Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 2

How Insightful Is Dear White People?

Dear White People is not about white people. The show, Netflix’s adaptation of Justin Simien’s 2014 critically acclaimed film of the same name, is in some ways both a continuation of the source material and a radical departure. The original film’s satirical portrayal of race relations and black identity at the fictional Ivy League school Winchester University followed a group of black students, led by Samantha White (Tessa Thompson), and a budding campaign against the predominantly white humor magazine Pastiche that culminates in a blackface party and small-time race riot.

The 2017 incarnation of Dear White People picks up where the original left off. With some holdovers from the original cast, the first four episodes of the show reconstruct the party and backlash that ended the film, and begin a story on a campus—and within a racial climate—that’s much different than the one viewers last saw at Winchester. But does the show, also written and co-directed by Simien, exceed the expectations set by the original? The Atlantic’s Vann Newkirk, Adrienne Green, Gillian White, and Ta-Nehisi Coates discuss the whole first season, so spoilers abound.

Vann Newkirk: I enjoyed the show, and that’s an accomplishment because I didn’t like the film at all. I think this incarnation did a lot to flesh out characters in ways I found satisfying, and its use of multiple angles on the same basic events worked pretty well. But one of the things that sat in the back of my mind for all 10 episodes was that I have no idea whether Dear White People is primarily a commentary on race or a college sitcom. The use of different directors for different episodes makes it hard to tell, sometimes, and it’s unclear whether the moralizing elements are sincere or played for laughs (see: the show’s incessant use of the word “woke”).

Adrienne Green: I would argue that Dear White People juggles aspirations to be both a scripted commentary on race and a sitcom about college students, and fails mildly in both regards. It’s a better show for assigning full episodes to the perspectives of each of the five black leads—Sam, Lionel, Troy, Coco, and Reggie—an obvious attempt to remedy critiques of the film’s lack of character development. Where this method falls short is the show’s use of the love triangle between Sam, the biracial activist leader of Winchester’s Black Student Union, Gabe, the white graduate student she’s dating, and Reggie, another member of the Black Student Union who has pined for her since freshman year, as the throughline for the season. At times of heightened tension, it felt like Gabe’s feelings, perspectives, and anxieties were centered in a narrative that could have spent a lot more time unpacking the trauma experienced by the other main characters.  

As a sitcom about college students, Dear White People isn’t good comedy either. Even when employing obvious satire, especially when dealing with subdivisions in the black community, the jokes are outdated (so many uses of the word “hashtag”). Many of the supporting characters seem more like hollow stand-ins for ideologies than they are members of a cohesive cast: There’s a token African student, another student whose only references are to religion, and an Asian student whom viewers are forced to assume is “down.” Joelle, another black female student who’s best friends with the insufferable Sam, received glaringly little development despite having, I’d argue, the potential to be the most well-rounded character on the show. All in all, I think the series, while a detailed improvement on the film, struggles with its intersecting identities as much as its main characters did. I did laugh a little at the Scandal parody, though.

Gillian White: I think the archetypes of black students at prestigious, white institutions were limited and somewhat flawed, even in their obvious hyperbole. The bifurcation of the black campus population between the “woke” students—their dress, their speech, their plans of action—and the preppy, weave-wearing, non-agitators they deemed to be decidedly less worthy of that title, was clearly an intentional exaggeration of what kinds of black people exist on the campuses of Ivy League schools.

But that bifurcation still leaves out some important players in the black student space on such campuses: Caribbean and African students (they only get a small nod via one character as you mentioned, Adrienne), who often make up a large portion of the black student population on such campuses. Because many are from overseas or have families that immigrated in recent decades, their experiences are often very different than black American students, which brings with it its own set of differing viewpoints on what progress should look and feel like. Though the show has Troy and Coco, who don’t agree with agitation but still show up for conversations about race, it leaves out the black kids on campus who choose to not participate in such conversations or engage socially with other black students at all. And those stories, too, are an important part of the experience and dynamic on campuses like Winchester’s.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I should say, I didn’t see the movie, and I didn’t see it almost entirely because of the title, Dear White People. There’s a long tradition of black folks pleading with white people. It’s a tradition that emerges from political necessity, so I get it; I’m just not very interested in it. Maybe the movie isn’t part of that tradition. Maybe it was everything I would have loved. But my prejudices kept me away. Make of that what you will.

There is some of that in the show, as it’s concerned primarily with racism, and only secondarily with black people. What I mean is that blackness in Netflix’s Dear White People is largely a mode of protest. Nearly everything revolves around racism and the pariah-like feelings it inspires. The show is much less concerned with the interior lives of black people. Is there a single scene of a black party in the series? There is a black sorority, but is there a single step show? Even the communal amusement—like the parody of Scandal—revolves around the relationship with white power.

If this sounds like criticism, it isn’t. I think Dear White People, the show, is a tremendous artistic achievement. It’s always hinting that there is something beyond the pleading and wokeness, something that the show’s more militant characters can’t see. Sometimes it comes in humor—Joelle’s interrupting Sam’s broadcast to figure out how to get “waist-thin and ass-thick.” Other times it comes in moments of deep pain—Coco’s confrontation with Sam over colorism after being autotuned. I couldn’t really handle a Dear White People that was literally “DEAR WHITE PEOPLE!” But this show feels like it’s more about what happens when your sense of being is married to people who don’t much like you.

Newkirk: Having attended a Historically Black College (Morehouse), I agree with Ta-Nehisi’s not-criticism that racism was the star of the show, and not the black characters. My own college experience wasn’t defined by how it clashed with whiteness, and I know that even on real-life campuses like Winchester’s, it’s a lot more than dealing with racism. There’s so much drama within black college communities that needs unearthing, too. Hopefully in Season 2 we’ll get more frat calls and step shows and fried chicken Wednesdays. Hopefully.

To Gillian’s point, I can say the show’s depictions of its characters is kind of how black students at elite, predominantly white institutions (PWI) are viewed by many people who don’t attend such schools. All the characters on Dear White People are different shades of—can we say bougie here? Yeah, bougie. And it’s sometimes funny watching the students of Winchester struggle over their own particular slice of bougieness, although the heavy moments still feel heavy. I’ve always approached the dialogues about race and flare-ups on Ivy League campuses with a sort of detachment, because in my mind there’s still some of that stereotype of bougieness left. (Also, the Scandal parody was golden, as was the Iyanla Vanzant knock-off. I died.)

Green: While I wouldn’t necessarily say I connected to any of the characters in the show, I did attend a PWI (Ohio University) at a time when issues of race and brutality against black people were at the forefront of discussion after the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Mike Brown. Factions of students dealt with those tensions in different ways, and I think the rift between Sam, an agitator, and Troy, the obedient son of the dean, was somewhat a true reflection of how multiple approaches to talking about race and flare-ups on campuses play out in real life.

White: As someone who also went to a PWI (Columbia), I get that the perception of the black student body at PWIs might align closely with what’s presented in Dear White People. In reality I think the black students who wind up going to PWIs are incredibly varied, just like the black students who go to HBCUs. That’s true not just in background, but also in views on racial issues that arise, be they external (like those Adrienne mentioned) or internal campus relations (the main kind the show deals with).

The presumption of bougieness is actually why I found the Coco-Sam dynamic to be so interesting. Of course there are black kids who grew up in nice neighborhoods with lots of privilege. But there are many black kids at these very affluent institutions who are certainly not from affluent backgrounds, who are there in hopes that their four years will give them access to a better life. I also think that black kids who go to PWIs have the additional task of trying to navigate the differences within the black community, while coping with the realities of being black in America, while also trying to find a place at elite, white institutions that have histories of being inaccessible, hostile, and discriminatory. I think that can be a complex space to navigate, especially for young adults who are still trying to figure out where they stand absent parental influence.

Newkirk: I thought the show’s attention to detail helped illustrate the students’ efforts at navigating those complex spaces, but it takes an eye and familiarity to make sense of those details. The little things like Troy and Coco’s conservative-leaning Congress of Racial Equality are hilarious if you know the history behind the real-life CORE, and its transformation from a mainstream civil-rights organization to a radical black-power organization in the ’60s, then to a right-wing, climate-denying think tank after Nixon. The style cues also fit in here, and watching the characters’ transformations from freshman year to their adult identities (especially Sam’s adoption of an impressive accessories collection) are fun if you’ve followed black popular culture and aesthetics over the past few years.

Coates: Yeah. I’m intentionally avoiding learning too much about who wrote what in the show, but Vann, you are dead-on in terms of the show’s deep knowledge of tradition. I feel like that’s all through the show, too. And maybe that is what lends itself to the kinds of generalizations you guys didn’t like. The whole thing felt like satire to me, though. In a good way. None of these black people really resembled any I knew—with two exceptions, Joelle and Coco. The latter gets more screen-time, and I think there is a strong argument that Coco is the grounding of the show. (Maybe an argument for Lionel, too.) But I thought Antoinette Robertson’s performance as Coco was so spot-on, and the character so sculpted, that I found myself rooting for her even as she sold out. It felt like she’d earned a break.

White: I totally agree with that sentiment. I thought “Chapter 4,” where we learn more about Coco’s backstory and her relationship with Sam, was one of the most compelling episodes of the series. The splintering of their friendship and views about how to carve out a space for themselves on a campus where neither feels immediately accepted set up perhaps some of the show’s most interesting and illuminating relationship dynamics. The revelation that Coco is, in fact, keenly aware of her blackness and that her lack of acceptance of her skin, hair, and upbringing comes not only from white people, but also from other black people, was critically important.

Similarly, her assertion that Sam’s experience of searching for acceptance is drastically different, since her upbringing, light skin, and hair give her the ability to move more fluidly between crowds, brought some necessary history and context to a plot that could sometimes feel a bit narrow. (The plot felt especially limited for how it centered on the response to the blackface party while so many other issues swirled around the main characters.) I think the backstories explored in that particular episode really helped inform viewers about the choices that characters made when responding to racial tensions and discrimination at an institution apparently eager to turn a blind eye.

Newkirk: I will advance that this season was the most useful addition to the campus free-speech debate in years.  So much of the media freakout over “safe spaces” and “political correctness” comes from 50-year-old columnists and seems strangely disconnected from actual campus life today. Dear White People attempts to complicate that by illustrating both the destructive ends of bigoted speech and the usefulness of speech in advancing marginalized causes. And it shows the debates over free speech in the midst of students actually navigating the marketplace of ideas and coming up against the differences between the ideal and real life. I thought the fact that Lionel’s reporting at the fictional Independent newspaper was stonewalled by moneyed, racist interests helps put the debate back into focus, too. The real power to dictate speech and ideas still comes from circles well beyond those of liberal students.

Green: For sure. It felt like the broadest goal of the show was to emphasize how the grievances of black students on majority-white elite campuses are often discounted, manipulated, or ignored by the administration (and in the case of Lionel and Independent, the donor interests associated with them). The series succeeded in highlighting the imperfections in the strategies students use to cope with identity politics, and the challenges that will likely stay with them once they leave the campus.

