Transcript:
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GENE DEMBY, HOST:
What’s good, y’all? You’re listening to CODE SWITCH, the show about race and identity from NPR. I’m Gene Demby.
B A PARKER, HOST:
And I’m B.A. Parker.
DEMBY: OK. So there’s this school on the South Side of Chicago called Hyde Park Academy. It’s really big, and it has a lot of the challenges that really big inner-city schools with lots of poor kids have – you know, old building, not a lot of resources.
PARKER: We’ve heard that story before, yeah.
DEMBY: Just last month, some students there walked out of class to protest because three students died over the course of just one month. That’s horrible. But the students who walked out said that the school had cut the community groups offering support services. But right across the street – Stony Island Avenue – from Hyde Park Academy is the sprawling, ambitiously designed campus of the Obama Presidential Center.
PARKER: Not the presidential library, even though that’s still what some folks call it.
DEMBY: Right, right, right. But there is actually a Chicago public library branch on the center campus grounds. But anyway, it has a big basketball court. There are grills for everybody to use. There’s a state-of-the-art playground and a museum. Parker, there’s a sledding hill.
PARKER: A sledding hill?
DEMBY: Yeah, ’cause, you know, Chicago is famously flat. And so Michelle Obama, you know, who grew up nearby on the South Side, had them build one because she never got to sled as a kid.
PARKER: Oh.
DEMBY: The Obama Center reportedly cost around $850 million to build, and the Obama Foundation touts the fact that it was almost all private money that was raised to pay for this thing. But you know how it goes. The city, of course, had to come up off some money for costs related to its construction in a public park there. So the Obama Center is set to officially open to the public on Juneteenth. But from almost the moment around 10 years ago – they announced it back in 2017 – that this pretty spot sitting on Lake Michigan would be the spot for the Obama Center, there has been pushback – like, a lot of it – and from a lot of different directions.
PARKER: Yeah. I’ve heard about some of that. There were people concerned that this big, shiny new campus to commemorate the Obama presidency would speed up the gentrification already happening on the South Side – people having to move because the cost to rent in the neighborhood was going to go up even higher.
DEMBY: Right, right, right. And other folks were concerned that letting the Obama Center build on this public park in the city, that would mean opening up parkland to other private builders.
PARKER: But also, like, don’t the folks on the South Side deserve nice things, too?
DEMBY: And that’s a really big sentiment, too, Parker. People have a lot of feelings about their new neighbor, like this 2019 Hyde Park graduate who requested we not use her name because she currently works for the city and is not authorized to speak to the media.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: And I was saying the Obama Center isn’t a bad thing. It is truly a really good thing if it is used right, if it is prioritized for the people who live in that community. The studio, the little park – I can see myself walking my dog in the little garden next to little Nancy (ph) and Karen (ph).
DEMBY: But she did share that the neighborhood around the Obama Center has become too pricey for her and her family, and she wondered how all this would affect her old school.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: People like – students like me wouldn’t be able to attend there. That’s the end goal. They don’t want to continue to cater to Black students, if that’s the way they want to move.
DEMBY: But, you know, public space is always contested, not unlike a presidential legacy.
PARKER: True. And the architecture of this place – I mean, what’s a diplomatic way to say it looks excessive?
DEMBY: (Laughter) Right. Right. It looks like a giant – they call it the Obamalisk pejoratively.
PARKER: Oh, boy.
DEMBY: But a lot of the architectural reviews of this center are about the very different vibe you get from looking at this place, depending on where you’re standing. Like, either it looks like a beacon in the sunlight or this big foreboding monolith.
PARKER: I mean, it probably looks different if you’re a tourist walking the grounds than it would if you’re one of the kids of that high school across the street.
DEMBY: And it’s, like, transforming this intensely segregated neighborhood. And so that’s what we’re going to answer today, Parker, because we’re talking to two South Siders who have been looking into the Obama Center, and we’re going to dig into the complicated local legacy of the man and the myth that this sprawling project commemorates and celebrates. And we’re going to try to think back to those heady, hopeful days not all that long ago when the South Side’s dreams and the country’s dreams were all wrapped up in each other.
