I have no doubt that affirming these narratives was the only way for a person of color, in the period Obama arrived on the national stage, to achieve leadership in this majority-white country. In the Clinton and Bush years, for someone like Obama to cast his or her life story in more radical terms — in the anticolonial framing, for instance, that I grew up with — would have meant abandoning mass electoral success within the two-party system. But once in office, this affirmation came at the price of rejecting a broader left imagination that had long overflowed the bounds of a staid Americanism. And it had profound costs at a time of national reckoning. At a moment when the country faced convulsive social crises, and more and more of his supporters called for a fundamental reconstruction of American institutions, Obama marshaled his personal story and oratorical gifts to defend hollow tenets: the righteousness of American primacy, the legitimacy of global market liberalism, the need for incremental reform, the danger of large-scale structural overhaul. The consequence — intensified by a virulent right — was that fundamental problems continued to fester and became harder to ignore: mass incarceration and structural racism, dramatic class disparities in power and opportunity, interventionism abroad, and national-security abuses at home. Obama was, in a sense, the most that was possible in 2008. But his limitations, which were really the limitations of a broad generation of center-left politicians shaped by the fallout of the 1960s, point to what is now needed for radical liberation movements to reach the political center and defeat the forces of reaction.