My President Wasn't Black Enough

“A man can be phenotypically Black while being historically detached from the memory that defines the ADOS experience.”

This afternoon, I was listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates reflect on storytelling—specifically the contrast between how Donald Trump and Barack Obama use narrative. On The Guardian’s podcast Today in Focus, Coates made the case that both men are effective storytellers because politics demands it. Candidates have to sell a story, and in this country, narrative is often more powerful than policy.

Coates shared that President Obama once told him Trump “could not win” because Americans “embrace optimism” over a “dark view of the future.” In Coates’s view, Obama—like many Democrats—believes that America is fundamentally sound, just in need of a few minor tweaks. You know, a policy nudge here, a program expansion there. Nothing too disruptive.

But things got interesting when Coates turned from Obama to Black people, almost as if Obama isn’t... Black people?

He contrasted Obama’s sunny outlook with that of the Black community, saying: “From the perspective of Black people, people telling stories like Trump win all the time… they exert great power.” That statement landed heavy. Because if Trump-style storytelling—rooted in grievance, fear, racism and power—is more aligned with how Black folks experience America, then why didn’t Obama see it coming?

The host missed the obvious follow-up: Isn’t Obama part of the Black community? If so, why doesn’t he share its outlook? Why didn’t the first Black president see what the Black community saw coming?

Coates knows Obama is Black. He wrote My President Was Black and once likened Obama to Malcolm X. So why the disconnect? What Coates inadvertently revealed is this–he recognizes, perhaps unconsciously, that Obama—though racially Black—is not rooted in the same lineage-based experience that shapes the worldview of American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS). He’s a Black man, yes, but one anchored in the experiences of his white mother and grandparents. His father, a Kenyan immigrant, was absent. He grew up in Hawaii, not the American South or the urban North. His life wasn’t shaped by slavery, Reconstruction, redlining, convict leasing, or the legacy of sharecropping. That matters.

Coates didn’t pause to explain why Obama—“his president”—failed to reach the same conclusions as the broader Black community. But the answer is embedded in Obama’s biography. A man can be phenotypically Black while being sociopolitically and historically removed from the collective memory of multigenerational Black suffering in America.

What Coates gave us—without quite meaning to—is a case for lineage, not just phenotype, as a defining marker of the Black political experience in America. Storytelling matters, yes. But so does the storyteller’s origin. And if we want our politics to reflect our people, then we can’t confuse being Black with being ADOS. One may give you optics. The other gives you insight.