PARKER: Take it away, Gene.
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DEMBY: So I wanted to pick the brains of some of our CODE SWITCH play cousins who live on the South Side. These are folks who have been covering the Obama Center and, you know, all the drama around it from different angles in their day jobs since the notion of putting the center on the South Side was just a baby idea.
NATALIE MOORE: I am Natalie Moore, a Chicago native, longtime reporter and editor in Chicago. And I teach journalism at Northwestern University.
MAIRA KHWAJA: And I’m Maira Khwaja. I’m a writer and an educator and a multimedia producer. I’ve been at the Invisible Institute for the past 10 years. It’s a journalism production company on the South Side of Chicago. We mostly investigate police misconduct, but for many years, we also had a youth program at Hyde Park Academy, which is across the street from the Obama Center. And I interviewed kids about their feelings about the development for many years.
DEMBY: Both of you are Chicagoans. But the South Side was for decades – it was, like, the largest Black neighborhood in the United States.
MOORE: It is the capital of Black America.
(LAUGHTER)
DEMBY: Atlantans – feel like a bunch of Atlantans will get mad at that. But, like, you know, the estuary into which all the rivers of the Great Migration flowed. It’s part of the reason Barack Obama was drawn to it – right? – when he was, like, working through his big questions of identity. It’s where he met Michelle, obviously.
MOORE: You know, I did stories back then, you know, about why the first Black president came from the South Side of Chicago because I am serious when I say Chicago is the capital of Black America. You look at – you know, Black History Month founded here, Black studies, you know, all the – you know, the different ways that things have converged here in the heartland.
DEMBY: Like, can you talk about, if you lived in the South Side during his presidency – like, I read about and heard about how there was, like, you know, a Secret Service detail in the block – right? – that he and Michelle used to live on. Was there other ways in which his sort of, like, presidency was, like, physically felt in the space of the South Side of Chicago when he was in the White House?
MOORE: Well, I used to live on Greenwood, the same street…
DEMBY: OK.
MOORE: …As the Obamas.
DEMBY: Neighbors.
MOORE: Two blocks away. We moved there.
DEMBY: Did you borrow sugar from them?
MOORE: No. They were in the White House by the time…
DEMBY: OK (laughter).
MOORE: …We moved there.
KHWAJA: Also, same.
DEMBY: Oh, word?
MOORE: You were on Greenwood, too?
KHWAJA: I was on 53rd and Greenwood, yeah. They were on 50th.
MOORE: I was on 52nd and Greenwood.
DEMBY: Oh. So neighbors, yeah.
KHWAJA: Neighbors, yeah.
DEMBY: You can borrow sugar from each other if not from the Obamas.
KHWAJA: (Laughter).
MOORE: So, you know, when the Obamas were in town – I mean, I remember one time, I had a flat tire. I’m trying to come home. And the police are like, you can’t come down this block because I wasn’t on the list. I’m like, but do you see I have this flat tire.
DEMBY: (Laughter).
MOORE: And I had to drive all the way around to try to get home. You know, it was an inconvenience. But it wasn’t – like, they weren’t there a lot.
KHWAJA: Yeah. And when they were, you could just go to Valois, which is his favorite diner, and sometimes meet him, which was a fun way to meet him.
DEMBY: Oh, whoa.
KHWAJA: So I don’t know. It was kind of cool, like, to get to meet him that way.
DEMBY: You’ve met your neighbor Obama at some point?
KHWAJA: Yeah.
DEMBY: Both of you, like, bumped into him at the diner?
KHWAJA: A couple times.
DEMBY: Oh, wow.
KHWAJA: A couple times.
MOORE: I’ve met him in the capacity as being a journalist, not as a neighbor (laughter).
DEMBY: (Laughter) Not just neighbor, yeah
MOORE: Yeah. And there was a certain ownership that people felt. They saw him. They knew him. This wasn’t something that was abstract.