For example, Sam and Reggie relied on a much more militant approach than Troy and Coco, who advocated for engaging with the university administration, and Lionel, who chose to process his experiences as a black Winchester student via his reporting. These differences were most apparent in their responses to Pastiche’s blackface party and Reggie’s encounter with police in episode five. However, I was disappointed by the times the show meditated more on the strained relationships that resulted from the Reggie party scene (Sam/Gabe, Troy/his father) than on how Reggie dealt with his own trauma on a personal level.

Newkirk: That’s pretty spot-on. While I personally appreciated the focus on those strained relationships, I think Dear White People missed a golden opportunity to dig deep into Reggie’s psyche and make a commentary about the psychological effects of activism and involvement in policy brutality, as well as the line between activism and experience.

White: I found the episode that starts with Reggie agreeing to try to break out of his shell and have a fun time hanging out with both his white and black peers—only to end in a racial brawl and a cop pulling a gun on him—to be the most heartbreaking of the series. I loved that the episode ended with Reggie, who has been shown to have no problem sticking up for himself, and even goading others into tense encounters, crying on the floor of his dorm room as he tries to process what just happened and the powerlessness that he feels. For a show that’s ostensibly trying to grapple with these very complexities, Dear White People wasted its chance to delve into a devastating moment that so many black Americans, and black students, could surely relate to by not building on that raw emotion in the next episode.

Green: Agreed, Gillian. The fallout from Reggie’s encounter with the police felt more like a buildup of passion between Sam and Reggie, and minimized what, as Vann said, was a golden opportunity. The poem that Reggie performed at the open-mic could have been the sole outlet for him to vocalize his pain, thus offering him and viewers some catharsis after a very emotional fifth episode. Instead, it was treated as an effort to spark intimacy with Sam. The deflated re-read of the same poem on her radio show, that he performed halfheartedly while watching Sam plead with Gabe to take her back, only underscored how mismatched this thread was for the gravity of the situation. Oddly, Coco delivered the most direct line of the season about race at Winchester: “As soon as you double down on your blackness, they will double down on their bullshit ... Who cares if you’re ‘woke’ or not if you’re dead?”

Newkirk: If I hear the word “woke” again, I’m gonna vomit. I’m a fan of the comedy in the show iteration of Dear White People, but the dialogue at times felt it was written by a parody statement T-shirt generator. The “woke or not” app made me want to fight people. I get that it seems exactly like something college kids actually do and look back on as adults and groan about, but I really can’t tell if the show is serious about it or not. I can’t tell if a lot of the things that I laughed about with Dear White People were intended as knowing jokes or were actually just written on a slam blog from 2014, but the “woke” stuff was just especially bad.

Coates: I liked “WOKE OR NOT”! Come on! It was satire. All kidding aside, I take your point, but I thought the writers were very self-aware. Wasn’t the whole idea of that app to pan the self-righteousness of its creators?

One thing that is perhaps shading my view, for the better, of the show is I don’t watch that much TV. I’ve seen, and liked, Insecure and Atlanta. But I have a hard time situating Dear White People in the larger universe of black television. Also. It is incredible that one can now say “larger universe of black television” earnestly. I remember when no one in my city had cable. And it was, like, three channels. Damn, I’m old ...

Green: Having seen and enjoyed new shows like Insecure and Atlanta—shows that came out in 2016, widely regarded as a “banner year” for black television—what stood out to me was how many of them not only advanced the conversation about the potential for diversity in television, but also supplied nuance to stories that represented specific iterations of the black experience.

While I found Dear White People to be somewhat relatable and filled with many cultural references that could resonate with its black viewers—my favorite being the quip about why nothing Stacey Dash did after Clueless matters—it might lack the intentionality around making characters both flawed but well-rounded that made these other shows so appealing. This first season ends with the apparent dissolution of the love triangle and a final gut punch, with Sam unable to answer the question of whether protesting accomplishes anything at all. The season has come full circle in a way that I think gives the second season a lot of room to work on its missteps.

Barack Obama Is Okay With the Criticism

While he was still president, Barack Obama sat down with Ta-Nehisi Coates and discussed what it’s like to be a symbol of power and the recipient of people’s anger and excitement. “When people criticize or respond negatively to me, usually they’re responding to this character that they’re seeing on TV called Barack Obama, or the office of the presidency, or the White House and what that represents,” he says in this animated interview. “So, you don’t take it personally. You understand that if people are angry that somehow the government is failing, than they are going to look to the guy who represents government.”

On Trump and the Election

(Editor’s note: Reader questions are in bold, followed by Ta-Nehisi’s replies. The speech above was delivered the day after Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.)

With the election and current political climate, there’s a lot of very understandable gloom and trepidation right now. But is there anything happening in America now that makes you feel optimistic about our future as a society? Any bright spots you would like to see more focus on and draw peoples’ attention to?

I don’t know. I don’t tend to look for reasons for optimism or pessimism. I think human societies tend to be problematic. And we are just conforming to the rule.

Trump is very aggressively attacking the credibility of the media. How can the media and journalists best respond to his tactics?

Not sure they can. Dunno if this is really up to them. Feels like something larger happening. Obviously you can do your job well. But I don’t think, say, The New York Times doing its job well is going to garner them cred among the people who believe Trump is a credible press critic.

Do you believe in the meme that it was liberal intolerance for conservative views that generated the backlash personified by Trump? Or the related meme that liberals have ignored white heartland people?

Nah. Trump was polling well back in 2012 in GOP primaries.

How do you think protest movements are gonna evolve in the next few years to counter the alt-right direction that national politics have taken?

No idea. But they need to take appropriate measures against the very real possibility of government surveillance and harassment. We’ve done it before. Like, in the life-times of many Americans. No real reason to think it could not happen again.

What lessons can today’s protest movements take from the civil rights movement, Black Panthers, etc.?

Read On »

On Race Relations

(Editor’s note: Reader questions are in bold, followed by Ta-Nehisi’s replies. In the video above, he discusses issues surrounding his cover story, “My President Was Black.”)

After reading you for the last 5+ years or so, and becoming more aware of the racial strains that permeate the U.S. on so very many levels, and realizing that you are so much more aware of these things than I am (from experience and study), I wonder if you despair of Americans ever living together in truly racially peaceful and tranquil society, rather than being riven by racial division, strife, and conflict? Is a real peace—with something approaching fairness and justice—ever going to be on offer in America in your view?

Nah. I don’t despair. The world is imperfect. Long view of history shows evil triumphing more often than we’d like to admit. That’s just how it is. I don’t despair too much about dying either. It’s just a fact of being human.

How do you try and communicate that insight to children?

I talk to them, just like I’m talking here. I’ve never tried to hide anything.

As a black mother and an advocate for racial equality, I am concerned about your totality of belief that black people will never gain true equality in America. Don’t you think you should use your position in the media to forge alliances and proffer the reality that there are many blacks and whites that seamlessly bridge the gap between the races?

Nah. I’m a writer. My job is to speak what that which I think is true. If that bridges the gap, that’s good. If it doesn’t, that’s too bad.

As a Gen-X pundit of repute, what’s the most frustrating gap you see between Boomer and Millennial (and younger, now) activism? Is there something you’d wish both could grasp, but somehow they cannot?

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On Music and Books

(Editor’s note: Reader questions are in bold, followed by Ta-Nehisi’s replies.)

I’ve been listening to Blood Orange’s Freetown Sound album on repeat for a couple days now and it blew my mind when I looked at the credits and realized it was you at talking at the end of “Love Ya.” How did that even happen?

They asked to sample. I said, sure. It’s a cool album.

What music have you been grooving to recently?

Rihanna. Frank Ocean. Kilo Kish. Old Jay-Z.

What sort of history books, if any, are you reading these days? I loved your discussion of Bloodlands.

Very slowly making my way through Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction.

Have you been following Jamelle Bouie’s reading of it at Slate?

Nah. Gotta stay in my own head.

I know you’re not much of a football fan these days, but I was wondering if you have any thoughts on (what seems to be) the steadily growing pushback against taxpayer-subsidized stadiums in major cities around the country (including, as of this week, San Diego). Will we see an end to these sorts of deals anytime soon? Should we?

I actually am back watching. Got pulled back in. Was looking for some part of me that was lost. More on that soon.

How has your living in France modified your point of view about race and culture, or has it?

Left me thinking a lot more about the international implications of the twin legacies of colonialism and enslavement. I’m not prepared to say anything definitive. But there’s a lot of interesting stuff there. Things like looking at the reaction of white Southerners to the Civil War, and the reaction of les pieds noirs to the Algerian War.

Just questions right now, honestly. Nothing certain.

How’s your French, at this point? Have you tried it out shouting at an American tourist or two?

Ça avance. Mais la langues étranger sont toujours difficile. Particularmente pour les adults. J'ai une prof privée. Nous rencontrons une fois ou deux fois chaque semaine. Donc, je vais continuer. J'adore français.

Désolé pour mes faults.

“Les langues”! C’est pluriel. Bonne continuation!

Salut!

‘I Miss Blogging, Terribly’

(Editor’s note: These questions from Atlantic readers—in bold—and replies from Ta-Nehisi were compiled from an “Ask Me Anything” he did with the TAD group on 1/12. In the podcast above, starting at the 114:30 mark, Ta-Nehisi speaks at length about the bygone era of blogging and his writing today. Money quote: “Blogging was real-time, ongoing learning process. That went away. … I didn’t write too much [during the 2016 election] because I didn’t want to take this oracular role. There was no space to try to figure it out. There was no space to think about it.”)

I have been dying to ask about the new book. Is it by any chance the historical fiction one you’d started oh so long ago? I always thought you had captured some lightning with that one.

Hi Sandy. Yes. Signed a two book deal. First, is essays. Second is that historical fiction.

You tweeted earlier this year that you’re focused on book-writing. How much has your process changed as you’ve gotten more attention and a wider audience? How different is your day-to-day process now from the days of The Atlantic blogging and the original Horde?

Changed a lot. More people looking. Probably more than I’m comfortable with. Much less room to think out loud. So, thinking is much more of a private thing these days. The landscape isn’t really set up for the public act of asking questions.

It’s cool though. There was a time when I asked questions privately—before I got to The Atlantic. Basically have to go back to that. Maybe that’s as it should be.

Do you miss blogging? [Atlantic colleague and former Dish editor] Chris B. was lamenting the fall of blogging as a platform for thinking and learning in public and I always found that to be my favorite kind of process to read.

Yes. Terribly.

You seem both surprised and a little discomforted by how much attention you got following BTWAM [Between the World and Me] and, obviously, a lot of it was hostile. I remember reading about your Park Slope house purchase and your comments on the whole response to that. How do you manage that? I'm legit just curious about it as someone who feels, y'know, affection for you from your work but also invested in your work and what it adds to the discourse.

