Waiting for Obama

with John McWhorter

Try putting yourself in the mindset of 2007. Barack Obama was an interesting but ultimately doomed outsider candidate whose main selling point was that he voted “no” on the Iraq invasion. Social media was a frivolous diversion for college students. Donald Trump was a gameshow host. I was a lefty!

In 2007, sixteen years ago, John McWhorter and I had our first conversation, and I wanted to revisit it to examine just how much—or how little—things had changed. In our conversation (you can watch the whole thing here), I sometimes seem to play the role of the experienced black progressive taking a young colleague to task for his conservatism. I thought I knew whereof I spoke. John had published two books—Losing the Race and Winning the Race—that cut against the conventional wisdom in black intellectual circles, and he did so from what seemed to me to be a right-of-center perspective. I had been there before, when I was an outspoken black conservative in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Since that time, I had managed to convince myself that I had changed my ways and come “back home” politically, to where all right-minded black people belonged.

Well, sixteen years is a long time. In this clip, we watch our younger selves debate whether America is really ready to “move beyond race.” It sounds almost quaint now. As I remark below, Obama’s presidency seemed to offer us just such an opportunity, and it was squandered. I haven’t given up hope that the transracial humanism I then espoused could one day become the common sense of the nation. I think it’s the only way out of our current mess. But listening back, I’m struck by how much closer we seemed to that ideal in 2007 than we do in 2023.

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GLENN LOURY: I was just reflecting on the fact, John, that you and I have been talking at our podcast here for sixteen years. Sixteen years. That's longer than a lot of people's marriages last.

JOHN MCWHORTER: This has outlasted my marriage, yeah.

I went back and took a look at our inaugural conversation, November 12th, 2007. In those years, I was less conservative than you, John, it seemed to me anyway. Maybe you've moved left, maybe I've moved right, or maybe a combination of the two or something. But it's really quite striking that in some instances, our roles seem to be reversed in the conversation. What I had in mind for our conversation today is to play some outtakes from that inaugural Glenn and John discussion, and then just have us kick it around and see how we react.

There we are.

Good lord. Look at how technology has even changed.

You have a baby face. Look!

I look seventeen.

You're holding a phone to your ear. You look like you're seventeen years old.

The vast majority of poor people are not black. The vast majority of people who are at the economic margins, in and out of unemployment, on welfare rolls, are not black. And, to the extent that it's a useful thing for people across the racial lines to see their economic and social situations as similar, and to see their fate as shared, their plight as common, so that they can organize and pull themselves together in new formations that cut across these lines. To that extent, talking about the problem in these broader terms—like we know what they've done for the rich with the tax cuts, what have they done for you—this kind of talk is kind of undercut when we put it into a kind of racial and cultural thing.

This may seem odd to you coming from me. People think of me as always being a guy who wants to talk about black this and black that. But I think that the deepest problems that we have in the country that we can solve together through our political action, our problems that cut across racial lines.

I, especially last year, did a fair amount of visiting prisoner re-entry programs and spending time talking to people and watching training sessions and things like that. To tell you the truth, Glenn, sitting in those rooms with mostly black and brown men who've done time, looking at the problems that they face, the idea that in my lifetime or yours, we're going to fix it so that those guys see themselves as the poor rather than black guys, it's just impossible for me to see. Maybe that's not a good thing, but the self-conception there is as what Stanley Crouch would call a “Negro.”

It's not just their self conception, it's also how they're conceived. I mean, I think it's every bit as important, or maybe even more important, that your typical voter who doesn't live in the ghetto sees them as not so different for me. And yeah, maybe a little screwed up. But still, you know, pretty much if we were in their situation, we'd probably be struggling with some of the same challenges.

The mainstream white person does not see the poor black guy as just the poor. They see a poor black person. Is that what you're saying?

I know that's what they see. I wish they didn't, though. And I think they're wrong to see that way.

They may be, but we can't fix that.

I don't know if that's true. Is it really true that we can't fix that?

How would we fix it, Glenn? I mean, really?

Well, how? I don't know. That's just the honest answer. I don't know how we would fix it. But I'm not prepared to rule out a priori that we could.

