The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress

By Jelani Cobb

A trenchant and timeless examination of the still-contested meanings of President Barack Obama's election, from a preeminent scholar of race, politics, and American history-with a new introduction by the author.

When voters in 2008 chose the United States' first black president, some Americans hailed the event as a sign that the nation had, at long last, transcended its bloody history of racial inequality. Obama's victory was indescribably momentous, but if the intervening years proved anything, it is that we never leave history entirely behind. Indeed, this may be the ultimate lesson of the Obama era.

First published in 2010, The Substance of Hope is acclaimed historian Jelani Cobb's meditation on what Obama's election represented, an insightful investigation into the civil rights movement forces that helped produce it, and a prescient inquiry into how American society does-and does not-change. In penetrating, elegant prose, Cobb teases apart the paradoxes embodied in race and patriotism, identity and citizenship, progress and legacy.

Now reissued with a new introduction by the author, reflecting on how the seismic impact of the Obama presidency continues to shape America, The Substance of Hope is an indelible work of history and cultural criticism from one of our most singular voices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Oct 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781635577433

Jelani Cobb

Jelani Cobb is a historian and dean of Columbia Journalism School. A staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015, he is a recipient of the Sidney Hillman Award for Opinion and Analysis, as well as fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Fulbright Foundation. He lives in New York City. 

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

On Hopes & Histories

Life right now has the quality of being trapped inside of one of those duck arcade games you see at amusement parks: there is an abundance of things to focus on but none for more than a few seconds at a time. In exceptional times we witness the impeachment and trial of an American president; in inexplicable, ineffable times, like these in the spring and summer of 2020, we can witness such a thing and have nearly forgotten all about it three months later. The first quarter of this year featured said trial, a global coronavirus pandemic, an economic recession-bordering-upon-depression, and sustained international protests sparked by the death of George Floyd, a black man who was casually asphyxiated by a white Minneapolis police officer while three other officers looked on. All of this has been exacerbated by a president who operates as a chaos maestro, incessantly preening, habitually hawking quack cures, lashing out at all arbiters of contrary information (also known as facts) and doing so with the unwavering support of one-third of the American public. The downside of having so many ducks in a row is the difficulty of keeping track of the bigger picture, of assessing the grand themes tying all this together. Fortunately—actually, not—current events periodically intervene to remind us.

The past, we are told, is prologue and this present tempest is only understandable in the context of what preceded it. By any measure other than the calendar, much more than twelve years separate 2020 from 2008. Yet to an extraordinary extent our contemporary politics are a reaction to the presidency of Barack Obama. The Substance of Hope was my attempt to make sense of a momentous shift in American politics and the way race is lived in the United States. It is a capsule of an era that seems so deeply different from our current one that it feels like reading diary entries from a more youthful, idealistic time. Prognostication is a fool’s errand (a conclusion many people drew as the election returns rolled in on the night of November 8, 2016) yet from the beginning it was easily predictable that Obama’s candidacy and ultimately his presidency would be consequential. The precise yield of those consequences, however, has been stunning to even the most broad-minded observers of his ascent in American politics. In the early pages of the book I wrote, In 1908 Jack Johnson defeated a white man for the heavyweight championship, and race riots erupted in the streets across the country. One hundred years later Barack Obama defeated a white man for the presidency, and the streets were filled with riotous laughter. But like Johnson, the black president too was besieged by a series of Great White Hopes trying to fulfill a racial mandate, the most absurd of whom succeeded him in the Oval Office.

In the case of Donald Trump, that mandate entailed venting the nativist, intolerant, and xenophobic bile whose overt expression had seemed like a relic of the twentieth century. The office that had been heralded, albeit naively, as the beacon of our postracial future was now being used to ban Muslim immigrants; to separate the children of undocumented migrants from their families and place them in hazardous, unsanitary holding pens; to give rhetorical comfort to the murderous white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville in the summer of 2017; and to disparage Puerto Ricans—They want everything done for them, he said—in the midst of a catastrophic hurricane which leveled swaths of the island and cost three thousand lives. And these were just the calamities of his first year in office.

Three days after the 2016 election I wrote an essay that observed, in part, It is difficult not to see the result of this year’s presidential election as a refutation of Obama’s creed of common Americanism. The distressing turn of events had vast immediate implications and more subtle long-term ones.