The house was actually in Lefferts-Garden, where I’d rented when my wife, my son and I first moved to New York. Was attached to that neighborhood. Got the house. Neighborhood blog plastered my face up. Realtor talked. And suddenly it wasn’t home anymore. It was performance.

When you know that people know who you are, you are always working—and not the work you want to do. You are sort of performing, because you know they are looking, or at least glancing at you. Would hate to walk out thinking about that.

There is something else: People never stop to think about you as an actual person with a family in these situations. I’ve said this publicly now, so it’s no point hiding it. My wife has long had women’s health issues at the core of her mission, specifically reproductive rights. She’s actually in med-school now, and the plan was always for her to be active on that front. When you want to go into that work, and your address is plastered all of the internet, with pictures and floorpans of your house, well … When I talked about “not feeling safe,” it wasn’t just for me.

Read On »

‘Superhero Comics Are Largely a Response to Trauma’

(Editor’s note: These questions from Atlantic readers—in bold—and replies from Ta-Nehisi were compiled from an “Ask Me Anything” he did with the TAD group on 1/12.)

As someone who’s largely a DC [Comics] reader, Black Panther is effectively my first real introduction to the character. What immediately jumped out at me was the dialogue. It feels a bit different from most comic books (in a good way!), and I look forward to seeing what happens in it down the road. Is there any other comic book you’d love to write? Or do you think Black Panther might be it for you?

I expect to be on Black Panther, or BP-related things, for a while.

How would you like to see the Black Panther series (and world) grow and change? Any inclusion of other, missing characters? What would they be?

Want it to get bigger. Much, much bigger.

When discussing writing Black Panther, you’ve talked about the need to disregard fan opinion on some level to work toward the goal of creating work that will hold up five or 10 years from now. As the stories you’re writing have progressed, has the fan reception of your work changed that outlook for you or confirmed it?

Still believe it. I don’t want artists making work that they think I want to see. I want them to pull from their heart, and if I love it, I love it. If I don’t, oh well.

Where does feminism intersect with your work? Does it at all?

Right now, it’s most prominently in my comic books. I don’t want to blow the story, but basically one of the main threads is a revolution launched against the main character. The facts of sexual plunder, a society ignoring that plunder, and the fact of resistance to it, basically runs through every issue.

And that is how it’s manifest in its least subtle ways. I think in a lot of other ways, it’s much more subtle, but there. Snuck in an Audre Lorde citation in the last issue.

I don’t expect everyone to read comic books, so if folks aren’t seeing this, it’s cool. But it is there. Here’s a good summary of the early stuff and the most obvious aspects of it.

Any specific female writers that you’re engaging with right now? (I so vividly remember the days you were reading Southern Confederate female writers.) Who are the female voices that, I dunno, really speak to you and influence the work you’re doing on the comics? I know that Roxane Gay was tapped to work on the prequels.

Read On »

‘Surprised Like Everybody Else’: Obama on the Election of Donald Trump

In “My President Was Black,” The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates examined Barack Obama’s tenure in office, and his legacy. The story was built, in part, around a series of conversations he had with the president. This is a transcript of the final of those four encounters, which took place by phone after the election, on November 17, 2016. You can find the other interviews, as well as responses to the story and to these conversations, here.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Hello.

Barack Obama: Hey, man, how are you doing?

Coates: I’m okay. How are you, Mr. President?

Obama: Well, I’m doing fine. I’m in Germany, so this is how I roll this week, I guess. I guess I’ve got some business back home in between doing my business out here.

Coates: Yeah, I guess it’s about 10 o’clock at night over there.

Obama: Yeah, but it’s all right. I’m a night owl. And I didn’t think this needed to be a long conversation. I just figured that after all our conversation before the election, and then in the wake of the election, that you might need a very brief follow-up question. And I wanted to make sure that you had a chance because I know that you had to finish that story.

Coates: Yeah, I appreciate that, and I did not think of this as a very long conversation, either. If you don’t mind, I have three questions. Is that okay?

Obama: It may be. It depends on what they are.

Coates: Okay. All right.

Obama: If they’re too long or difficult, then I’ll pretend that we got cut off.

Coates: All right, well, I’ll try to get through this. I’ll see what I can do here. The first thing I would ask is, we had this conversation very early in our session, and you talked about the belief that what the American people most want from a candidate is an optimistic vision. And I believe you were referencing Donald Trump at the time, and it was your thought that it was hard to get elected with a gloom-and-doom message. And I just wonder what you take from this election given what happened, and how your theory reconciles with that.

Obama: Well, look, I think I am absolutely, you know, surprised like everybody else with the outcome. So, you know, I don’t want to pretend like I was anticipating the results. I do think, though, that when you look at the specifics of this race, it is hard to, I think, draw a grand theory from it, because there were just some very unusual circumstances. We ended up having a situation in which both candidates had very high negatives. I think the caricature of Hillary Clinton that developed as a consequence of all kinds of stuff, compounded in that last week with more news about emails, meant that people never really got to hear a positive, optimistic message. Hillary Clinton had all kinds of terrific policies, but that was just not the focus of coverage. And as a consequence, you ended up having not just a polarized electorate, but a fairly dispirited electorate. It meant that a lot of the people who voted for me didn’t turn out to vote—that a lot of people who, if the surveys are correct, approve of my work and my presidency didn’t vote or decided, You know what, let’s just shake it up this time. And you know, it’s just an indication of the structural challenges that progressive politics have always faced in this country.

You know, we are a country that makes it harder to vote than most countries. We are a country in which the campaigns are so long and so expensive that by the time you get to the end of it, negative campaigning dominates as opposed to a proactive set of proposals. We have an electoral college that mirrors, you know, the states’ power that was preserved in the design of the Senate, where, you know, small states, or more rural states, or states with, you know, large rural or less diverse populations have significantly more influence in some cases than massive states like California. And so, you know, you add all that up and you ended up getting the specific result that we got.

Hillary Clinton testifies before the House Select Committee on Benghazi on October 22, 2015. (Evan Vucci / AP)

But as I have said publicly in all the interviews that I’ve conducted since the election, to be optimistic about the long-term trends of the United States doesn’t mean that everything is going to go in a smooth, direct, straight line. It, you know, goes forward sometimes, sometimes it goes back, sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it zigs and zags. And, you know, the important thing that I’m hoping everybody draws from this is anybody who thinks that opting out of the system is a smart protest move, anybody who thinks that disengaging from the political process because “both parties are the same” or “both candidates are the same” or “none of them are getting at the structural issues that are ultimately going to make the biggest difference”—you know, those approaches can result in Donald Trump being elected president.

Coates: I’m going to skip to my third question, because it’s important I get to it. I don’t want to get accidentally cut off here.

Obama: I was teasing. I wouldn’t actually—but I appreciate that you took it seriously.

Coates: I did. One of the things I wanted to ask you—and this really comes personally from my own concerns—we have this history in our country where national-security policy is directed at a certain foe—for instance, earlier in the 20th century at communism during the Cold War—and sometimes, when in the wrong hands, it expands out. And in the ’60s it expanded out into the civil-rights movement. In the post-9/11 world, the office of the presidency has accumulated quite a bit of powers in terms of national security. Are you concerned at all about that stuff—now that there’s somebody else—being directed at activists, at Black Lives Matter, people like that? Are you worried about that?

Obama: Yeah, I have to say that this is an argument that I know was made in a New York Times article and you’ve heard in some progressive circles, and it’s just not accurate. Keep in mind that the capacity of the [National Security Agency] or other surveillance tools are specifically prohibited from being applied to U.S. citizens or U.S. persons without specific evidence of links to terrorist activity or other foreign-related activity. And those laws have been in place and have been strengthened, and the capacities that have been developed over the last eight years of my presidency mainly derive from changes in technology, not because we’ve somehow weakened oversight or expanded executive power. It just has to do with the fact that everybody is using a cellphone, everybody is using emails.

In terms of domestic surveillance of any sort, it’s probably harder to surveil or use these tools with a smartphone than it was getting a wiretap for a land phone. And both would be illegal without probable cause. So you know, I think this whole story line that somehow Big Brother has massively expanded and now that a new president is in place it’s this loaded gun ready to be used on domestic dissent is just not accurate. It doesn’t match up with how these things are organized. Now, I think it’s absolutely important to be concerned that our criminal-justice system, the FBI, the Justice Department, law enforcement take seriously civil liberties. Because the possibility of abuse by government officials always exists. The issue is not going to be that there are new tools available; the issue is making sure that the incoming administration, like my administration, takes the constraints on how we deal with U.S. citizens and persons seriously. And that’s not a technical issue; that’s the degree to which we abide by the law.

Coates: Right. Right. Okay, third, final question. In one of your speeches you made this very explicit appeal to black voters, and you mentioned if we didn’t come out, this would be an insult to your legacy. And at least in the early numbers, it looks like we did not—we certainly did not come out in the numbers that we came out in in 2008 or 2012.

Obama: Right.

Coates: How are you feeling? Is this campaign right? Do you feel insulted? Or what are you left with?

Obama: No, you know, I mean, I think that I was trying to make a very specific point, which is that you can’t rely on inspiration to take care of your business. If you were a strong supporter of me, and loved Michelle, and believed in everything we were doing, and stood in line for four hours to vote for us in ’08, and put up with some more lines in ’12, then you can’t stay at home in ’16 because we’re not on the ballot. That there’s a direct line between the work we did and the handoff we needed to make to the next administration to ensure that that progress was sustained. And ultimately, I’m not entirely surprised that there was some slippage. That wasn’t just among African American voters. It was among young voters, and, you know, those were costly in the places where it really mattered in some of the swing states. It just reflects the nature of our political process, where we do not think of voting and political participation as a routine responsibility and duty, but rather think of it as something we do when it’s exciting. Now, look, I don’t want to make generalizations across the board, because the truth is, the African American vote actually exceeded the white vote in terms of percentage—not absolute numbers, obviously, but the percentage who voted—in 2012. And that was probably not entirely sustainable.

On the other hand, we’ve got more ground to make up. We’ve got more schools that are underfunded. We’ve got more youth that are unemployed. We’ve got more people who are struggling to pay the bills. And, you know, one of the difficult truths of democracy is that the people who would benefit most from progressive policies like raising the minimum wage, and investment in infrastructure, and strengthening unions, and affordable child care, and help on college access and affordability—those are the folks also that, for a whole variety of reasons, are less likely to vote. And it requires an enormous amount of energy to overcome that historical fact. We were able to do it in 2008 and 2012, but it’s hard to sustain. And then one of things that I’ll be spending a lot of time thinking about once I’m out of office is: How do we change those habits? How do we make our engagement and involvement and interest an everyday thing rather than an every-four-years thing or an every-eight-years thing?

Coates: Okay.

Obama: All right?

Coates: That’s it. Thank you so much, Mr. President. I appreciate you taking this time.

