"Like Jackie Robinson, Barack Obama not only changed the game, he changed America forever."

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Barack Obama is the Jackie Robinson of American politics
By Mike Jones, July 4, 2015

What is the difference between a Black president and a president who is Black? There are people who would say there is none, it’s a distinction without a difference. Others would say the question is a riddle wrapped up in an enigma. On Friday, June 26, America saw the difference and solved the riddle. 

In November 2008, America broke the ultimate political color barrier: It elected a man who was not White to be president of the United States, Barack Obama. While most White Americans and all Black Americans celebrated this historic achievement – the president who was Black – Black Americans were holding our collective breath and waiting for the second miracle: The arrival of the Black president.

On Friday, June 26, Black America exhaled.

Concluding  arguably the most successful and important week of his presidency with the breath-taking eulogy of Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the Black president we’ve been waiting for showed up. In Charleston, South Carolina, the birth place of the Confederacy, he choked the life out of the lie that is represented by the rag that’s called the confederate battle flag.

He did it without nuance, without equivocation. He didn’t speak to us, he spoke for us when he said, “That is what the Black church means. Our beating heart. The place where our dignity as a people is inviolate.” I can’t recall any other time when speaking as president he has used a first-person plural pronoun to refer to himself and the Black community.

Because of Barack Obama, America is at the beginning stage of changes that will be of epic proportions. It is impossible to imagine the changes in the future course of America because of one Black man.

In fact, we’ve been here before, though you’d have to be over 90 years old to have witnessed it. The last time America underwent a social change with this kind of seismic implications was 1947. Before there was Montgomery, before there was Selma, before there was a March on Washington, there was Jackie Robinson.

Today baseball is a game played by overpaid marginal athletes, but in the first 60-plus years of the 20th century baseball was much more. Then, it was said, if you understand baseball, you understand America. And no man of color, no matter how skilled, was allowed to play Major League Baseball. It represented everything that White America considered American, and it could only be played by White men – a lot like presidential politics before 2008.

Jackie Robinson and Barack Obama share important historical similarities. Both had very atypical backgrounds for Black men of their generation.

When most Black baseball players were marginally educated from the Jim Crow South, Jackie Robinson was a college-educated, former U.S. Army officer from Southern California. Barack Obama – the child of a White mother and African father raised in Hawaii – never set foot on the American mainland until he was 20 years old.

As their personalities and sense of self were being formed, neither had to deal directly with the oppressive weight of overt White racism. And both had the idea of their humanity challenged because they dared to redefine what was possible for Black men in America.

Jackie Robinson’s place among the elite in baseball history is not just the result of his paradigm-changing role as the first Black player in the major leagues. Jackie Robinson was a great player and, more importantly, he was a champion. When he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, they were a second-division team. His skill, passion and leadership turned the Dodgers into World Series champions.

Barack Obama also has prevailed over his adversaries in championship fashion. It’s not just that he was first to hold a position of power where America said we would never be permitted, but he has been a transformational historical figure in what he has achieved once he got there. He steered the country through the Great Recession, made health care affordable for millions of uninsured Americans and even had the grace to perceive the workings of God in the actions of a racist mass-murderer.

Like Jackie Robinson, Barack Obama not only changed the game, he changed America forever.
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