The last four years have, in many ways, pulled off the bandage that has covered the wounds on which American democracy was built. The sitting president’s overt racism has forced the nation to come to terms with the glossed-over racism on which the nation’s wealth and power are structured. Robin DiAgnelo, the writer of the wildly popular book, White Fragility notes in that book: “the nation began with the attempted genocide of Indigenous people and the theft of their land. American wealth was built on the labor of kidnapped and enslaved Africans and their descendants.” America has had to face a reckoning with itself and its history.
It is an appropriate time for Barack Obama to speak again, given that for so long he was a model of optimism and hope. The Atlantic recently published an updated excerpt from Barack Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land, titled “I’m Not Ready to Abandon the Possibility of America.” The excerpt brings no major surprises. Obama is as measured as ever, as skillful at understatement as he was during his eight years as president. He opens the excerpt with he and Michelle boarding Air Force One sitting with the “unexpected results of an election in which someone diametrically opposed to everything we stood for had been chosen as my successor.”
And while Obama declares openly in the title of his Atlantic article that he’s “not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America,” Obama’s strain of relentless optimism and hope seem to have finally become tempered. Amid all of Obama’s characteristic humility, down-to-earthedness, and optimism, there’s another strain that I haven’t seen in his writing or speaking before—the open acknowledgement that America is indeed facing an unprecedented crisis. It’s not just the global pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 Americans and counting, our economic crisis that has shuttered business and left many out of work, police violence against Black men and women, it’s something deeper than all this and it goes back to our founding; Obama doesn’t mention the fact that our sitting president won’t concede given the fair results of a democratic election.
He frames the problem we are facing by looking down into the foundation on which the nation was built. A building built on rotting earth cannot stand, or at least, its standing is questionable.
Obama writes about the contradiction present in America’s very founding, a crisis “embedded in the founding documents that could simultaneously proclaim all men equal and yet count a slave as three-fifths of a man. It finds expression in our earliest court opinions, as when the Chief Justice of the United States bluntly explains to Native Americans that their tribe’s rights to convey property aren’t enforceable, because the court of the conqueror has no capacity to recognize the just claims of the conquered.”
Obama wonders aloud whether he has been “too tempered in speaking the truth as I saw it.” I wondered this, too. But for him to have done so over the past four years would have been to break the norms all American presidents have honored once they left office—one of non-interference.
And yet, the Trump presidency, in its constancy in breaking all norms, puts everyone committed to the democratic and Constitutional project at a loss. Should they break the norms too and stoop to his level, shattering an unspoken system of norms that took centuries to build, or should they remain silent, uphold the norms, but also fail to speak out at absurdity when it stares us in the face? It’s a catch-22. Obama choose to uphold the norms. “When they go low, we go high.” I respect his decision, but it came at a cost.
Obama notes that many think it’s time to “discard the myth—that an examination of America’s past and an even cursory glance at today’s headlines show that this nation’s ideals have always been secondary to conquest and subjugation, a racial caste system and rapacious capitalism, and that to pretend otherwise is to be complicit in a game that was rigged from the start.”
Obama who was once measured in all things, except for his faith that “the better angels of our nature” would prevail has now extended that measured restraint to his hope in America’s future. We should all be a little scared.
His essay in the Atlantic is remarkable because it reveals a side of Obama that we seldom saw. Obama asks the tough questions, salts the answers with his characteristic optimism, but peppers them as well with something I’m not accustomed to seeing—concern, deep concern. Is the social compact salvageable in the wake of the Trump presidency, in the wake of so much economic and human devastation? Is it salvageable now that America is coming to a reckoning about the foundations of racism and theft on which the nation has been built? Do we need a new social compact?
“I don’t know,” writes Obama. And yet, we just witnessed an election with the highest turnout in history. Black men and women turned out to vote in Detroit and Philadelphia and Georgia and they made their voices heard as a powerful demographic that cannot be ignored. Obama says his hope in the future lies with young people. He says he wrote A Promised Land for young people as an invitation to “once again remake the world, and to bring about, through hard work, determination, and a big dose of imagination, an America that truly aligns with all that is best in us.” I look forward to reading Obama’s book, which Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reviews in the New York Times, writing that it is “is nearly always pleasurable to read, sentence by sentence, the prose gorgeous in places.”
I take Obama’s invitation seriously. It won’t be easy. It will require writers, teachers, and artists, willing to try to create a world not beholden to “rapacious capitalism.” It will require those with the creativity to seek out new models of connection, community, growth, and living. It may require a reinvention of America itself.
So, I leave this essay with this thought: I have an artist friend on Instagram: @kahea.mana.hina. She lives on the island of Hawai’i. She recently posted a sketch she drew of Iolani Palace. Above the palace, she wrote the words of Queen Liliuokalani, who was removed from power and later imprisoned in the palace by a minority uprising that ultimately resulted in Hawai’i being annexed to the United States. Above the drawing of the palace, my friend writes the words Queen Liliuokalani wrote to President William McKinley in 1897: “I, LILIUOKALANI OF HAWAII, by the Will of God named heir-apparent on the tenth day of April, A.D. 1877, and by the grace of God Queen of the Hawaiian Islands on the seventeenth day of January, A.D. 1893…. I declare such a treaty to be an act of wrong toward the native and part-native people of Hawaii, an invasion of the rights of the ruling chiefs, in violation of international rights both toward my people and toward friendly nations with whom they have made treaties, the perpetuation of the fraud whereby the constitutional government was overthrown, and, finally, an act of gross injustice to me.”
We live in a nation built and enriched by injustice. How do we reckon with it? It is not an easy nor comfortable question.
We stand at the precipice. The wounds are open and must be tended to. Let’s come together and make art with meaning, teach with heart, write the truth, speak with honesty and bravery, and imagine a future with tempered hope. As the case numbers for the coronavirus grow, as the current sitting president continues to refuse to concede, and as we face what I believe will be a dark couple of months in our nation’s history, we will need to come together as we have never come together before and ask ourselves what the new character of our nation will be.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.