Obama: All right, man. Take care.

'It’s What We Do More Than What We Say': Obama on Race, Identity, and the Way Forward

In “My President Was Black,” The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates examined Barack Obama’s tenure in office, and his legacy. The story was built, in part, around a series of conversations he had with the president. This is a transcript of the third of those four encounters, which took place on October 28, 2016, aboard Air Force One. You can find the other interviews, as well as responses to the story and to these conversations, here.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I’m going to put out a perception I’ve always had of you, and if I’m wrong you can riff off it. You being born in Hawaii, and the ancestry that you’ve had, and beyond that you having a cosmopolitan experience very early on living elsewhere—this is a blunt way to say it, but it occurs to me you had an opportunity to just check out. I never perceived myself as having much choice about being black, and I’ve always wondered why you’ve made the choice. And I don’t know if you perceived it as a choice—maybe you felt the same way, like you didn’t have one. But it seemed like you could have been anybody. You could have been one of these rootless cosmopolitans working on some other issues.

Barack Obama: Right.

Coates: I wonder how you came to think of yourself as black and why.

Obama: Well, part of my understanding of race is that it’s more of a social construct than a biological reality. And in that sense, if you are perceived as African American, then you’re African American. Now, you can—that can mean a whole lot of things. And one of the things I cured myself of fairly early on, and I think the African American community has moved away from, is this notion that there’s one way to be black. And so you are right that I could have been an African American who worked for an international organization and was not engaged in the day-to-day struggles, politically or culturally, that the African American community faces. There are a lot of African Americans who may make those decisions, and they’re still African American, but they’re just living their lives in a different way.

I think for me, first and foremost, I always felt as if being black was cool. That it was not something to run away from, but something to embrace. Why that is, I think, is complicated. Part of it is, I think, that my mother thought black folks were cool, and if your mother loves you and is praising you—and says you look good, are smart—as you are, then you don’t kind of think in terms of How can I avoid this? You feel pretty good about it. By the time I was cognizant of race, American culture had gone through enough changes that as a child, I wasn’t just receiving constant negative messages about being black. It is true that I did not have the role models that Malia and Sasha have, but I could look at a Dr. J, or a Marvin Gaye, or a Thurgood Marshall and feel as if the embrace of African American culture was not going to hold me back but rather propel me forward, that it was exciting to be part of a group that had struggles but also had a huge potential.

I think it was not until I was in high school that I started seeing complications around it, and I started to think about it explicitly. I wrote about this in my first book, but even when I started perceiving discrimination, or racism, or just the disadvantages of being a minority, that felt more like a challenge than something to fear. I think probably the final element of this is, when I moved to the mainland, that was the first time where I confronted what at that time, and to some degree to this day, was the segregation of communities. And I did have to make, I think, a conscious choice to root myself physically and professionally in the African American community. And, again, this is something I’ve written about. I never wanted to be somebody who looked like I was avoiding who I saw in the mirror. I never thought that it would be a healthy thing. And disconnected from race, and more connected to the nature of me growing up, I didn’t like the idea of being rootless.

Coates: You didn’t like the idea of being rootless.

Obama: Michelle and I always joke—but it’s not really a joke, I think it’s an insight—that, in some ways, we saw in each other elements that we hadn’t had growing up. In Michelle I saw roots. I saw a nuclear family, neighborhood, community, continuity. In me she saw adventure, cosmopolitanism. And so the fact that I had not grown up with a stable family, that I hadn’t grown up with a father in the house or a community of which I was a part on a continuing basis—I had great friends, I had loving family members, but I didn’t have a place—that, I think, warned me off of the kind of life you described of just floating around and enjoying life but never being fully invested in it. That element, I think, is not simply a racial decision. You can imagine me as an Irishman deciding to want to live in a neighborhood with some Irish folks and embracing that side of myself.

Coates: That’s interesting. As somebody who began to travel relatively later, I had this moment when I was at this town in Switzerland and had to switch trains to get to a larger town. And I had started my life and thought in that moment I could get on a train and go anywhere. Nobody would know me. I’m free.

Obama: It’s liberating but it’s also—that can get old. In some ways I saw that in my mother, as somebody who had lived an expatriate life. She loved Indonesia—really found meaningful work there, made great friends—but at the end of the day didn’t have a place that was solidly hers. And I think there were elements of that I saw as a kid as being lonely or a loss. There are always trade-offs in life.

Coates: Right. You know, certainly not the majority of the African American community, but certainly a privileged few of us are now raising children who are growing up—I’m thinking of my own son—with all these different experiences—

Obama: And options.

Coates: And options.

Obama: They’re unconstrained.

Coates: Unconstrained. Is that need for home still there? Is that still important in the same way?

Obama: I think it is. It’s interesting watching Malia and Sasha, who have obviously lived in as strange and unreal an environment as any kids do. They feel very strongly about their African American roots. They don’t feel that they have to choose. And that, I think, is a great gift to bequeath them, where they know they’ve got a home, they know they’ve got a base, they know who they are. But they don’t think that in any way constrains them. And certainly they are not burdened by the sorts of doubts that previous generations—and even our generation—might have felt in what it means to be black. They think being black and being free are not contradictory. It’s interesting, when we went to visit the museum, Smithsonian [National Museum of African American History and Culture], just watching them soak it in. And they’re well-informed young people, so they knew most of the history, and I forget which one of them just said, “I can’t wait to bring my friends here.” And I think she was not just referring to African American friends but her white friends. She said, “Because face it, our stuff’s cool.” We’ve got Michael Jordan, Beyoncé, Dr. King. What you got?

So there’s a confidence that they project, which doesn’t mean they’re not mindful that there’re still struggles. You hear them talking about what black women have to go through with hair and they’ll go on a long rant—just the inconvenience and expense that they still feel is forced upon them, not just by the white community but the black community. They’ll still notice a certain obliviousness of even their best friends on certain issues. But they don’t feel trapped by that. They don’t feel as if that’s determinative of their possibilities. And I think they would say that the upsides really outweigh the downsides. They really like who we are. They like the community.

People watch U.S. President Barack Obama speak on a jumbotron at the opening ceremony of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture on September 24, 2016, in Washington, D.C. (Paul Morigi / Getty)

Coates: Do you recall the first time you were aware of folks saying, “Barack, you’re not really black”?

Obama: You know, it’s interesting. When I look back—and I kept journals during this time, I was really in my own head—but from the age of, say, 18 to 25, when I first moved from Hawaii and I’m living in L.A. and New York and ultimately Chicago, what strikes me is less the lack of acceptance and more just my own self-consciousness. That one of the wonderful things, I believe, about the African American community is the degree to which we embrace whoever it is that we’re with. So, socially, I never experienced being rebuffed. The friends I made in my first year in college who were African American, there was never that “You’re not black enough. You’re from Hawaii. Your mom is white.” There just wasn’t any of that. There were times where you’d feel it in terms of friendships and groups, right? Because you went to Howard, you’re in an all-black environment, that doesn’t come up.

I think I felt some tensions around: You’ve got your white friends, or you’ve got black friends, and they don’t necessarily hang together in the same ways. So you’re kind of doing shuttle diplomacy sometimes. Which is why I think some of my closest friends during those early years in college were Pakistani, or French, or people who themselves didn’t neatly fit in categories. But by the time I get to Chicago—and I’m still a young man at that point, I’m 25 years old—and I’m in the middle of the South Side of Chicago, there was a degree of familiarity, and love, and comfort that I guess in retrospect you might be puzzled by it. But it just fit.

Now, there were times as an organizer, and certainly when I ran for office, where that stuff got brought in tactically or strategically by folks who I was dealing with. So you got some pastor, some alderman, who didn’t like what we were trying to do, who says, “You know what? That guy, he’s got Jewish backing,” or “He’s working with this Catholic church,” or “He’s from Hawaii.” When I ran against Bobby Rush: “He’s got that Harvard degree, and he’s from Hyde Park.” And so those themes would arise. But I always experienced those as just tactics being deployed by somebody who was pushing back on something I was trying to do.

Coates: Were you hurt, though? Personally hurt? Did it bother you on any level?

Obama: Again, it didn’t. Because of the experiences I had had in the neighborhoods, and communities, and with regular folks. Because that’s not how regular black folks think. They’re not sort of measuring on a day-to-day basis, Okay, is what you’re doing a white thing, or is it a black thing? Folks weren’t doing stuff like that. And in fact, among working-class black folks, you doing things that weren’t typical oftentimes was a source of pride. So I remember my first job out of college was working for this business magazine—subscription magazine—and I was the only African American there who wasn’t a delivery man or some tech-support guy. Most of the African Americans in the office were secretaries and, you know, they were proud that I was walking in there and working. So I think that gave me a base and a sense of confidence. So if somebody was playing a game later on, I know that Well, they’re not speaking for, quote-unquote, “the authentic black experiences,” because I live with folks who are at least as authentic as you. Sometimes it’s like these rappers who grew up in the suburbs and suddenly they’re all—

Coates: Gangsta.

Obama: Gangsta. It’s like, “Come on, man, I know you. I know who you are. Don’t pretend.”

Coates: I talked to quite a few people who knew you after that Bobby Rush race, and there were people who—Valerie [Jarrett] told me this—did not want you to run for the Senate. How personally—maybe you weren’t, I don’t know, maybe this doesn’t get to you—were you personally injured after that? Was it just like, Oh my God, I don’t know if I can—

Obama: No. I was upset about losing as bad as I did in that congressional race, and there’s no doubt it shook my confidence. But it wasn’t because of race. I remember campaigning in the congressional race, and it was a shoestring operation. I’d go meet people and I’d knock on doors and stuff, and some of the grandmothers who were the folks I’d been organizing and working with doing community stuff, they weren’t parroting back some notion of “You’re too Harvard,” or “You’re too Hyde Park,” or what have you. They’d say, “You’re a wonderful young man, you’re going to do great things. You just have to be patient.” So I didn’t feel the loss as a rejection by black people. I felt the loss as “politics anywhere is tough.” Politics in Chicago is especially tough. And being able to break through in the African American community is difficult because of the enormous loyalty that people feel towards anybody who has been around a while. Look at Marion Barry in D.C.—or you can come up with all kinds of stories. Generally, we are pretty loyal voters.

And so I think that the loss made me question my career choice not because of racial issues, but rather because it made me question whether, in fact, there was a path for me to be able to break through and have a platform to get the kind of things done that I wanted to get done. Or was I destined to just slog away in the state legislature until I’m 55, and then some congressional race comes up, and now I’m a backbencher in Congress—and is that how I wanted to spend the next 20 years? So those were the kinds of questions that I was asking myself.

