Obama, as much as we sometimes imagined him otherwise, was a politician. He was an American President, which means that he was tied into all of America’s machinery, which means that he was operating with a proximity to some level of violence at all times. But he was more than this, too, a complex and fullstoried person. The problem with the way visible and complicated people of color and their histories are approached by the world around them is that they are, all too often, not afforded the mosaic of a full and nuanced history.
