Barack Obama went looking for his identity as a black man in his youth.
As President of the United States, he found it. And he found it by polarizing America along racial lines.
After turning what could have been a unifying presidency for the United States into a wedge with which to divide black and Hispanic Americans from white Americans, President Obama reaped his reward Saturday night when alleged comedian Larry Wilmore called Obama his “nigga.” Wilmore, hosting the White House Correspondents Dinner, explained that throughout the Obama administration, he didn’t care about Obama’s policies – he only cared about his skin color:
Mr. President, but all jokes aside, let me just say how much it means for me to be here tonight. I’ve always joked that I voted for the president because he’s black. And people say, “Well, do you agree with his policies?” And I always said, “I agree with the policy that he’s black.” I said, “As long as he keeps being black, I’m good.” They’d say, “What about Iraq?” “Is he still black?”But behind that joke is a humble appreciation for the historical implications for what your presidency means. When I was a kid, I lived in a country where people couldn’t accept a black quarterback. Now think about that. A black man was thought by his mere color not good enough to lead a football team — and now, to live in your time, Mr. President, when a black man can lead the entire free world. Words alone do me no justice. So, Mr. President, if i’m going to keep it 100: Yo, Barry, you did it, my n—a. You did it.
Now, normal people would find this offensive. If anybody suggested that Donald Trump’s policies don’t matter because hey, he’s white, that person would rightly be tagged a racist. But Obama found the whole routine perfectly acceptable. Not only did he laugh his way through it, the White House said today that Obama “appreciated the spirit of Mr. Wilmore’s expression Saturday night.” Josh Earnest explained, “I’m confident that Mr. Wilmore used the word by design. He was seeking to be provocative. Any reading of his comments made clear that he was not using the president as a butt of a joke.”
Yes, that’s the point. He wasn’t. He was sincerely offering racial fealty to the president by calling the president authentically black in the leftist parlance. And Obama lapped it up.
Is it any wonder that he did, given his statements in Dreams From My Father about his racial ambivalence, his longing for acceptance, his attempts to find a place in the black world? In his introduction to that book, Obama wrote, “When people who don’t know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it is usually a discovery, for I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites), I see the split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some telltale sign.” Obama found acceptance by engaging in activism in “community organizing” in black communities; he has extended that agenda to the presidency, where he has legitimated black criminals like Michael Brown, justified riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, sicced his Department of Justice on non-racist police departments.
And now he’s Larry Wilmore’s “n—a.”
So it was all worth it, apparently.
Maybe for him. But not for the Americans who rely on the president to look beyond racial solidarity to govern. To those Americans, Obama’s presidency couldn’t be more of a disappointment.