And Reading a Reaction to "My President was Black" as a White Man

Ta-Nehisi Coates piece "My President was Black" is supposed to be a positive examination of Obama's legacy, how he was elected, and how his side lost the 2016 election. But Tresssie McMillan Cottom read it as Obama ignoring his own African American legacy, living without much of the struggle, yet still enjoying the black "coolness" which helped elect him. 
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/obamas-faith-in-white-america/510503/

She writes from a perspective of a southerner, so more of the focus of the class. She herself identifies primarily as southern and black, and therefore knows much of what it also means to be southern and white.  So her story begins in 2007 when she attends a fundraising event in Charlotte, but specifically in the old-money, white part of Charlotte. There, she is one of the only African Americans at the party, but all these white attendees just love Obama. And they, unlike many of her friends, thought he would win. 

After witnessing more actions, she comes to the conclusion that "It wasn’t that Barack Obama knew his whites that convinced me or my mother. It was that whites knew Obama." This is because "White voters allowed Barack Obama because they allowed him to exist as a projection of themselves." She states this quite clearly. She disagrees that Obama has any insight into white people's "goodness" because he was also unable to predict Trump's election. "It didn’t matter that Obama had faith in white people, they needed only to have faith in him: in his willingness to reflect their ideal selves back at them, to change the world without changing them, to change blackness for them without being black to them." 
Her argument continues that Obama didn't do enough to help African Americans because of his belief in white people, and his belief in their goodness. " Even after Donald Trump was elected, Obama told Coates that all is not lost. He is still hopeful about the soul of white America. He said nothing about the soul of black America." 

Personally, I was able to vote for Obama in 2012, and I can't know if it wasnt because I could see part of myself in him. There is something to be said about voting for change without changing anything; its easy to ignore racial horrors when there is a black man in the White House. Tressie Cottom isn't wrong, and she is right to show the fallacies in Obama's own statements about white America. What is happening is something that many white Americans also failed to see. At Rhodes and in all my social circles, it seemed impossible that Trump could win. Perhaps we've all put too much faith in white America.