America's rejection of the politics of Barack Obama

Redemptive constitutionalism has always had two sets of opponents. Some are whites who have benefited from concrete racial advantages—from formal segregation to access to home loans to better police protection—as well as from the softer privilege of feeling that the country is their own. They have resisted every wave of racial change. On the other hand, critics on the left, both black and not, have insisted that the redemptive story glosses over too much. They argue that racist settler-colonialism lay at the heart of the American founding, and for the persistence of structural and psychological advantages conferred by race.

As Obama championed redemptive constitutionalism, white resisters felt that something of utmost importance was being taken from them, and organized their dissent into the Tea Party and the Trump campaign. At the same time, activists on the left and, especially, young people mobilized by police violence against black men coalesced in new movements. The symbolic apotheosis of racial reconciliation in the presidency of Barack Obama, and the reality that he has not changed much about the daily lives of black people, left it seeming a false promise. Black Lives Matter is the political expression of this insight. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me is its literary voice. Although neither the Clinton nor the Sanders campaign has succeeded in claiming these movements, their presence marked the Democratic primaries and made Obama-style racial optimism much harder to take seriously than in 2008.