disappointment. It is,
I think, a stronger draft than the first as writing to
capture your emotions, but I think it is still a missed
opportunity to take the emotions as feelings, and go
further.
This is the first president with whom you specifically
identified, and—as a potential future holder of the
office—you began to experience the involvement in his
decisions and their consequences, having opinions of your own
about what should have been decided, and both rational and
emotional responses to how things turned out. The great
contemporary political theorist Michael Walzer refers to this
as "vicarious participation," which he sees an elemental
component of democracy: the people each individually putting
themselves in the position of those who govern.
Another form of vicarious participation in political or
social events is the reading of history and biography,
which—at their rather different bests—also allow
us to see how states are governed, or armories are run, or
any other social process is conducted, from within the
documented perspectives of the women and men who did the
work. But when we read history we are unlikely to experience
the same intensity of mobilized emotion—whether anger,
aspiration or disappointment—with which we endow
present vicarious political participation.
If you want to learn how to be president, however, more
analytical and less emotional forms of vicarious
participation will aid learning. How much of the history of
American government in the last eight years justifies
disappointment with the president himself? To what extent
did his way of doing the job contribute to what you regard
as his failures? These questions are subjective in their
answers, of course, but the effort to think them through
contributes to learning how to be president, or perhaps more
literally to your understanding of practical politics in any
setting. Not differently in essence, I think, no matter how
very different in detail, than asking the same questions
about John Quincy Adams, Richard Nixon, or Franklin
Roosevelt, however. Asking such questions about Indira
Gandhi, or Charles de Gaulle, or the Emperor Hadrian would
also contribute to your own understanding, and more than
likely to your way of acting for the good of society, whether
you ever become President of the United States or not.
So thinking about Obama rather than being disappointed in
Obama, or angry at those people who placed themselves for
racist reasons (conscious or unconscious) against Obama
will be most valuable to you. These two efforts seem to me
together to have cleared the field for where you might
instead wish to go.
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