The spirit in the chamber last night was undeniably triumphant and undeniably colored by the racial significance of Barack Obama’s presidency. The Congressional Black Caucus filed in early to ensure preferential seats near the aisle, and it seemed that the chamber contained more black people than any prior State of the Union address has had. Members of the caucus were vibrant and enthusiastic, and invited guests wore regalia usually only found in Southern black churches. The urgency and the emotion around the moment was palpable. However, the speech that Obama delivered, while dipping into the triumphant spirit present that night, was oddly silent about the fears and struggles that come along with it.
I’m 27. Obama was elected when I was just shy of my 20th birthday, my first time voting in a presidential election. Along with other students at the Atlanta University Center, I canvassed for him through rural streets in Georgia and South Carolina during the primaries earlier that year, braving the occasional n-word and more than one snake for the fever dream turned faint hope turned possibility that was a black presidency. On that November night, when the projections finally ruled out the possibilities otherwise, we danced. I hugged people I’d never hugged. I called cousins I’d never called. I cried when I thought of my great-grandmother, who taught me how to read and write, and how she always said I could be the first black president. She died 10 years before that 2008 night, but hell, I figured being the second wouldn’t let her down too much.
This isn’t meant to slip into memorializing a presidency—we’ll have plenty of time to do that later. But I reckon that my adulthood started in earnest that night, which means that my entire adulthood thus far has been shaped by the realities and achievements and frustrations of the first Black President. My cohort of black millennials has been shaped in a similar way.
The State of the Union was most important for me—as I suspect it was for many other people who joined to laugh and revel on Black Twitter—as the beginning of a long goodbye. Not to a man, not to an office, but to a part of our lives, and an era that has been unseen and unexperienced by any other generation. Part of saying goodbye to Obama is saying goodbye to pieces of ourselves, to the post-post-racial America that saw black rappers in the White House as often as white businessmen and pastel Easter Sunday suits and Al Green songs and Amazing Grace. This is the President that we elected, and his last State of the Union may have been the last such speech we’ll ever see from a black president in our lives. America is weird like that.
But we were also shaped by the Recession, a recession which impacted us more than anyone; a never-ending war; a tech onslaught that changed the way we think and live; a demographic revolution; and the resurfacing of a certain public thread of virulent racism that came with it. We were also shaped by the final realization that Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream had been left unfulfilled and seeing a backslide in many places to the Jim Crow that our parents and grandparents had run from. We realized with finality that despite whatever rhetoric existed, our lives were worth less. We were targets for police, schools, lenders, industry. Nothing more.
Those dueling narratives—the hope of a black president and a changing country, versus the tired resignation and frustration of realizing that we haven’t come as far as we thought—have shaped the highs and lows of the Obama presidency with black millennials, often to the point of naked contradiction. There’s the praise when the president steps forward to speak on an issue that would have gone unaddressed otherwise, when he quotes a spiritual, or code switches just a bit. The nods towards a shared secret culture. This praise often exists simultaneously with frustration when Obama used these very occasions to lecture people on respectability, or castigate young black fathers, or praise police while noting the rampant brutality at hand.
And so it has been this way with Black Lives Matter and the scourge of police violence. We comfort ourselves with the notion that Obama can’t go “all the way” in support of black voices on these issues for risk of alienating the center. This is half right. But sometimes, uninspired tepidness is uninspired tepidness no matter how much we like to call it political shrewdness. Obama has been hot and cold on Black Lives Matter, agreeing with the moderate premise that there is a racial problem with policing and working to fix it, but also operating on the premise that policing as a whole is good and done with the needs of everyone in mind. To many, these two viewpoints are simply incompatible.
While there was an allusion to the movement, Obama’s State of the Union had no mention of Black Lives Matter. This in itself is probably excusable. The State of the Union is largely a pomp show for the president to flex when times are good, and reassure when times are bad. Tricky policies and distinctions are usually not part of the show. But the stage could have provided a final platform for Obama to finally make the kind of full-throated racial policy statements that many hoped would come along with the other symbolic gestures of blackness. Obama could have taken the lead and been the standard-bearer of a bold America that is willing to aggressively confront its own racism. There isn’t much time left, nor is there much capital left to spend. If not then, when?
This isn’t all sour grapes. On the whole, the racial significance of the night rivaled the policy, and that can probably be said of the entire presidency. And America is strong. We have health care. The nightmare of the recession seems to at least be receding to the corners of our mind. But the fear that there may never be another person holding this highest office who quite understands and feels the issues creating the new Jim Crow in America—another person who might care like Obama might care—is becoming dread as we are faced with options who seem eager to wipe people of color out, instead of maintain the status quo of stable marginalization. It’s a very real fear that the Obama presidency was an oasis in a desert, instead of a sea change. Those are fears that Obama himself may not ever have had the power to overcome. But he could have assuaged those fears from that podium. Blackness mattered most there, in the space where Obama didn’t mention it.