The Obama presidency was framed as an ending that concealed an unfinished lie

Evidence

Perhaps the most instructive example of the way the lie distorts our recent history can be found in how Barack Obama’s election to the presidency was largely framed as an ending: a triumphant climax to the civil rights movement begun decades earlier. The elevation of a black man to the presidency, such a story suggested, represented the notion that all constraints had fallen away, that if a black man could hold the highest office in the land, then surely we as a country had finally and definitively overcome our racist past. In this story, what King began in Montgomery in 1955, Obama finished in triumph at Grant Park on election night 2008. To be fair, Obama himself did not discourage this reading of his own ascendance, even though a simple look at the American landscape at the moment of his election could not have made more plain the hollowness of this story. Still, the lie had a nice ring to it. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 113

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The ‘ending vs. beginning’ Obama framing pairs naturally with the Grafting essay’s metaphor of growth — a ‘beginning’ reading is the graft, the ‘ending’ reading the severed claim of completion.
• XREF: Supports the reader’s thesis: ‘the lie’ — the story America tells itself that it has changed. — connects to: Obama’s realist framing masked a continuation of Bush-era imperial warfare — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 501; Birtherism delegitimated Obama by framing his presidency as unconstitutional — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 201