Reading "My President Was Black"

I was watching The Daily Show just now and Ta-Nehisi Coates came on the show to talk specifically about his article in the Atlantic, My President Was Black. I had just read the piece earlier today, and I wanted to muse about it. 

It begins in nearly present day, but before the election. So at this point it still looked as though Hillary would win comfortably, if not defiantly. There is a farewell party being hosted by BET, and Dave Chappelle is making remarks about Hillary that recognize her flaws, much to the disappointment of the other guests. The entire piece is trying to capture this idea about the Obamas and what their presidency meant. He says that they represented something, that  "it was not just that there might never be another African American president of the United States. It was the feeling that this particular black family, the Obamas, represented the best of black people, the ultimate credit to the race, incomparable in elegance and bearing." The Obamas have been in the White House for 8 years, and that has undoubtedly meant something different to white and black Americans. For white Americans, their election can almost be seen as a continuation of the master narrative. "Look" they say, "how can America be racist when we have a black president," while they ignore the racist remarks and statements made about that very same president. But for African Americans, it opened the door for the presidency and shown that "Obama communicated that the prohibition [on who can be president] had been lifted. It communicated much more. Before Obama triumphed in 2008, the most-famous depictions of black success tended to be entertainers or athletes".

The whole piece is too much to comment on, but one repeated aspect stood out for me. Coates seems to attribute Obama's success to his relationship to white people. He tells the story of that when Obama was growing up, he was lucky enough to fall into the graces of "good" white people who didn't denigrate him. He grew up instead thinking it was "cool" to be Black. This gave Obama an advantage which so many African Americans can never dream of, that being a trust of white people. Coates writes that "only Obama, a black man who emerged from the best of white America, and thus could sincerely trust white America, could be so certain that he could achieve broad national appeal." He won the election because he was able to empathize and reach out to all of America. However, i the very next sentence, Coates writes that "and yet only a black man with that same biography could underestimate his opposition’s resolve to destroy him." The 8 years of vitriol directed towards him led to the election of the president-elect, as Trump could deride anyone of wanting another "8 years of Obama" even while Obama himself enjoyed remarkably high approval ratings.