Travel back in time with me for a moment, won’t you? The year is 2008. Barack Obama has just received the Democratic nomination for president. The world is stunned. A Black man is running for the highest office in the country, and there’s a chance he could actually win. Many Americans never dreamed that this day would come, and regardless of how the election turns out, to them, Obama represents a new era – one defined by progress, change, and most of all, hope. When he is eventually elected, that symbolism is magnified. People are cheering in the streets. The word “postracial” enters the national lexicon. There are critics and skeptics and realists, of course, but they are being drowned out by the outright jubilation buzzing in the air.
Not fifteen years later, the world is a different place. As Kamala Harris steps into the spotlight as the Democratic party’s newest presumptive nominee, the mood surrounding her candidacy seems decidedly less breathless. Harris, of course, would represent even more “firsts” than Obama – if elected, she would be the first Asian American in the Oval Office, the first Black woman – heck, the first woman of any background. And while there are many people stanning for her, and all her identities represent, there seem to be just as many who learned some hard lessons from the Obama era – and aren’t willing to re-hang their “hope” posters just yet.
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So what exactly have we learned in the past 14 years?
For one thing, we’ve learned that the idea of a Black president ushering in an era of racial harmony was a pipe dream. Instead, as the journalist Wesley Lowery wrote in his book American Whitelash, the election of Obama “led us down a perilous path and into a decade and a half (and counting) of explicit racial thrashing.” The post-Obama era, he argues, has been characterized, in large part, by many white Americans becoming “convinced, in the aggregate, that they were the targets of antiwhite bigotry and being systematically discriminated against.”
People on the right learned that they could gain a lot of traction by foregrounding racist and nativist policies. They learned that they could shout “you lie” at a sitting president and face almost no consequences. They learned that spouting racist conspiracy theories did not risk getting you canceled; instead, it created a viable path to the highest halls of power. They learned that huge swaths of people felt that something was being taken from them, and that they were willing to fight to take those things back.
People on the left learned that having a Black president would not automatically lead to anti-racist legislation. They learned that many people in the general public had no qualms about drawing distinctions between “good” Black people like Obama, and “bad” Black people, like…almost anyone else. They learned (or were reminded) that simply being Black is not a political ideology. They learned that the divisions within the Democratic party felt almost as insurmountable as the ones outside of it.
All of which is to say, we are not the same rosy-eyed country that we once were. Very few people seem to think that Harris’s nomination portends the kind of utopic future that seemed possible – at least to some – all those years ago. And while that may seem sad, or jaded, perhaps it’s actually the thing that should be cause for the most hope. Because maybe, just maybe, Kamala Harris will get to anchor the next phase in her political career on something more substantive than the details of her heritage. Maybe, she’ll get to run – and be judged – according to the strength and substance of her policies and ideas. It won’t immunize her against the racist or sexist attacks that are already being lobbed her way. But it may mean that the people who support her are willing to let her serve as more than just a symbol.
This story was written by Leah Donnella and edited by Courtney Stein.
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