[Obama] now exists in history bracketed by the overmatched forty-third President and the misogynistic racial demagogue who will succeed him as the forty-fifth. During his 2008 campaign, Obama frequently found himself—and without much objection on his part—compared to Abraham Lincoln. He may now share an ambivalent common bond with Lincoln, whose Presidency was bookended by James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson, two lesser lights of American history … Trump is the antithesis of Obama: louche rather than gracious, parochial rather than worldly, conspiratorial rather than pragmatically intellectual. Yet the two are now bound in history, and in perhaps the cruelest subplot, Obama must now show regard and professional courtesy to the man responsible for engineering the doubts about his very citizenship.*

If Obama was the opening statement of a new age, it was now clear that there would be a vitriolic and contemptible response, one whose roots lie deep in American history.

The offhanded presumption is that the period between November 2016 and (at least) November 2020 should be referred to as the Trump era, but it’s more accurately considered the post-Obama era. This is not to say that Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States, is not an entity in his own right—we are keenly aware of the ways in which his ignorance, his bellicose racism, his narcissistic id, have shaped the time we live in—it’s to say that absent Barack Obama he had no rationale for his own political existence. The forty-fourth president operates as a kind of inverse guiding star for the forty-fifth, a mechanism by which he can look north to travel south. Obama’s allure, beyond the particulars of policy, was always the way in which he embodied black possibility in a country all but defined by the absence of it. Trump’s allure lay in the censure of those possibilities, the reinscription of the old order, a dissonant assertion that anything a brilliant black man could do well an ill-informed, mediocre white man could assuredly do better. Or at least do also.

Yet the vantage point of time has also clarified Obama’s standing as an agent in his own story. The signature achievements of his administration, in his own rendering, include the resurrection of an economy cratered by the subprime mortgage crisis, passage of the Affordable Care Act, and negotiation of a nuclear nonproliferation deal with the government of Iran. The unemployment rate in January 2009 was 7.8 percent and trending upward. By the summer it had reached 9.5 percent, and the suspicion held that the government’s statisticians were deploying every poker trick they knew to shade those numbers below ten percent. In January 2017, as Obama left office, the number stood at 4.7 percent and had fallen lower in each of the eight Januaries of his presidency. When he was elected there were forty-four million Americans without health insurance; the Affordable Care Act was signed into law in 2010. By the time he left office nearly twenty million of those people were insured under Obamacare, as it came to be known. The Iran nuclear deal, negotiated with a regime hostile to the United States and deeply suspicious that the huge 2009 spate of protests and uprisings in Tehran were the handiwork of the CIA, marked one of the most significant arms reduction treaties the United States had negotiated since the close of the Cold War. Yet his achievements consistently seemed to be incorporated into the case against him. Flush with conspiratorial paranoia about death panels and reparations, the right mobilized against the Affordable Care Act as the singular event heralding the arrival of Socialist America. (Efforts to undo the legislation extended past Obama’s term well into Trump’s, and the attempts to gut health care continued even into the 2020 pandemic.) The 2015 Iran deal, which, short of warfare, was the only viable option to stave off the spread of nuclear weapons to another nation hostile to the United States, was criticized by Republicans who vowed to upend Secretary of State John Kerry’s diplomatic achievement. That degree of partisan discord had become familiar by that point, but the attempt to undermine a president’s capacity to negotiate with a foreign power was not. There were rules for presidents and rules for black ones.

