In “Dreams From My Father,” the 44th president’s top-selling memoir, the Commander in Chief wrote that his white grandfather insisted “the family left Texas in part because of their discomfort with … racism.” Obama’s white grandmother, Toot, swears, “The word racism wasn’t even in their vocabulary back then.” Perhaps the president inherited his white grandparents’ dialect because “racism” is mostly absent from his vocabulary, as well.
While delivering his farewell address in Chicago, Illinois, Obama identified “talk of a post-racial America” as a threat to the country. The nation’s first nonwhite president conceded, “Race remains a potent and often divisive force in our society.”
With Usain Bolt-like haste, President Obama assured white listeners that he’d not gone rogue and had no intention of delivering an incendiary oratory on racism. “Now, I’ve lived long enough to know that race relations are better than they were 10 or 20 or 30 years ago,” he said, to applause. “You can see it not just in statistics, you see it in the attitudes of young Americans across the political spectrum.”
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