That's not an accident that he didn't begin with, say, trade or jobs or anything, that he actually began by otherizing (ph) the first African-American president of the United States. Then you gonna see what it’s really like.” Throughout their residency, the Obamas had refrained from showing America “what it’s really like,” and had instead followed the first lady’s motto, “When they go low, we go high.” This was the ideal—black and graceful under fire—saluted that evening. MARTIN: At the same time, you've been critical of the president. You know, it felt like him reverting back to what was in his bones and that's, you know, optimism and a deep belief in, you know, American institutions and the American people. His new piece in The Atlantic is called "My President Was Black: A History Of The First African-American White House And Of What Came Next." What it is is that Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and two white grandparents who, A, told him he was black and that there was nothing wrong with being black. I mean, the president, you know, at one point when he was campaigning said (laughter) I believe that Donald Trump was not qualified to run a 7-Eleven. Why that is, I think, is complicated.  Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates: 'My President Was Black' 
 
 Rachel Martin talks to writer Ta-Nehisi Coates about his new piece in The Atlantic magazine: "My President Was Black: A history of the first African American White House and of what came next." “When I started doing that work, my story merges with a larger story. So I’m in a position to understand those essential parts of me not as separate and apart from any particular community but connected to every community. And so that gave him a kind of optimism, an ability to see things, you know, and frankly, an ability to trust, you know, in his fellow, you know, white countrymen in a way that I, for instance, you know, and the vast majority of black people I know never really could. I don't know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that he was sincere. He was untraumatized. They weren’t just big cities or they weren’t just liberal enclaves. For most African Americans, white people exist either as a direct or an indirect force for bad in their lives. And so, yeah, I will always give my grandparents credit for that. COATES: Yeah, I think there's a sort of, you know, very thin way of reading this that says, well, Barack Obama is biracial thus that gives him some understanding of both white America and black America, but that's not really it. You know, part of that is ordinary African-Americans, you know, you come out of your house and you see the conditions in your neighborhood and you see, you know, folks in your neighborhood doing certain things that, you know, are irresponsible. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record. Because you feel like saying to these folks, ‘[Don’t] you think if I could do it, I [would] have just done it? COATES: I have, yes. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: 
 
 Author Ta-Nehisi Coates was probably always planning on writing a big piece around this time of year, a big-picture philosophical analysis about what it meant for this country to be led by a black president for eight years and what that president's legacy would be. Obama’s accomplishments were real: a $1 billion settlement on behalf of black farmers, a Justice Department that exposed Ferguson’s municipal plunder, the increased availability of Pell Grants (and their availability to some prisoners), and the slashing of the crack/cocaine disparity in sentencing guidelines, to name just a few. And it can be true that a unique, you know, individual like Barack Obama can succeed in spite of that and still be the case that that force is quite, quite strong. Prior to the election, Obama, ever the optimist, had claimed that intransigent Republicans would decide to work with him to advance the country. And initially he was still optimistic. Coates told me that in some ways Barack Obama was naive about the role race would play in his presidency and the election of Donald Trump. He grew up in Hawaii, far, far removed from the most, you know, sort of violent, you know, tendencies of Jim Crow and segregation. I still want Obama to be right. COATES: It was a week after Donald Trump had won. After the election of Donald Trump, that legacy was no longer secure and Ta-Nehisi Coates started thinking about the Obama years in a different way.
– In the new Atlantic cover story, one of the nation's most prominent black voices provides a lengthy assessment of the nation's first black president. The 17,000-word piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates makes clear that Coates considers Obama a man worthy of high esteem. After noting that Obama's rise to national prominence began with his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention, Coates writes: "Over the next 12 years, I came to regard Obama as a skilled politician, a deeply moral human being, and one of the greatest presidents in American history." He adds that Obama was "the most agile interpreter and navigator of the color line I had ever seen," able to connect to black people while not alienating white people. That was due in part to his own upbringing with a Kansas-born white mother. Obama recalls that in the 2008 race, he gave himself maybe a 25% chance of winning—but he never doubted his ability to win over white voters. Why? "Obama was able to offer white America...something very few African Americans could—trust," writes Coates. But he adds that Obama had something of a blind spot here as well. As he tells NPR, he thinks the president "deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life." In the Atlantic piece, he takes issue with Obama's "overriding trust in color-blind policy and his embrace of 'personal responsibility' rhetoric when speaking to African-Americans," which Coates views as insensitive to the realities of many black youth. But the overall tone is deep respect for what Obama was able to accomplish despite overt obstructionism. His "victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans," writes Coates. "But there is nothing 'mere' about symbols." Click to read the full piece.