The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper rewrote history on Tuesday as he welcomed The Atlantic staff writer Thomas Chatterton Williams to Comedy Central to promote his new book. According to Klepper, it was conservative media that insisted on making Barack Obama “the black president,” not liberals who insisted that disagreeing with Obama was racist.
Klepper began by summarizing the book, “You look specifically at the summer of 2020, but this book takes us back a little bit, about the promise of Barack Obama. And talks about this promise of post-racialism and how you can draw a direct line from that to this era of Trump and MAGA. Explain that for me a little bit.”
Williams responded, “Yeah, I think we had a moment in the beginning of this century when the country seemed to come -- not everyone in the country -- but a plurality of people in the country, maybe even a slim majority of people in the country, really wanted to put the past oppressions and biases behind us and create this multiethnic society that Barack Obama's figure kind of gave us a hint of what could be. There was a moment when people seemed to want to transcend the kind of conflicts we had been plagued with in the previous century, and Barack Obama's figure was a special, charismatic kind of idea of a post-racial future embodied in the president. And I think that we had a chance. But it didn't last so long.”
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