But I'm in a hurry. And you know, Glenn, I say this with sincere respect, but what's going to change it is also not fine writing such as yours where you say things like, “What kind of a nation are we to not attend to et cetera, et cetera.” There already was a civil rights revolution. Something happened which you couldn't have seen coming even ten years before it occurred. Everybody knows it.

And we're at a point now where what you're implicitly calling for is a second revolution. You're not putting it that way, but the idea is that something dramatic and massive is going to happen again. And given that something already did happen, and that people's general opinion is that something happened, that racism is nothing like what it used to be, and even if life isn't perfect, it's time for people to just deal. We cannot combat the fact that that is going to be the main barstool opinion.

We haven't changed that much.

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That was 2007. November. One year later, 2008, November, Barack Hussein Obama was elected president of the United States running self-consciously on a campaign not dissimilar from the point of view that I was espousing. Namely, can't we all get along? It's not a black and a white, it's a question of human interest and responsibility and mutual dependence and all of that kind of thing. And I embody it. “It's in my very DNA.” That's a quote. “It's in my very DNA.” He embodied the very kind of transracial, humanistic posture that I was perhaps quixotically or idealistically longing for.

What happened? Didn't Obama offer us a chance to get where I was hoping the country would go? And was it not a missed opportunity? That's a question to you.

Yeah, it was. And it wasn't his fault. It was the serendipity of history. Social media. And so it was in 2009 that Twitter and Facebook became norms. And quickly, they did two things. One was that they helped focus the Tea Party and the Tea Party Movement against Obama, created a conception that that was all about racism on the left. When I will go to my grave saying, do you think if John Edwards had been elected that there would be no Tea Party?

I have never heard a coherent answer to that question. There would have been the same thing. There may have been a racial tinge to that movement against Obama, but really that was about Republicans going out of their minds. No offense to those who may be Republicans, but I think we can all agree that something started happening in the late '00s that was not a good thing in many ways and, yes, did culminate in the election of you-know-who. And so there was that.

No, we can't all agree to that.

Some might. And so I think the first problem was that the left took that as an indication that Barack Obama's election didn't really mean anything significant in terms of racism, which was not true. And then after that, in 2012 and 2013, was Trayvon Martin and then Mike Brown. And for better or for worse, neither one of those cases would have become national news if it weren't for social media. If there were no social media, if Barack Obama had been elected in a context where everything was the same as it is now but social media hadn't happened, I do believe that we would have turned a major corner based not only on what he symbolized but on things that he tried to do.

But social media, it reinforced tribalist feelings, and I'm sorry to say that it was on the left, so that the left came to cherish pretending racism hasn't changed as a sign of moral worth and we're stuck with it now. That's what I think.

I would just want to get on the record, I don't think Obama handled his portfolio in terms of race relations at all very well. Cambridge cops behaved stupidly. Trayvon. Al Sharpton as the ambassador to America. No, what I wanted him to do was to actually be the black-white president of the United States. I'm black and I'm white. It's in my very DNA.

What I wanted him to do was to shout down the demagogues. I didn't want Al Sharpton anywhere near what he was doing. And I didn't want him saying, “I'm speaking for Black people when I say the following thing.” I wanted him to say, “I'm speaking for the country.” I wanted him to say, “If you go out there and break the law and burn down the city, I'm going to empower, to the extent that I am legally authorized to do so, the forces of law and order to come down on you with a ton of bricks.” That's what he should have said when Freddie Gray was killed in the back of a van in Baltimore and started a riot in that city. That's what he should have said when Michael Brown, killed by a police officer and then the subsequent deliberations led to rioting in Ferguson, Missouri and so forth. That's what I thought.

I thought he should have been law-and-order, tough, down-the-middle. He should have carried forward with some of the stuff that he initiated in this campaign with critiques of black culture and stuff. Instead, I think the opportunity for the first black president of the United States to point the country in a different direction was missed. I think he played the cards that he was dealt with an eye toward the half-century, nearly, that he will spend as former president of the United States—African American icon, celebrity, and so forth—instead of the opportunity ...

You think that's what he was thinking?

Yeah. I mean, no. I don't know. How do I know what he was thinking? That's my unkind surmise.

Just wondering. He's an opaque person. It's very hard to know what's going on in there. I was never thinking of it as that cynical. I just wondered if you knew something I didn't.

No, I don't know anything. I'm just cynical.

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