Yet to a striking degree Obama, throughout his first term and arguably well into his second, operated as if the usual protocols did not apply. Obama relaxed offshore drilling regulations in hope of greasing the wheels for a climate change bill, a gesture which went unrequited and came back to haunt the administration when an explosion occurred on the Deepwater Horizon, a drilling rig operated by the petro giant BP, killing eleven people and creating the largest marine oil spill in history. Amid the fight for the ACA the administration proposed cuts to entitlements, angering Democratic voters, with the belief it would allow Republicans to sign on to some form of the bill. They did not and the Affordable Care Act was passed without a single Republican supporter. But nowhere was this theme more apparent than in immigration. Two and a half million people were deported during his tenure, an increase of five hundred thousand over his predecessor George W. Bush. Criticized by the left flank of the Democratic Party for not only continuing but accelerating the rate of deportations, the administration appeared to be tacking to the right on immigration as a concession in hopes that Republicans, who controlled the House after 2010, would reciprocate with immigration reform legislation. This did not happen for two reasons. Over the course of his presidency, but particularly in his second term, the Republican electorate moved further to the right. Republican officeholders, as Senator Marco Rubio learned when he had to denounce proposed legislation he’d actually written, could not budge on the issue without facing serious political consequences. The other was that the GOP saw too much profit in stymying Obama’s efforts to achieve anything. The party was not opposed to Barack Obama’s ideas; they were opposed to Barack Obama.

Confronted with Republican intransigence, Obama declared in 2011, If Congress won’t act, I will. He issued a series of executive orders in the wake of that warning, most notably DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an order that made provisions to protect undocumented immigrants who arrived here as children and had never known any home other than the United States. In turn Republicans charged that his reliance upon executive orders was dictatorial, and despite broad public support in polls DACA catalyzed the growth of an outright xenophobic turn in conservative politics. It was shocking to hear Donald Trump launch his campaign by referring to Mexican immigrants as rapists in 2015, but in the prevailing climate it should not have been.

By 2016 the GOP no longer bothered to fig-leaf their contempt for Obama as disputes over issues. Following the sudden death of Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, Obama nominated Merrick Garland, a moderate whose views, in the thinking of the administration, were centrist enough to slip through a Senate controlled by Republicans. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took the extraordinary and unprecedented step of blocking Judge Garland from even gaining a hearing.

Obama’s emergence, as I wrote in 2009, was tied to his ability to articulate a transcendent vision of American identity, one in which the traditional divides of partisanship and race would be of less consequence than the overarching bond of citizenship. If the former was blown into a chasm by the orchestrated efforts of an opposition party, the latter was detonated by the random chaos of individual actions. On February 26, 2012, an armed, self-appointed neighborhood watchman named George Zimmerman confronted an unarmed black seventeen-year-old named Trayvon Martin in a gated subdivision in Sanford, Florida. The teen was returning to his father’s home after going to a local store to buy Skittles. After disobeying a police dispatcher’s request that he not pursue Martin, Zimmerman confronted him. A fight ensued during which Zimmerman drew a 9mm pistol and shot Martin in the chest, killing him. Under Florida’s stand your ground law, a perversion of the ideal of self-defense that allowed people to use fatal force nearly any time they felt threatened, Zimmerman had committed no crime.

The ensuing shockwave of outrage highlighted the contradictions that had always been present: the existence of a black president and the ongoing ability of white people, or, in Zimmerman’s case, white-adjacent people, to kill black people with impunity. (As subsequent analysis revealed, attempts to utilize the stand your ground defense were far more likely to be granted in cases involving a white person who killed a black person than vice versa.) Public pressure succeeded in having Zimmerman arrested and charged with murder, but he was acquitted in the summer of 2013.

In March 2012 Obama addressed the subject directly at a press conference, saying, memorably, If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon Martin. It was an exceptional moment. Race had continually been foisted upon Obama during the campaign; his eloquence in addressing it could not cloak the fact that he was often speaking under duress. His first foray into the matter as president, an offhand comment about Cambridge, Massachusetts, police who had stupidly arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. inside his own home, had blown up in his face, sparking outrage from law enforcement across the country. The inept response to it—a beer summit in which Gates, Obama, the arresting officer, and Vice President Joe Biden, seemingly thrown in to balance out the demographics, knocked back lagers at the White House—suggested an administration that preferred an evenhanded approach to matters of race, even when the grievances in question were not equal.

The Martin moment was different. Obama was speaking openly about who he was, reminding his electorate, including the white people, that there was little distinction between the kind of black people they like (the one who got elected president) and the kind they view with suspicion (the one who got profiled and shot dead on a Florida street). This was a conclusion, ironically, that his detractors would have readily conceded.

