All these years later, I was thankful for the progress I saw. In 2015, I was still
making visits to Walter Reed, but each time it seemed there were fewer
wounded warriors to visit. The United States had fewer service members at risk
overseas, fewer injuries needing care, fewer mothers with their hearts broken.
This, to me, was progress.
Progress was the Centers for Disease Control reporting that childhood
obesity rates appeared to be leveling off, particularly among children ages two to
five. It was two thousand high school students in Detroit showing up to help me
celebrate College Signing Day, a holiday we’d helped expand as a part of Reach
Higher, to mark the day when young people committed to their colleges.
Progress was the Supreme Court’s decision to reject a challenge to a key part of
the country’s new health-care law, all but ensuring that Barack’s signature
domestic achievement—the security of health insurance for every American—
would remain strong and intact once he left office. It was an economy that had
been hemorrhaging 800,000 jobs a month when Barack entered the White
House having now racked up nearly five straight years of continuous job growth.
I took this all in as evidence that as a country we were capable of building a
better reality. But still, we lived in the world as it is.
A year and a half after Newtown, Congress had passed not a single gun-
control measure. Bin Laden was gone, but ISIS had arrived. The homicide rate in
Chicago was going up rather than down. A black teen named Michael Brown
was shot by a cop in Ferguson, Missouri, his body left in the middle of the road
for hours. A black teen named Laquan McDonald was shot sixteen times by
police in Chicago, including nine times in the back. A black boy named Tamir
Rice was shot dead by police in Cleveland while playing with a toy gun. A black
man named Freddie Gray died after being neglected in police custody in
Baltimore. A black man named Eric Garner was killed by police after being put in
a choke hold during his arrest on Staten Island. All this was evidence of
something pernicious and unchanging in America. When Barack was first elected,
various commentators had naively declared that our country was entering a
“postracial” era, in which skin color would no longer matter. Here was proof of
how wrong they’d been. As Americans obsessed over the threat of terrorism,
many were overlooking the racism and tribalism that were tearing our nation
apart.
Late in June 2015, Barack and I flew to Charleston, South Carolina, to sit
with another grieving community—this time at the funeral of a pastor named