KHWAJA: Yeah. And, like, globally, too. Whenever you travel, and if you say that you’re from Chicago, any taxi driver or whatever would be like, Obama.
DEMBY: Obama, right.
KHWAJA: You’d be like, yeah.
DEMBY: (Laughter).
KHWAJA: That is my neighbor. Like, it was exciting in that way. And the merch game was unmatched.
MOORE: It’s still Oprah, Michael, Obama.
(LAUGHTER)
DEMBY: What do you remember about how people talked about the Obama presidency in the city back when he was in the White House? Like, what was the vibe?
MOORE: I would say mostly excitement. You know, there’s 2008. And then there’s 2016. But, you know, I was a reporter the whole time of his presidency, and yeah, I just – I think it was exciting. And then, you know, you have folks, Black folks – not just Black folks – who, you know, just really don’t believe in the imperialist nature of a presidency. So, you know, I heard some of that. You know, sometimes things were a little unfair, you know, questioning his motives or, you know, who he is. And then there are, you know, other critiques that are rooted in policy and understanding that the empire knows no color.
DEMBY: But, Maira, you were pretty young during the Obama presidency. Now you work with younger people who probably don’t remember a pre-Obama America, right? So, like…
KHWAJA: No.
DEMBY: …How do the people in the neighborhood you work with talk about or think about his legacy to you?
KHWAJA: There’s honestly something kind of amazing about the fact that having a Black president was not, like, considered remarkable to them. Like, when I would talk to students a lot about – high school students about voting or, like, take them to vote once they turned 18…
DEMBY: Oh, you would take them to vote?
KHWAJA: Yeah. That was, like, part of what I did. And then if they didn’t want to vote, I would, like, interview them about why just to, like, understand their, like, interest in civics or disinterest. And I think there was overall not an interest in voting, in part because the students I worked with, their interaction with the government in general was through the lens of just being policed every day, and having police in their school, police around their school, cop cars waiting outside of Hyde Park Academy every day expecting a fight.
And so, to them, it’s like, participating in voting or anything was, like, just the same thing as interacting with the police. And so Obama kind of fell into that, too. He visited Hyde Park Academy a few times. That was cool. Like, it’s cool. He’s very nice, right? Like, he’s a celebrity. But there wasn’t this feeling of, like, oh, me, too – I could be like that.
DEMBY: For sure. I mean, for those of us who are not from the Chi, who don’t have a sense of the geography there, like, how would you describe the specific area that the Obama center is located?
MOORE: For people who aren’t from Chicago, the South Side is like this blank, amorphous term. But it’s the largest geographic part of the city. So it is in Jackson Park, which, you know, it’s near the Woodlawn neighborhood, which is a Black neighborhood. My mother grew up in west Woodlawn. This is where Lorraine Hansberry’s father bought a house that was the inspiration for “A Raisin In The Sun.” But I would say, the park is more of a South Side park rather than just a Woodlawn park. Woodlawn is just south of the University of Chicago, so there have always been housing tensions that are there.
DEMBY: Housing tensions because the University of Chicago is a well-resourced school. And so much of the South Side of Chicago, where it is, is, like, working-class, middle-class Black families. And all the sort of friction and drag that comes on…
MOORE: Correct.
DEMBY: …Housing for Black folks.
KHWAJA: Yeah. One thing I’d love to mention about the geography of where the Obama center sits is that it kind of straddles this extremely wealthy part of Hyde Park. And then you cross this park, and then you’re at Hyde Park Academy, which, like Natalie said, is actually in Woodlawn. And so, quickly, you shift from, like, wealthy Hyde Park into a much lower-income area. There’s affordable housing right around there that has been kind of under threat. And a lot of tenant unions have been organizing around it.
