Former President Barack Obama admitted in a recent NPR interview that he never expected his election as the nation's first Black president to end racism, but he also said he did see a "backlash" from some based on his race.
"Here's one thing I never believed, right, was the fever of racism being broken by my election," Obama told "All Thing's Considered" interviewer Ari Shapiro, as the two discussed Obama's latest memoir, "A Promised Land." "I never subscribed to the: We live in a post-racial era."
But, he added, "I think that what did happen during my presidency was yes, a backlash among some people who felt that somehow, I symbolized the possibility that they or their group were losing status not because of anything I did, but just by virtue of the fact that I didn't look like all the other presidents previously."
Still, he said, a majority of Americans seemed to say they were going to judge him based on whether their lives got better, and they thought it was good that the barrier had been broken.
"And you had a whole generation of kids who grew up not thinking it was weird or exceptional that the person who occupied the highest office in the land was Black," he said.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.