Transcript: How do we explain the fact that President Obama, a Black man, has reached the level of power that he has in this country? 

What Obama proved was that good organizing is the only thing that trumps risk. If you would have asked someone a year before the primaries that led to Obama's nomination, he wouldn't even have been a part of the conversation. He flew under the radar for so many months, organizing on college campuses, using the internet in ways that politicians had not dreamed of, and a lot of other things. He understood–because of his training as a community organizer, and at least in part because of his church–he was able to organize a movement that took him from being something that would be impossible… all of us said, there won't be an African-American elected in our lifetime. It just wasn't something that was going to happen. So the nomination and election of Barack Obama is an incredible feat. 

Now, when Barack Obama becomes president, he's in a whole different arena. Because he is surrounded by the systems of the white dominant culture, and he can't move. He can't do anything without people going crazy. He's recently had some victories by virtue of, again, very effective organizing. But in general, no president, in my opinion, has faced the obstacles that he has faced. What do we hear about him? He's a failure, he hasn't done as well. The left criticizes him this way, the right criticizes him that way, and the middle says he's squeamish. It's an impossible task, and yet it's one that he has done. 

The struggle with race and class–to go back to that for just a minute. If, as you moved up the professional ladder or as you moved up the economic ladder as a person of color, if racism ceased to exist, if the micro-aggressions that you had to deal with every day somehow were no longer relevant, then you could say, well, race is largely a class issue. I have never met a person of color who is either high on the economic scale or high on the professional scale say, you know, as I became head of this, or Dean of that, as I became a lawyer arguing before the Supreme Court, racism just didn't factor in anymore. In fact, many insist it factors in more. That you become more pressured. And that's why you run to your own community when you get a break–you don't have to defend yourself all the time. 

It's fascinating, as I came out of a working class background as a white in the south in Mississippi, my way out was very clear: get an education, get into one of the professions, work hard, stay out of trouble, stay in school, get degrees, and you will have things that your ancestors never dreamed of. That's very true. It's not as easy for people of color as they move up the ladder, so to speak, to get rid of racism.