Barack Obama Informative Speech

he only Inauguration I have attended, and probably the only one I ever will attend, was Barack Obama’s first, eight years ago. My wife and I were nearly broke, but we gathered money from the life insurance left by my mother, who had died of lung cancer six weeks before the election. We wrapped our California kids, ages five and three, in a million layers of clothing and hats, filled thermoses with soup and hot chocolate, shared hand-warmers among us, and packed as though we were braving the Arctic tundra. The temperature in Washington was in the twenties, and we were outside for eight hours. It must have been uncomfortable. Our kids must have suffered. Their mom and I must have bickered. But I don’t remember it that way. I remember laughing …show more content…
After the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested for trying to break into his own home, Obama chided the Cambridge police; his approval ratings, particularly among white voters, dipped severely. It would not be the last time he would wrongly calibrate the fervor of white America’s sensitivity around race. For eight years, we watched him trying to thread the impossible needle, searching for a message that would resonate evenly with a nation of people who seemed increasingly estranged from one another. The deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, and others bubbled up into a movement of protests. Soon, the idea that black lives mattered was branded by some as a terrorist threat; talk of race wars slithered to daylight from the damp crevices of American …show more content…
His citizenship and religion were called into question. Republicans in the House and Senate preferred to nearly tank the country rather than appear to be in league with him. Newscasters vociferously questioned his fitness for the job. These reactions moved beyond the terrifying and into the cartoonish. White racism, which I used to take so seriously, came, more and more, to seem childish and pitiful to me.

Meanwhile, Barack and Michelle Obama—cool, collected, fiercely loyal to each other—have reflected back to me my own capacities. Representation does, in fact, matter. When I was alone among white kids, I wondered if I had any power or beauty within me. With Michelle and Barack in the White House, I knew I did.

I still consider my own destruction daily. I think about doomsday scenarios and potential horrors to come. But I do not fear them. I am clear on what my worth is and what the worth of each person is. I no longer hope to avoid arousing the demons of racism—I know that such an awakening is an unavoidable result of affirming my own humanity. And there is no longer a scenario, under any President, or any Administration, in which I would refuse to do that. I have a family whom I love, and I know the difference between right and