Coates: One of the things you’ve done, that you do very, very successfully—one thing I don’t think I’ve seen anybody really do—is speak about your roots, your ancestry, your family, and speak about your blackness without a sense of rejection of any of it: “I’m an African American and my grandfather was this and my mother was this,” and you’d be very clear about it. Is that a story you always told yourself? Did you decide, I have to figure out something and—

Obama: No. By the time I was running for office, I think, I was sort of formed. That stretch that I described—maybe you want to stretch it out from the age of 18 to 27, when I go to law school—I was wrestling with myself and trying to game this out, and to figure this out, and it wasn’t a smooth passage. When I look back at journal entries, when I read biographies of me that talk about that stretch, I’m full of confusion and turmoil and doubts. The degree to which my organizing work in Chicago, I think, solved a puzzle for me, I can’t overstate.

And I’ve said this before: I didn’t set the world on fire when I was doing that work. We had some small victories, and a whole lot of failures. The people I worked with and the communities I was serving gave so much more to me than I think I gave to them. It’s hard to think how I could repay them. I still think about them in the Oval Office. It was a great gift they gave me, understanding who I was, or at least who I aspired to be. So that by the time I’m off to law school, I’m pretty formed at that point.

Coates: What was it that it gave you? What is the relationship between that and sorting out who you were? What happens there?

Obama: For me, and this may be different for other people, part of becoming an adult is linking your personal ambitions and striving to something bigger. And when I started doing that work, my story merges with a larger story. That happens naturally for a John Lewis. That happens more naturally for you. It was less obvious to me. How do I pull all these different strains together: Kenya and Hawaii and Kansas, and white and black and Asian—how does that fit? And through action, through work, I suddenly see myself as part of the bigger process for, yes, delivering justice for the [African American community], and specifically the South Side community, and low-income people—justice on behalf of the African American community. But also thereby promoting my ideas of justice and equality and empathy that my mother taught me were universal.

So I’m in a position to understand those essential parts of me not as separate and apart from any particular community but connected to every community. And I can fit the African American struggle for freedom and justice in the context of the universal aspiration for freedom and justice.

Which is why I’ve always said, and I continue to believe that, the struggle for racial equality in America has been the essential catalyst for America’s growth and development. As painful as it is, as ugly as that history has often been, as hard as it’s been on black folks themselves, it’s the driver of the expanded moral commitment. And it continues. And because of it, we better understand other struggles. It helps stretch our moral imaginations to embrace the Latino farmworker, or the LGBT kid who is feeling ostracized, or the woman who is hitting the glass ceiling. So the work helped me form an integrated vision of the world and my place in it in a way that would not have happened if I had been a professor reading about it or writing about it, but they would just be intellectual exercises.

Coates: Did your mother ever get to see you working in Chicago?

Obama: She never went along with me. She was doing her own thing. When we visited it was typically in Hawaii. That stretch of time when I was organizing was a particularly busy time for her. So she always expressed pride about the work, and interestingly, it wasn’t all that different from some of the work she was doing. She was out in poor villages trying to help people leverage microloans into a better life. Probably the moment where things most intersected in a way that she sees it is at our wedding, which is why I end the book at the wedding. Because I’ve got some South Side folks there, I’ve got my boys from Hawaii there, I’ve got Pakistani friends there, I’ve got my Kenyan family there. And to see my mom talking to my mother-in-law, or my Kenyan sister; to have some folks from Altgeld come up to my mother and say, “You should be so proud of your son”; to see my grandmother, a little old Kansas white lady, interacting with some of Michelle’s older relatives, little old black ladies, and they basically had the same tastes and attitudes—it was, I think, a moment where, in a very personal way, everything I talked about was made manifest. We still have the old video from our wedding, and when I watch it, it reminds me of how lucky I’ve been.

Coates: How difficult was it, thinking about that, when you had to sever your relationship with Reverend Wright during the campaign?

Obama: It was hard. Reverend Wright was an embodiment of so many positive trends that I saw in the black Church: strong, somebody who embraced learning, somebody who was socially conscious and taught black folks to respect themselves and the culture. He’s somebody who was sophisticated enough to be pro-black without being antiwhite. The church itself was an amazing, and continues to be an amazing, institution. And he was a friend, somebody who I was very fond of. And there was and continues to be a translation problem between somebody like Reverend Wright and the larger society.

In a way that’s true, I think, for all subcultures that are not part of the majority culture. There are things that are said in the barber shop, the beauty salon, or folks are just talking stuff, and there’s a certain tolerance for exaggerations, for saying things for effect, for smack talking, that are complicated. They’re not always meant literally as much as they are expressing emotions or making a point.

As I said in my speech in Philadelphia, the blind spots that he possessed are the blind spots that that generation of African American men at some moments all have possessed, it would be impossible not to possess. He grew up—he was 15 years older than me—if you’re coming of age in the late ’40s, early ’50s, early ’60s, or the ’70s in Philadelphia, or Alabama, or Oakland, or Baltimore, it would be superhuman not to have some vestiges of anger, not to have internalized some conspiracy theorizing, to not have blind spots. I may have said this to you in the interview that we had, but I was rewatching Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. Did I say that to you?

Coates: No.

Obama: It just happened to be on a few weeks ago, and I was watching it. It was just a reminder: As crazy as Elijah Muhammad’s philosophies were, if you went through what Malcolm Little goes through—

Coates: It all makes sense.

Obama: There’s a plausibility to those theories as a way of you just explaining what is happening to you. And so Reverend Wright is part of that transition from a black community, in which its men and its women are trapped in a vicious social construction, to an environment that you and I grew up in, in which suddenly there’s openings and spaces are cleared, in part because of the work that they did, in part because of the struggles, and fights, and the sharp edges, and the elbows, and mistakes—but ultimately victories and triumphs—of our parents and our grandparents.

To try to explain all that in a sound bite is impossible. To expect the broader American society to absorb that in the course of a political campaign was not possible. I did my best in my speech in Philadelphia. But recall that I’m not severing the relationship until the Press Club interview in which Reverend Wright, I think feeling hurt, feeling misunderstood, showing his age, doubled down in ways that actually I had not seen out of him in church or in my previous interactions.

Obama delivers his “A More Perfect Union” speech on race and politics during his 2008 campaign in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008. In the speech, Obama rejected controversial statements made by his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and distanced himself from Wright. (William Thomas Cain / Getty)

Coates: From the outside, it looked like you didn’t want to sever the relationship.

Obama: No. My hope was, after the Philadelphia speech, which wasn’t clear to me was going to work and involved some risk, my hope was that that would contextualize what had happened. And look, the fact was that some of the quotes that he had that I hadn’t heard—frankly, I wasn’t in church every Sunday—were things I would have to reject, they were just wrong. The same way that, even after his trip to Mecca, Malcolm would still be saying some stuff that I said, “Well, that's just not right.” So that saddened me. And anybody who has sat in Trinity, as I wrote about—his father is the amazing pastor who actually gave me the idea for the Joshua speech that I made the first time I went to Selma—anybody who has gone to Trinity and sat there would say it’s a magnificent community that Reverend Wright built, and it’s doing a lot of good.

But this is always one of the challenges of politics: It can never capture all the complexity and contradictions in life. So you end up having to try to be true in a way that can be consumed for a mass audience, but you're always missing some elements of it. You're always leaving some things out.

And that’s part of the reason why race is such a difficult thing to deal with in politics, because the evolution of racial identity, racial relationships, institutional racism, is never similar. The trajectory, I believe, has been positive. But anything you say on the topic of race, there’s a counterargument, there’s an exception, there’s a nuance. There’s a, Wait, hold on a minute, how about that? And that’s part of the reason why, I think, it creates frustration. It’s also why it’s easy to demagogue. It’s also why situations that look ambiguous can lead to people dividing into camps very quickly.

We think of the two episodes of me running for president, or being president, that on their face, should not have been as charged as they were. The first is when I say at the end of a long day, towards the end of a long campaign, that part of the reason that you had a lot of working-class whites supporting a Republican agenda that on its face doesn’t seem to be serving their interest is because they’ve given up hope that the system is going to look out for them. They feel it’s rigged. So their attitude is that, If you’re not going to help me get a job, if you’re not going do anything concrete for me, then at least I’m going to cling onto my religion and my Second Amendment rights.

And I said that not from an unsympathetic perspective. I was saying something that every writer now who’s writing about Trump voters is saying: that these communities feel ignored, and so it’s much easier for them to think in terms of those constants in their identity. But just by saying, “They cling to their guns and Bibles” made it, as David Axelrod said right after I said it, anthropological, made it sound patronizing, and to this day is the primary proof point that is used to argue that I am not sympathetic towards those communities, that I’m sort of this elitist, coastal liberal, and in part responsible for the backlash to my presidency. And if I had been a white person saying the exact same thing, it wouldn’t have played the same way. If I had said it the way I meant it or felt it, it would have been absorbed differently. But because there was a racial component to it, immediately it becomes a permanent talking point.

And then you’ve got Skip Gates being arrested, which, to me, I was saying something pretty obvious. They ended up handcuffing this middle-aged, elderly man on his own porch. No matter how much he cursed you out, you overreacted, and it probably would not have happened had there not been some assumptions about who he was based on his race. Again, immediately folks ignored the discussion.

So this is part of the reason why when I hear people say we need a dialogue about race, or we need commissions on race, or this or that, I’m always somewhat skeptical, because trying to engineer those kinds of conversations on a national level in a way that could actually capture reality is very hard. What can happen, I think, is for us to act in ways that show mutual regard, propose policies that safeguard against obvious discrimination, extend ourselves in our personal lives and in our political lives in ways that lead us to see the other person as a human worthy of respect. It’s what we do more than what we say, I ultimately think, that saves us. All right?

Coates: All right.

Obama: You got a lot, man. You should be able to write something.

‘Better Is Good’: Obama on Reparations, Civil Rights, and the Art of the Possible

In “My President Was Black,” The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates examined Barack Obama’s tenure in office, and his legacy. The story was built, in part, around a series of conversations he had with the president. This is a transcript of the second of those three encounters, which took place on October 19, 2016. Valerie Jarrett, the senior adviser to the president, was also present. You can find the other interviews, as well as responses to the story and to these conversations, here.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I’ve talked to Marty [Nesbitt], I talked to Mama Kaye [Wilson], I talked to Eric Holder, so I’ve been making the rounds. I’ve got all the goods.

Barack Obama: You’ve got all the goods.

Coates: I’ve got all the goods. Talked to [David] Axelrod, talked to [David] Plouffe.

Obama: I’m ready to just fill in the gaps.

Coates: I thought we’d talk about policy today. I wanted to start by getting a sense of your mind-set coming into the job, and as I’ve understood you—and you can reject this—your perspective is that a mixture of universalist policies, in combination with an increased level of personal responsibility and communal responsibility among African Americans, when we talk about these gaps that we see between black and white America, that that really is the way forward. Is that a correct summation?

