Obama’s presidency exemplified the deadly gambit of black liberal politics

Evidence

President Obama represents the culmination of this tradition. How he engages matters of race, how he imagines black people’s relation to the nation, and how he uses African American history affirm this liberal vision. In some ways, all the declarations in 2008 that we had reached the promised land revealed the deadly gambit at the heart of black liberal politics: that somehow our inclusion at the highest levels of power would finally unhook white supremacy from the nation’s precious ideals and we would be free. But the price of this “freedom” was communal death in service of the illusion of racial progress. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 437

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• QUESTION: Directly relevant to reading with the post-Obama publication date in mind: does this verdict on Obama’s presidency hold up given subsequent politics?

Related

• Obama’s presidency proved inclusion does not unhook white supremacy from American ideals (similarity 0.92)
• Obama’s presidency consummated black liberalism’s century-long inclusion project (similarity 0.83)
• Obama’s race-avoidance reinforced the illusion of a post-racial nation (similarity 0.82)
• Black liberalism’s King-Obama narrative strangles the range of black political imagination (similarity 0.80)
• A black president can dismantle a tradition while performing blackness rhetorically (similarity 0.80)
• Standard black political history erases its radical alternatives (similarity 0.79)
• A black presidency coexisted with worsening racial inequality, exposing the limits of representation (similarity 0.79)
• Democratic presidents reinforced rather than challenged America’s racial habits (similarity 0.79)
• Obama’s anti-black rhetoric functioned to reassure white voters he posed no threat (similarity 0.79)
• Obama consistently avoided a specific policy agenda for black Americans (similarity 0.79)
• Obama’s election marked a peak of post-racial triumphalism, not its end (similarity 0.78)
• Many intellectuals took Obama’s election as proof America had moved past racism (similarity 0.78)