The Dream.

words.

"...President Obama approaches race as a participant-observer, a man whose perspective was formed on the penumbra of our bruised racial experiences. This was unquestionably an asset during his first campaign, when the very possibility of his election offered validation of the battered faith from which the movement sprang. No one with a lesser understanding of these matters could’ve crafted the masterstroke that was the “More Perfect Union” speech he delivered in the midst of the controversy over Jeremiah Wright. In his reëlection campaign, when the ghosts of voter disfranchisement rose up and drove African-Americans to the polls with a determination rooted in the scar tissue of history, the act of voting for Obama seemed an extension of that struggle. He is unparalleled in conveying these insights, as he did in July when he spoke to the wounds that the George Zimmerman verdict had reopened in black America. But when he is speaking about race on his own terms, it becomes easier to suspect that he deploys that insight cynically.

...Not long ago, Jay Z fended off charges that, by comparing himself to Barack Obama and arguing that his mere existence as a powerful black man was a form of philanthropy, he was showing himself to be nonchalant in the face of the struggles of black America. His critics said that it was evidence of the rapper’s arrogance growing into terminal narcissism, but there was an iota of a point to be considered. To the alumni of housing projects or cotton fields, the kind of one-per-center glory Jay Z represents isn’t simply evidence of capitalism’s ability to produce plutocrats but a defiant assertion of the right of blacks to exist and thrive in America’s most privileged echelons. Obama would not make a statement as obtuse as Jay Z’s, but looking at his Presidency now, from its midpoint, it seems entirely possible that history will regard his biggest contribution to black people as his mere existence..."

THE NEW YORKER: Requiem for a Dream