Obama: I think it’s a three-legged stool and you left out one, which is vigorous enforcement of antidiscrimination laws. So the way we thought about it when we came in is that—and obviously we came in during crisis, so how we might have structured our policy sequencing if, when we came in, the economy was okay, and we weren’t potentially going into a great recession, and folks weren’t all losing their homes, might have been different. But as a general matter, my view would be that if you want to get at African American poverty, the income gap, wealth gap, achievement gap, that the most important thing is to make sure that the society as a whole does right by people who are poor, are working class, are aspiring to a better life for their kids. Higher minimum wages, full-employment programs, early-childhood education: Those kinds of programs are, by design, universal, but by definition, because they are helping folks who are in the worst economic situations, are most likely to disproportionately impact and benefit African Americans. They also have the benefit of being sellable to a majority of the body politic.

Step No. 2, and this is where I think policies do need to be somewhat race-specific, is making sure that institutions are not discriminatory. So you’ve got something like the FHA [Federal Housing Administration], which was on its face a universal program that involved a huge mechanism for wealth accumulation and people entering into the middle class. But if, in its application, black folks were excluded from it, then you have to override that by going after those discriminatory practices. The same would be true for something like Social Security, where historically, if you just read the law and the fact that it excluded domestic workers or agricultural workers, you might not see race in it, unless you knew that that covered a huge chunk of African Americans, particularly in the South. So reinvigorating the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, making sure that in our Department of Education, where we see evidence of black boys being suspended at substantially higher rates than white boys for the same behavior, in the absence of that kind of rigorous enforcement of the nondiscrimination principle, then the long-standing biases that I believe have weakened, but are still clearly present in our society, assert themselves in ways that usually disadvantage African Americans.

If you’ve got those two things right—if those two things are happening—then a third leg of the stool is, how do we in the African American community build a culture in which we are saying to our kids, “Here’s what it takes to succeed. Here’s the sacrifices you need to make to be able to get ahead. Here’s how we support each other. Here’s how we look out for each other.” And it is my view that if society was doing the right thing with respect to you, [and there were] programs targeted at helping people rise into the middle class and have a good income and be able to save and send their kids to school, and you’ve got a vigorous enforcement of antidiscrimination laws, then I have confidence in the black community’s capabilities to then move forward.

Now, does that mean that all vestiges of past discrimination would be eliminated, that the income gap or the wealth gap or the education gap would be erased in five years or 10 years? Probably not, and so this is obviously a discussion we’ve had before when you talk about something like reparations. Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps. That those were wrongs done to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it’s not in the form of individual reparations checks, but in the form of a Marshall Plan, in order to close those gaps. It is easy to make that theoretical argument. But as a practical matter, it is hard to think of any society in human history in which a majority population has said that as a consequence of historic wrongs, we are now going to take a big chunk of the nation’s resources over a long period of time to make that right. You can look at examples like postwar Germany, where reparations were paid to Holocaust victims and families, but—

Coates: They lost the war.

Obama: They lost the war. Small population, finite amount of money that it was going to cost. Not multiple generations but people, in some cases, who are still alive, who can point to, “That was my house. Those were my paintings. Those were my mother’s family jewels.” If you look at countries like South Africa, where you had a black majority, there have been efforts to tax and help that black majority, but it hasn’t come in the form of a formal reparations program. You have countries like India that have tried to help untouchables, with essentially affirmative-action programs, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed the structure of their societies.

So the bottom line is that it’s hard to find a model in which you can practically administer and sustain political support for those kinds of efforts. And what makes America complicated as well is the degree to which this is not just a black/white society, and it is becoming less so every year. So how do Latinos feel if there’s a big investment just in the African American community, and they’re looking around and saying, “We’re poor as well. What kind of help are we getting?” Or Asian Americans who say, “Look, I’m a first-generation immigrant, and clearly I didn’t have anything to do with what was taking place.” And now you start getting into trying to calibrate—

Coates: Isn’t there just—not to cut you off—isn’t there, and this is out of the role of U.S. president, I’m almost speaking to you as a law professor now, an intellectual, in fact—

Obama: Well, that’s how I was answering the question, because if you want me to talk about politics, I’ll be much more blunt about it.

Coates: I figured that. I thought that was what I was getting.

Obama: I was giving the benefit of playing out, theoretically, how you could think about that.

Coates: And I appreciate that. And the question I would ask is in that situation, to the immigrant who comes here, first generation, and says, “I didn’t do any of this,” but the country is largely here because of that. In other words, many of the benefits that you will actually enjoy are, in fact, in part—I won’t say largely—in part here because of the past. So when you want the benefits, when you invoke the past, that thus you inherit the debt, too—

Obama: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess, here’s the way—probably the best way of saying it is that you can make a theoretical, abstract argument in favor of something like reparations. And maybe I’m just not being sufficiently optimistic or imaginative enough—

Coates: You’re supposed to be optimistic!

Obama: Well, I thought I was, but I’m not so optimistic as to think that you would ever be able to garner a majority of an American Congress that would make those kinds of investments above and beyond the kinds of investments that could be made in a progressive program for lifting up all people. So to restate it: I have much more confidence in my ability, or any president or any leader’s ability, to mobilize the American people around a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment to help every child in poverty in this country than I am in being able to mobilize the country around providing a benefit specific to African Americans as a consequence of slavery and Jim Crow. Now, we can debate the justness of that. But I feel pretty confident in that assessment politically. And, you know, I think that part of my optimism comes from the belief that we as a people could actually, regardless of all the disadvantage of the past, regardless of the fact that a lot of other folks got a head start in the race, if we were able to make the race fair right now, and—

Coates: You think we could catch up?

Obama: We were able to make sure that it stayed fair for a long time and that children going forward were not encumbered by some of that same bias of the past, I think it would not take long at all, because we are a talented, resourceful people. Just play this out as a thought experiment: Imagine if you had genuine, high-quality early-childhood education for every child, and suddenly every black child in America—but also every poor white child or Latino [child], but just stick with every black child in America—is getting a really good education. And they’re graduating from high school at the same rates that whites are, and they are going to college at the same rates that whites are, and they are able to afford college at the same rates because the government has universal programs that say that you’re not going to be barred from school just because of how much money your parents have. So now they’re all graduating. And let’s also say that the Justice Department and the courts are making sure, as I’ve said in a speech before, that when Jamal sends his résumé in, he’s getting treated the same as when Johnny sends his résumé in.

Now, are we going to have suddenly the same number of CEOs, billionaires, etc., as the white community? In 10 years? Probably not, maybe not even in 20 years. But I guarantee you that we would be thriving, we would be succeeding. We wouldn’t have huge numbers of young African American men in jail. We’d have more family formation as college-graduated girls are meeting boys who are their peers, which then in turn means the next generation of kids are growing up that much better. And suddenly you’ve got a whole generation that’s in a position to start using the incredible creativity that we see in music, and sports, and frankly even on the streets, channeled into starting all kinds of businesses. I feel pretty good about our odds in that situation.

And my point has always been: We’re so far from that. Why are we even having the abstract conversation when we’ve got a big fight on our hands just to get strong, universal antipoverty programs and social programs in place, and we’re still fighting to make sure that basic antidiscrimination laws are enforced, not just at the federal level, by the way, but throughout government and throughout the private sector? And those are fights that we can win because—and this is where I do believe America has changed—the majority, not by any means 100 percent, but the majority of Americans believe in the idea of nondiscrimination. They believe in the idea that Jamal and Johnny should be treated equally. They believe in the idea that a child shouldn’t be consigned to poverty just because of circumstances of their birth. Now, in practice, in daily social interactions, etc., there may be all kinds of biases and prejudices that are unspoken, that people aren’t aware of, that affect who’s hired, and who gets loans, and how kids are treated in school. But it’s a powerful thing if you have on your side an idea that the overwhelming majority of people believe in because that’s how you can build a consensus that’s lasting. And that’s how you avoid an argument that “I’m being treated unfairly because you are treating somebody differently than me.” Everybody potentially can make the claim that we should all be treated fairly. As opposed to getting into arguments about, well, these folks have been treated fairly so now we’re going to be doing things that, very easily in the minds of a lot Americans feel like, “Now I’m being treated unfairly.”

Barack Obama signs an executive memorandum following remarks on the “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative in the East Room of the White House on February 27, 2014. (Win McNamee / Getty)

Coates: One of the things I would say—the first thing I want to say is—I don’t want to draw this into an either-or argument, that if you make the reparations argument, you therefore don’t support everything else that you said.

Obama: I’m well aware of that.

Coates: Okay. The second part, you’re talking about how the country has changed, and the consciousness, and I think we both agree that 150 years ago that wasn’t true. And I wonder, is it the work, perhaps maybe not of presidents but certainly of people outside of government, to change that mind-set? And if one can come to see, for instance, that, yeah, it is true that nondiscrimination should be a basic value that we share, that, as I would put it, responsibility for our history is one, too?

Obama: Right. And I think that it is. I want my children—I want Malia and Sasha—to understand that they’ve got responsibilities beyond just what they themselves have done. That they have a responsibility to the larger community and the larger nation, that they should be sensitive to and extra thoughtful about the plight of people who have been oppressed in the past, are oppressed currently. So that’s a wisdom that I want to transmit to my kids. And it may be that we found an area where you’re more optimistic than me. But I would say that’s a high level of enlightenment that you’re looking to have from a majority of the society. And it may be something that future generations are more open to, but I am pretty confident that for the foreseeable future, using the argument of nondiscrimination, and “Let’s get it right for the kids who are here right now,” and giving them the best chance possible, is going to be a more persuasive argument.

One of the things you learn as president is, as powerful as this office is, you have limited bandwidth. And the time goes by really quickly and you’re constantly making choices, and there are pressures on you from all different directions—pressures on your attention, not just pressures from different constituencies. And so you have to be pretty focused about where can you have the biggest, quickest impact. And I always tell my staff, “Better is good.” I’ll take better every time, because better is hard. Better may not be as good as the best, but better is surprisingly hard to obtain. And better is actually harder than worse. [Laughter]

It requires enormous energy for us to cut the African American uninsured rate by a third. A lot of scars. Bernie Sanders would say, “You still have millions of African Americans who aren’t insured, and if we had a single-payer system, that wouldn’t be the case.” And that’s true. But it is my judgment that had I spent the first two years trying to get a single-payer system, all those folks who now have health insurance that didn’t have it would still be uninsured. And those are millions of people whose lives are impacted right now. I get letters from them right now. “You saved my child’s life.” “I did not have to sell my home when my wife got sick.” And that is what, as a policy maker, I’m trying to achieve during the short period of time that I’m here.

