Reach Out

Why Obama Must Reach Out to Angry Whites

White America, fast becoming a minority, needs to hear reassurances from somebody other than Trump.

By Issac J. Bailey

For all the bad feelings that Donald Trump’s naked religious bigotry and race baiting are conjuring up, it is also providing our nation with an opportunity. The ugly rhetoric just might force the country to finally contend with a problem many don’t even want to acknowledge exists: that we are fast becoming a nation in which minorities make up a majority of the population. As a result, tens of millions of white Americans, accustomed for so long to having all the benefits of being the majority, are scared out of their minds—and it is this fear that Trump is exploiting so effectively. These feelings are emerging not because whites are all racists, but because they don’t know what that might mean for them and their children.

As long as angry, scared white Americans follow Trump and his ugly rhetoric, the racial divide in America will only deepen, and it will become increasingly difficult to solve the nation’s most pressing problems. So the question becomes: Who can counter Donald Trump?

This task can’t be left to pundits, academic experts or even preachers, rabbis and imams—particularly as long as Trump continues to tap into the darkest recesses of people’s souls. Destructive groupthink can overcome even the most sincere efforts of community leaders. It cannot be left up to other 2016 presidential candidates, either. They’re far too busy trying to win the White House to be healers.

There is only one person who can unite the country again, and he works in the White House. Yes, President Barack Obama—ironically, the man who is the personification of the fear Trump is exploiting—is the one in the best position to quell the anger being stirred up.

This is not something the president can do from the Oval Office, or from a stage. What he needs to do is use the power of the office in a different way, one that matches the ruthless effectiveness of a demagogue with a private jet. Obama needs to go on a listening tour of white America—to connect, in person, with Americans he has either been unable or unwilling to reach during his seven years in office.

I know the difficulties of such outreach, and also its unique payoff. I‘m a black man who has spent the past decade listening to white Southern conservatives—people who many assume would hate me. Because of that, I’ve been able to get through to people others wouldn’t dare try to reach. I have the battle scars and rare friendships to prove it, including one with a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans who may help me in a criminal-justice reform push.

The conventional wisdom might say the current U.S. president should visit places like Chicago and Ferguson, where decades-long racial disparities are at the heart of recent bouts of unrest. Or that he should visit San Bernardino and offer condolences in person (which he did before going on vacation), as he’s done so many times after so many mass shootings. Or maybe Detroit, a city still struggling even after a massive bailout saved the domestic auto industry.

I say, instead, he should first go to places like Conway, South Carolina, where a Democratic president has nothing to gain, a place whose residents daily drive by an electric plant that is now empty in part because of environmental policies that may indeed be necessary to save the planet but hurt real people in real time, nonetheless.

Or maybe he can map out a path along the Appalachian Trail and visit cities and small towns full of people who believe they’ve been left out of the American dream and forced into a nightmare they are convinced they can survive only by clinging to their God and their guns, which is why they balk at the emergence of legalized same-sex marriage and talk of gun control, not because they hate—even if the words they sometimes use sound hateful—but because they still need something to call their own.

Let them see their president. Let them speak directly to their president. Let them shout, cuss, fuss and unload if that’s what they need to do. Because no matter how you slice it, the country they’ve long known is dying, and a new one is taking shape. Obama’s presence in the White House, while heartening to many, is the tip of the spear to those fretful about what’s to come.

Sweeping demographic change isn’t the only thing roiling the lives of many white Americans. According to a study recently released by Princeton University, in an era when mortality rates for nonwhites and young whites are decreasing, middle-aged whites are seeing their mortality rates rise. Much of that is due to suicide, drug addiction, the stress of financial uncertainty, and decreasing mental and physical health. And, just this month, Pew noted that the middle class is “losing ground.” While minorities remain on the wrong side of too many deeply entrenched racial disparities, white people face real challenges, too.

The problem now is that this significant slice of the American public believes Trump is the only leader who hears their understandable, if overwrought cries. He speaks directly to their fears about being left behind in a country they no longer recognize, and he (along with a smaller, uglier slice of the electorate that does really want to return to the time white people were favored) is convincing them that minorities are responsible for their troubles.

In a recent interview with NPR, the president explained clearly that he understands this reality, saying, “Blue-collar men have had a lot of trouble in this new economy, where they are no longer getting the same bargain that they got when they were going to a factory and able to support their families on a single paycheck. … There is going to be potential anger, frustration, fear. Some of it justified, but just misdirected. I think somebody like Mr. Trump is taking advantage of that. … In some ways, I may represent change that worries them.”

But Obama needs to do more than just talk about these Americans on NPR. He needs to reach out to them directly, again becoming the “there is no blue America/red America” Obama of a decade ago. Or at least he must spend his final year in office trying. Because this is bigger than politics, more important than party and maybe his most consequential legacy.

He shouldn’t go give a speech or detail the ways the Affordable Care Act is improving the lives of even those who despise him. He shouldn’t brag about reports showing his administration has killed at least 30,000 terrorists, including Osama bin Laden and many top ISIL leaders. He shouldn’t bother making them aware that the country is on the longest monthly job creation streak in its history.

He shouldn’t try to soothe them or say he feels their pain.

He shouldn’t say much at all. He should go primarily to listen, even if it means he has to endure being called nasty names to his face or risk being spat on. Because when you cut through the political rhetoric and fearmongering and empty, overheated debates, that’s the one thing people in those communities believe they haven’t received and want most—to be heard.

Of course Obama would have to make it clear that a tour through disaffected white America is only the beginning, not end, of his efforts to heal this nation’s wounds during his final year in office, that the concerns of others like #BlackLivesMatter will remain a priority. It’s a delicate balancing act, no doubt, but one Obama is skilled enough to pull off.

Presidential power is overstated in many ways, seeding the ground for unrealistic expectations among supporters and critics. The president can’t singularly reorder world events, stop every terror attack, enforce fiscal responsibility or guarantee that a pet project will be realized.

But the current president—the nation’s first black president, born of a white mother, married to a descendant of slaves, father of 21st-century daughters—can use the allure and mystique of his office to speak to the American public, and all of its myriad, divisive factions, in a way no one else can.

Reaching out directly to those who express hatred for him is the kind of powerful symbolism that can break through a divide that cannot be healed by reciting statistics, will not be moved by stirring sermons and won’t disappear because enough of us wish it away.

Sometimes the president can speak loudest when he doesn’t speak much at all—and just shows up to remind those who feel powerless that yes, they do have a voice, that they are being listened to, not just by a reality TV star with bad hair playing upon their fears—but by the most powerful man on the planet.