If the maelstrom surrounding the Affordable Care Act defined his first term, what happened with Martin, just a month after Obama was sworn in again, provided the theme for the second. In an anguished moment following Zimmerman’s acquittal, a queer Bay Area labor organizer posted a long essay on Facebook that ended with the words Our lives matter. A friend amended those words to include a specifying noun: Black Lives Matter. Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, along with fellow organizer Patrisse Cullors, began creating an activist network under that three-word banner. The phrase itself found purchase online but did not explode into public consciousness until a year later when Michael Brown, a black eighteen-year-old, was fatally shot by police officer Darren Wilson on a narrow side street in Ferguson, Missouri. For the second consecutive summer the nation was enmeshed in a racial crucible that involved the shooting of an unarmed black teenager.

The administration responded in two ways: Attorney General Eric Holder launched an investigation into the circumstances of Brown’s death, and Obama himself created the Task Force on Twenty-First Century Policing. The Department of Justice investigation yielded two separate reports, the first of which declared controversially that based upon the pertinent forensics Wilson appeared to have been acting in self-defense when he shot Michael Brown. The second report established deeply ingrained patterns of racist behavior in the Ferguson Police Department and the habitual use of law enforcement as a mechanism for extracting money from the poorer, mostly black sections of the municipality. In a bid to address the root issues, the task force delivered a report outlining suggested reforms in the way the nation’s eighteen thousand police departments operate. (That report was taken down from the DOJ website during the Trump administration, which immediately gutted the previous administration’s attempts at police reform. The foolishness of this move became apparent over the course of eight minutes and forty-six seconds on May 25, 2020. That was the length of the video which showed George Floyd, a handcuffed forty-six-year-old black man, being slowly asphyxiated by a Minneapolis PD officer.

Martin’s death galvanized a new generation of activists who emerged fully formed in the streets of Ferguson in protests and disruptions that stretched over the course of a year. But as if to demonstrate the validity of Newton’s third law to social circumstances, Martin’s death also became the galvanizing event for the emerging radical right wing, the revanchist take-back-our-country faction that had believed from the outset that a black presidency was synonymous with white perdition. The stage for an equal and opposite reaction was to be Charleston, South Carolina, where, 150 years after the Confederacy’s demise, an armed white supremacist entered the sanctuary of the Emanuel AME Church on Calhoun Street and murdered nine black churchgoers. Their names were Cynthia Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Tywanza Sanders, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Ethel Lee Lance, Daniel Simmons, Myra Thompson, and Clementa Pinckney—the church pastor and a state senator who was personally friendly with Barack Obama. The shooter, a scrawny twenty-one-year-old named Dylann Roof, committed the murders as a call to arms for white people who he felt were losing their ordained position of supremacy in the United States. When he was captured and interrogated he told police that he was awakened to the peril confronting white people when he read about the Trayvon Martin case.

Obama eulogized Pinckney on an insufferably hot June afternoon. Thousands of people attended the service, which was held two blocks from the church in the auditorium of the College of Charleston. Obama’s arrival in American life had occasioned a multitude of reactions which themselves fostered an infinity of additional reactions, one rogue strand of which had culminated in death of the tall, elegant man whose coffin was before him in a college auditorium. As with Roof’s spiritual forebears during Reconstruction, the mere existence of a black man with power was a signifier that the world had slipped off its axis. Amid the outrage and sorrow that attended the church attack a proximity went unnoticed. Roof killed the congregants on June 17, 2015. One day earlier Donald Trump had ridden down the gold-colored escalator in Trump Tower in Manhattan and declared himself a candidate for the presidency. Both men had stated that they were driven to their acts as a response to the menace of dark rapists afoot in America. There was no causal relationship between the two events, just two white men with twinned interests, the revanchist fantasy of white restoration.

One other thing defined the racial context in which Obama operated and, as a consequence, the context in which the rest of us, particularly those of us who are black, lived our lives. In 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court struck down key sections of the Voting Rights Act. This was both a predictable and unconscionable development. The opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts essentially held that the law unfairly discriminated against white Southerners by requiring that states of the former Confederacy be overseen by a panel of federal judges to ensure that no new election law there could be used to disenfranchise black voters. The logic was deeply familiar—it was the same argument that the segregationist Alabama senator J. Lister Hill and others like him made in opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In issuing its decision the court was restoring the favor of arguments that, had they been adhered to at the time, would never have allowed a black president, or really black citizenship,