Now, you as a thinker, you as a writer, you as a philosopher, you want to stretch the boundaries of thinking, because you’re not constrained by trying to move the levers of power right now. And so I think that these are all worthy topics of conversation. Sometimes I wonder how much of these debates have to do with the desire, the legitimate desire, for that history to be recognized. Because there is a psychic power to the recognition that is not satisfied with a universal program, it’s not satisfied by the Affordable Care Act, or an expansion of Pell grants, or an expansion of the earned-income tax credit. It doesn’t speak to the hurt, and the sense of injustice, and the self-doubt that arises out of the fact that we’re behind now, and it makes us sometimes feel as if there must be something wrong with us, unless you’re able to see the history and say, “It’s amazing we got this far given what we went through.” So part of, I think, the argument sometimes that I’ve had with folks who are much more interested in sort of race-specific programs is less an argument about what is practically achievable and sometimes maybe more an argument of “We want society to see what’s happened, and internalize it, and answer it in demonstrable ways.” And those impulses I very much understand, but my hope would be that, as we’re moving through the world right now, we’re able to get that psychological or emotional peace by seeing very concretely our kids doing better and being more hopeful and having greater opportunities. And your son thriving at some United Nations model conference, and me seeing Malia and Sasha doing amazing things. And some of the mentees that I was talking to at A and T overcome incredible disadvantages and starting to gain confidence in what they can do in the world. And I’ll stop there.

Coates: You know, Mr. President, I think largely what a lot of us fear, everything you described—Pell grants, health care, all the programs—that’s the world—let me speak for myself, not for anybody—that’s a world I’d want to live in whether black or not. That just speaks to society’s commitment to its citizens. What we fear is that the gap will never close. Or let me rephrase that: The gap will close, but it will never actually be equal. There will always be carrying this. That without some sort of specific acknowledgment—you know, when I was working on this piece about race, the theory—fine. Going to a 90-year-old’s house in Lawndale in Chicago, and I’m not supposing you don’t have more experience with this, because you read letters and travel and you see, but as a journalist to sit there and see somebody who fought in World War II, and to hear him talk about how they had done everything right—basically obeyed their side of the social contract—and to hear them basically say, “And what I got was ripped off.” And then to have in my city in Baltimore, right now about 10 years ago during the housing crisis, to see Wells Fargo going to these black folks who just want to buy homes, who just want to be part of the basic American dream, social contract, and to see them being ripped off, not in the same fashion but the same idea—taking from them. We fear without any sort of direct engagement of that question, it won’t stop.

Obama: Well, this is why the antidiscrimination principle being enforced is important. Because it won’t stop if some of the underlying biases aren’t challenged and surfaced. And that in and of itself creates backlash and denial. This is what I mean when I say better is hard. Just making sure that right now folks aren’t being ripped off—that’s a challenge. I remember when I was in Chicago and data started coming out that when black folks walk into an auto dealership, and women, too, to some degree, they are automatically given higher quotes, worse deals. And this was just documented extensively across auto dealerships around the country. There was a tax being imposed on black folks. By collecting that data, you can construct policies to combat that. And that’s potentially thousands of dollars in people’s pockets that are being taken away right now. But it’s hard to do. It requires an effective government agency, and data collection, and pushing, and shoving, and litigation until finally you start getting new norms and new practices.

And my argument—it’s not even an argument—my conviction is that those fights need to be fought right now and can be won. And if in fact we have finite political capital, energy, resources, we need to win those fights. And if we win all those fights, and now let’s say the income gap, and the wealth gap, and the education gap have for the most part been closed—let’s say hypothetically, knowing what we know now about public policy, that we could close the education gap so that it was only a couple percentage points, and we could make sure that hiring barriers and educational barriers had been leveled down, and unemployment among African Americans right now instead of being double was only 10 percent higher than white unemployment—if we got to that point, first of all, America as a whole would be a lot richer. Second of all, the African American community would not just be wealthier, but it would actually also be more politically empowered by virtue of having more resources. Third, I actually believe that some residue of discrimination would lessen, because it’s my view that there is a certain percentage of the white population that stereotypes and makes assumptions about African Americans because they don’t inject the history of slavery and Jim Crow into current incarceration rates, or crime rates, or poverty rates, or what have you—but if they started having more middle-class black kids who are friends with their kids, eating Cheerios in their kitchen, their attitudes start changing. If we achieve all that and there’s still a gap, at worst we’re much better positioned to pursue strategies to close that final gap. And at best we might surprise ourselves in terms of how well we’re doing.

So there’s going to—as I said before, it’s a generational project just to get America to live up fully to its ideals and to have the kind of society where everybody has a shot, and every kid is getting a good education, and people are getting living wages, and they have decent retirement. And if we got there and we looked up and we said, “You know what? Black folks are still doing a little bit worse off than whites, but it’s not like it was 20 years ago,” then we can have a discussion about how do we get that last little bit. But that’s a high-class problem to have. And to me the question right now is: How do I close that first three-quarters of the achievement gap, education gap, wealth gap? What gives me the best chance to do that? And I’m pretty darn sure that if America is a just society and treating people well right now, irrespective of past wrongs, that I’m going to close a big chunk of that gap. I’ve seen it.

This is what I always take away from something like My Brother’s Keeper—it’s almost an analogy. I look at some of the kids that I interact with, and they were born with so many disadvantages. And you could start off in your first interaction with them saying, “Unless they get a lot of compensatory help, they’re not going to be able to compete; they’re just so far behind, and they’re wounded and they’re hurt.” Think about that young man we were talking to: His mother was a drug addict, and his dad is in prison, and he has no sense of direction. And there’s no doubt that the more you did for him, probably the better he would do, but what’s always striking to me is he just got a little bit. He just had a few adults paying attention and telling him he was worth something while he’s in juvee, he’s just got somebody who is willing to pay his community-college fees, and suddenly you’ve got this young man sitting there who is so self-aware that to the president of the United States he can say, “Look even though I look like I’ve got my act together, I’ve still got pains, wounds, there’re issues I still have, and yet I’m going to be a teacher and I can tell my story, and here’s how I’m thinking about social change in the community.” And I’m thinking to myself, Wow. I believe he can close that gap, and my conclusion is that five years from now, if you ask me who has a better shot of being a great teacher in a school, that guy or some kid who grew up in an upper-middle-class community who out of all kinds of good-hearted impulses wants to be a teacher, I’m betting he ends up being the better teacher. That gap has been closed, even though you would think it wouldn’t be.

Now, I don’t want to exaggerate; having as many African American men as we’ve had in the criminal-justice system, and the amount of time it takes for the damage done by that to wash through our society and our communities, the disadvantages born out of kids being undiagnosed with mental-health problems early, or not getting the kind of exposure to reading and math when they’re 4 or 5 or 6 years old, that carries a cost. But I know that those gaps can be closed. And they can be closed substantially, more than I think we believe. So I guess maybe we can agree that in some ways you’re more optimistic than me, and in some ways I’m more optimistic than you. You’re maybe more optimistic than me in terms of the ability to persuade a society to make up for past injustices; but maybe I’m more optimistic than you about the ability to persuade a society to make up for current injustices and the capacity of the victims of those injustices to catch up pretty quickly.

Coates: Were you surprised relatively early on in your presidency when people criticized you for not having a quote-unquote “black agenda”?

Obama: No. I mean, I think if you worked at the community level in Chicago and then a politician on the South Side of Chicago, and worked at the state level, then you’re pretty familiar with all the variations of politics in the African American community and criticisms you may get. If you’re not familiar with those or you don’t have a thick enough skin to take it, then you probably wouldn’t have gotten here.

Coates: So it didn’t surprise you at all?

Obama: No. I think, and look, Ta-Nehisi, I don’t want to discount those criticisms, but offsetting those criticisms is that I have 90 percent or 95 percent support in the African American community and it’s not sort of “Well, he’s black, so it’s okay. We’re not going to say anything even though we’re seething.” And I hang out with a lot of middle-aged black women, and they’re not casual in their support of me. There’s a lot of love forthcoming. Partly because they understand the constraints of this society. They know that this is hard. And they also, I think, see me and Michelle trying. It’s one thing if they were watching and we were not working on poverty issues, and we weren’t working on education issues, and we weren’t working on health-care issues. You know, they’re pretty sophisticated; they understand that I’m trying to move an aircraft carrier here, I’m not just steering the speedboat. And so part of it is, I think, intellectual, and part of it is obviously emotional as well. But that support has been so constant and gracious and loving. Michelle and I have never felt as if, at any stage, folks didn’t have our backs. And as a consequence, I think that just spurred us on that much more to make us want to do the right thing, and do our best in the positions that we have.

Coates: So perhaps more substantive than that early-on critique, for instance—and Valerie [Jarrett] and I talked a little bit about this—when you attempted to bring in some of the Black Lives Matter activists and folks refused. And I heard you address this at Howard, too. What I would say—did you understand why some of them refused? Could you comprehend it?

Obama: Oh, I absolutely could comprehend it. A couple of them refused because they’re 20, or 21. I mean, that’s why they refused. It’s the same as when we were working on immigration reform and there was a young Latino man, young immigration activist here who, in the Roosevelt Room, refused to shake my hand.

Coates: Are you serious?

Obama: Absolutely. And I’m going around the table shaking everybody’s hand. And he made a point of saying, “I can’t shake your hand; you’re deporting too many people.” And I just said to him, “Young man, I’m glad that you feel so passionately about this issue, but you’re with the president right now in the White House. You’ve got to think about what’s going to be most effective in getting what you need, what you’re trying to accomplish. Because this may not be your best strategy.”

Coates: How did he respond?

Obama: Like a 21-year-old would, which is sort of a mixture of defiance and uncertainty and embarrassment. Which is fine. Look, so I guess I don’t—one of the things you understand, and it’s hard to do, but you—and I’m not saying I’m impervious to criticism—but one of the things that you come pretty early on to understand in this job, and you start figuring out even during the course of the campaign, is that there’s Barack Obama the person and there’s Barack Obama the symbol, or the office holder, or what people are seeing on television, or just a representative of power. And so when people criticize or respond negatively to me, usually they’re responding to this character that they’re seeing on TV called Barack Obama, or to the office of the presidency and the White House and what that represents. And so you don’t take it personally. You understand that if people are angry that somehow the government is failing, then they are going to look to the guy who represents government. And that applies, by the way, even to some of the folks who are now Trump supporters. They’re responding to a fictional character named Barack Obama who they see on Fox News or who they hear about through Rush Limbaugh.

Coates: What I’m trying to get at is a theory—you’re very unique in the sense that you are the president but you’ve also been an activist. You’ve actually occupied both roles. So what I’m getting at is, can you see how—

Obama: Is there utility—

Coates: In not being so close to power?

Obama: Yeah. And my argument would be: Yes, and it’s the reason why I am always interested in engaging in people who are pushing us and pushing against the status quo. But having been an activist, the only thing that I’m always encouraging activists to do is, once you have raised the issue, and even through controversial means, you have to come behind it with an agenda and the possibility of reconciliation if power meets your demands. And that was true during the civil-rights movement, that was true during the union movement, that’s always been true. And so the only time I get frustrated with activist criticism is if I have recognized them, and invited them to work with me to figure out how we solve this problem that they’re concerned about, and either they don’t engage out of the sense of purity—“I’m not going to shake his hand”—or you’re not sufficiently prepared so you don’t even know what to ask for, or you’re not being strategic as an activist and trying to figure out how the process has to work in order for you to get what you want.

