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  • 2018-11-27 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Barack Obama Say Becoming Donald Trump Was the American Dream? (en)
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  • David Garrow's dense and rigorous 2017 book profile of Barack Obama's pre-presidential years, titled Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, was in all respects an extremely deep dive into Obama's early life, as recounted in a Politico review: Among the tidbits reported on heavily by various news outlets at the time was the unpublished policy manuscript Barack Obama wrote with his friend and Harvard Law classmate Rob Fischer sometime around April 1991. The manuscript, titled Race and Rights Rhetoric, was written for Harvard Law professor Martha Minnow’s Law and Society class, and the two young men hoped it would become a chapter of a book. That chapter would have broached the idea that talking about minority rights in terms of universal rights could be counterproductive and instead suggested the possibility that these discussions could be more productive if framed in the more commonly held American notions of equality of opportunity, as described by Garrow: As an example of this line of thought, Obama and Fischer described what they called the unfounded optimism of the average American and used Donald Trump as an extreme caricature of what some people’s conception of upward mobility looked like, as summarized (with direct excerpts) by Garrow: Because of the reference to Donald Trump, Barack Obama’s presidential successor, some news outlets highlighted this excerpt, suggesting in somewhat misleading headlines that Obama was praising Trump as an archetypical example of the American Dream: While some of these articles clarified Obama and Fischer’s meaning in their text, the headline claims presented were a mischaracterization of Obama and Fisher’s argument, which was a call for pragmatism in discussions of racial equality and progress. As one example of this pragmatic approach, Obama and Fischer suggested reframing the quest for racial equality as part of the American concept of equality of opportunity. The invocation of Donald Trump's name was not, as implied by headlines, used to provide an example of the American Dream, but rather an example of the unfounded optimism of the average American (i.e., the expectation that they or their children would become economically well-off someday) -- a concept Obama and Fischer suggested could be tapped into as a way to bring about more fruitful discussions of racial equality. (en)
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