So I’ll give you some specific examples just so that this isn’t too abstract: I thought Brittany Packnett, who was one of the Ferguson activists, really interesting, smart young lady, really impressive—you might want to talk with her. So she was one of the organizers of the Ferguson movement, ended up joining our task force. She came in here and she just knew her stuff. And I don’t think at any point backed off, even in our first meeting, saying, “Here’s what we’re concerned about; here’s where we’re disappointed in the Justice Department’s response; here’s what we need.” But she was sufficiently well-informed and engaged that it was very easy then to say, “You are right about this, you’re wrong I think about that, but I’m not sure, let’s sit down and see if we can hammer out a strategy that we agree with. And by the way, I want you talking to that police chief over there and that sheriff, because I think you might be able to persuade them if we break this down into its component parts.”

Now, in contrast, there have been times where, let’s say on LGBT issues, when we were trying to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and I got the Pentagon and Bob Gates, a Republican holdover from the Bush administration, to authorize a study of how you might end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, headed up by Jeh Johnson, who at that time was a council to the Justice Department. And it was going to take a year to conduct that study, issue a report, and figure out how it might be implemented, what effect it would have on unit cohesion and military effectiveness. And I had laid out this strategy because if I could get the Pentagon’s imprimatur on this thing, then I knew that we could end up getting legislation passed to reverse the policy, and we could get the branches of all the military to implement it. But during the course of that year, probably every speech I gave, I’d have gay activists just screaming at me during rallies. And you just say, “Come on, man. Not only do I agree with you, but I’ve actually got a strategy to execute, we are executing it, and in what sense do you think that you yelling at me here is going to advance your cause?”

Brittany Packnett (left), a co-founder of We the Protestors and Campaign Zero, sits with Obama and Representative John Lewis during a meeting with civil-rights leaders in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on February 18, 2016. (Carolyn Kaster / AP)

Coates: They don’t want you to forget.

Obama: Well, the theory was they didn’t want us to forget. But the problem was, and we saw some of this in the immigration-reform issues as well, was they hadn’t done sufficient homework to know that I didn’t have all the capacity they thought I did in order to just execute this through the stroke of a pen. So I think that where I’ve gotten frustrated during the course of my presidency has never been because I was getting pushed too hard by activists to see the justness of a cause or the essence of an issue; I think where I get frustrated at times was the belief that the president can do anything if he just decides he wants to do it. And that sort of lack of awareness on the part of an activist about the constraints of our political system and the constraints on this office, I think, sometimes would leave me to mutter under my breath. Very rarely did I lose it publicly. Yeah, usually I’d just smile. [Laughter] No, and the reason I say that is because those are the times where sometimes you feel actually a little bit hurt. Because you feel like saying to these folks, “[Don’t] you think if I could do it, I [would] have just done it. Do you think that the only problem is that I don’t care enough about the plight of poor people, or gay people, or immigrants, or …?”

Coates: But don’t they have some level of distrust towards you? I mean, that’s what I’m hearing: They don’t trust you to ultimately follow through. And isn’t that kind of the mind-set that the activist has to have?

Obama: Well, I think, yes. Which is why I don’t get too hurt. I mean, I think there is a benefit to wanting to hold power’s feet to the fire until you actually see the goods. I get that. And I think it is important. And frankly, sometimes it’s useful for activists just to be out there to keep you mindful and not get complacent, even if ultimately you think some of their criticism is misguided.

I’ll give you an example that’s outside the issues of social justice, but the criticism that some on the left consistently have given us around drone strikes. The truth is that this technology really began to take off right at the beginning of my presidency. And it wasn’t until about a year, year and a half in where I began to realize that the Pentagon and our national-security apparatus and the CIA were all getting too comfortable with the technology as a tool to fight terrorism, and not being mindful enough about how that technology is being used and the dangers of a form of warfare that is so detached from what is actually happening on the ground. And so we initiated this big process to try to get it in a box, and checks and balances, and much higher standards about when they’re used. But the truth is that, in trying to get at terrorists who are in countries that either are unwilling or unable to capture those terrorists or disable them themselves, there are a lot of situations where the use of a drone is going to result in much fewer civilian casualties and much less collateral damage than if I send in a battalion of marines. And I think right now we probably have the balance about right.

Now, you wouldn’t know that if you talked to Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International or some of the international activist organizations. Certainly you wouldn’t know that if you were talking to some of the writers who criticize our drone policy. But I’ve actually told my staff it’s probably good that they stay critical of this policy, even though I think right now we’re doing the best that we can in a dangerous world with terrorists who would gladly blow up a school bus full of American kids if they could. We probably have got it about right. But if suddenly all those organizations said, “Okay, the Obama administration’s got it right, and we don’t have a problem here,” the instinct towards starting to use it more, and then some of those checks and balances that we’ve built up starting to decay—that’s probably what would happen. So there’s an example of where I think, even if the criticism is not always perfectly informed and in some cases I would deem unfair, just the noise, attention, fuss probably keeps powerful officials or agencies on their toes. And they should be on their toes when it comes to the use of deadly force.

Coates: This actually ties right back in. I wanted to ask you about it, so I’m glad you brought that up. You know, you’re a great—and I don’t want this to come of as a “gotcha” question, I want to have a discussion here about this to the extent that we have time, a discussion about this—

Obama: Oh we better, I mean, we have time, we’ve spent a lot of time—

Valerie Jarrett (senior adviser to Obama): We have around 15.

Coates: You know you’ve talked quite a bit about your admiration for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which is sincere and heartfelt. Have you thought much about how you reconcile that, not just with you yourself, but actually with the office of being president, which does involve killing—it’s part of it as commander in chief—do you think much about reconciling those two things?

Obama: Yeah. Absolutely. When you take on the position of president, you are committing yourself to, first and foremost, protecting the American people. You are accepting an institutional role that requires you to make hard decisions and hard choices, and as a consequence you have to take your moral sense and not put it aside, but rather take that moral sense and apply it to the particulars of a job that is going to test those ethical and moral precepts differently than if you’re a professor, or a business person, or a dad. And if I were not comfortable with the judicious use of our military to protect the American people, than I shouldn’t have run for president. And having said that, I do think that the wisdom of a King or a Gandhi can inform my decisions. I may not be able to follow their beliefs to their logical conclusions, but I can think about what Gandhi said or King said about violence begetting violence, and still be true to my job by asking myself the question whenever we’re confronted with a situation where some may be arguing for military action: Will this actually result in America being safer, or the most lives being saved?

But these kinds of questions arise not just in the military sphere. Going back to the discussion we were having about immigration reform, some of the most challenging discussions I’ve had are with activists who essentially would argue that any immigrant from Central America, let’s say, who gets here to this country should be allowed to stay because their country is dangerous, their country is poor, and the opportunities for that mom and that kid are much greater here, and why would you send them back? And I remember—I think you were sitting in this discussion, Valerie—when I said to one young activist who herself was the daughter of an undocumented worker, and so could speak from a very personal and legitimate perspective—I remember saying to her: I agree with you, from a moral perspective, that a child from Honduras is worth the same as my daughter. God is not a respecter of boundaries; he’s not saying that American kids deserve a better life than Honduran kids. But I’m the president of the United States, and the nation-state by definition means that boundaries mean something and borders mean something. And I have to be able to implement a policy that doesn’t completely erase borders and boundaries. Not because I think that Honduran child who’s gotten here is less worthy of love, attention, opportunity than my child, but because I’m the president of the United States of America and I’m not speaking as a religious leader. I’ve got certain responsibilities that I have to carry out in a very specific institution and in a specific moment in time.

So why don’t you ask one last question? And then we can decide how much more you’ve got.

Coates: Okay. I wonder if part of this is the fact, as we talked about last time, that the idea of a black president was so remote to everybody that if it happened, it must mean that all these other things would be true about the world—the world would change. I don’t want to use the word postracial or anything like that. But the expectation of the idea of a black president was almost abstract to people.

Obama: Right.

Coates: And I wonder—I heard you talk about this very early in your presidency, but there was so much fervor, the crowds that you were getting—at what point did it occur to you: Oh, I’ve got to tamp this down a little bit. People are going to expect me to split the seas?

Obama: Well, we used to talk about this in the middle of the campaign. It’s interesting when you go back. I told this to Valerie: We had to get out of Chicago so quick. Election night happens, suddenly I’m talking to Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson and trying to figure out whether the world’s going to fly apart, and Michelle is trying to figure out where the girls are going to go to school. And we pack up and leave and basically our house in Chicago just became like a time capsule. My desk in my home office still had stacks of articles and bills and stuff from 2008. And probably last year I went back, maybe it was earlier this year, and I just start going through some stuff and there was an article—it was the [Time magazine “Person of the Year” issue], and this was at the height of Obama Hype, I mean I’d just been elected—

Coates: Were you tired of it? Were you like, “Please stop”?

Obama: Oh yeah. But I read the—there’s an interview of me in there—and I read through it, and what’s interesting was, I was pretty realistic to people about what we could get done, and the situation we were in, and trying to tamp down expectations. If you listen to my stump speeches, if you listen to what I said at Grant Park, I kept on saying, “Look, this is not just about me, this is not going to happen in one year, or one term, or even one presidency.” And we tried to layer into everything we were saying a sense of hope, but also realism. I don’t regret the excitement, because I do think that it helped us accomplish as much as we did. I don’t regret the fervor, because I do believe, in the African American community but also for other communities, and I know from talking to people, for communities around the world, the election of an African American to the most powerful office on Earth meant things had changed, and not just in superficial ways. That in some irreversible way the world was different.

But I can say with confidence that I never bought into the hype, and I made sure that the people around me didn’t buy into the hype, and I did not surround myself with people who fed me the hype. And I’m glad of that as well. Because I think we would have made a lot more mistakes and would have accomplished a lot less had we not been grounded in some basic truths.

And I would say this, I’ll go back to those black ladies I was talking about who love them some Barack and love Michelle even more—and by the way, they are not middle-aged anymore, because I’m now middle-aged. So they’re a little bit older. As fervent as they were, as excited and happy as they were when I was elected, they had to go to work the next morning. They still had trouble paying those bills. They might have still had a son who was in trouble with the law or couldn’t get a job because of a felony record. They didn’t stop being grounded. And in many ways they’re my touchstone, because they are what I meant when I talked about the audacity of hope. If you read that passage, it talks about not blind optimism, but it’s hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty—that’s what makes it audacious. Those are the ladies sitting in church. And in the same way that they might feel a joy and release on Sunday, they are still going to work on Monday. And that’s who I was listening to during this process. And if at the end of my presidency they feel like I did a pretty good job, then I’ll feel pretty good.

Coates: Okay.

Obama: All right.