The other thing I’d say, too, to these observations about how Jackson Park has been used and cherished over the years is I remember when the Obama center was deciding on where they were going to build. And one of the advocates for building it in Jackson Park was the president’s adviser, David Axelrod. And I remember he famously said that nobody uses Jackson Park and that this would bring people to Jackson Park. And that, like – I continue to feel and hear that in my head every time I’m in Jackson Park, biking through for the cherry blossoms, going to the house music picnic.
MOORE: Yeah. But there’s some invisible lines within the park on who was going where. Like, I never go to the cherry blossoms because I always forget.
KHWAJA: Right, right, right. They’re also there for, like, three days (laughter).
MOORE: Yeah. I’m not opposed to them.
(LAUGHTER)
MOORE: So I always miss the window. But have I taken my daughter on the swings? Yes.
KHWAJA: Right.
MOORE: Do I go to the beach? Yes.
KHWAJA: Yeah. People love Jackson Park and have been using it for a long time. And it’s just an important thing to think about when you think of what this impact will be.
DEMBY: When he says nobody, he’s like – he means certain nobodies, right? Like…
KHWAJA: Yeah, exactly. He means, like, tourists (laughter).
DEMBY: So, Natalie, you’ve been down to the new center. You’ve seen the Obamalisk, as his detractors have called it. You’ve seen the new center. What do you think of it?
MOORE: So I’ve been covering this story since before the site was even picked.
DEMBY: So you have, like, a longitudinal view on, like, this – yeah.
MOORE: Yes. I would say the campus itself is beautiful. There’s a lot of open space and winding walking paths. There’s a beautiful public library branch. There’s gardens. There’s a lagoon, and then there’s, like, Michigan on the other side. So you can walk from one space to the other. You know, the – some of the architecture critics here were skeptical of the building because nothing is that tall. But now that it’s done, there’s a sense of, OK, I see how all of this works.
I guess I’ll finally say, having a building like this so big in a community or swath of a community that’s not used to it, you know, is a little – it’s jarring. But people also point out, like, there’s this wonderful Picasso statue in Daley Plaza that was – when it was built decades ago, people hated it. They’re like, this is ugly. Why is this here? We need to replace it, and now it is beloved. So I do think over time, we might see some different opinions on how this space looks. But I would say, from a campus perspective, it’s beautiful.
KHWAJA: The playground is – looks really cool.
MOORE: Oh, yeah, the playground.
KHWAJA: And, like, my biggest fear about the architecture or, like, frustration, rather, is the playground that the Hyde Park Academy students would play on was across the street, and they built home court over that. And I know that that campus will be heavily policed, and I’m like, well, where’s – where are they going to play? And so my hope is that the new playground, which does look dope, like, that’s a space that the kids can come to.
DEMBY: Have you been, Maira? Have you been down to the Obama Center?
KHWAJA: I have not been inside of it, no. I’ve, like, looked around the campus, but I have not been inside.
DEMBY: Gotcha. Yeah, the thing you said now is interesting, is, like, the way that sort of – when things are sort of habituated into the landscape in these ways. Like, you know, I remember thinking about the Vietnam War Memorial was, like, hated when it was first, like, introduced on the Washington Mall, right? And now is, like, this sort of, like, almost, like, the paragon of how you should do something that’s, like, that somber. And so many of the reviews I’ve been reading about the Obama Center have been kind of almost necessarily in conversation with the Trump moment, and it’s like, oh, I wonder how people will think about the way this place looks when we are further removed from this particular moment. Do you have any sense of, like, how the area around the Obama Center will be policed?
MOORE: So it is supposed to be public.
DEMBY: But, you know.
MOORE: What I am interested in seeing is what does that public look like. Outside of the Obama Center, there’s so much policing at the beach. And I know people are thinking, what are you talking about? Yes, Chicago has lots of beaches.
DEMBY: Yes, it does.
MOORE: Because Lake Michigan is a sea. It is not a placid lake. You cannot see the other side. So, you know, there’s already a heavy police presence in public parks. So, yes, I will be curious to see what this is like.
KHWAJA: Yeah. I think this summer, in particular, I’m interested and anxious to see what the policing will be like because in the neighborhood of Hyde Park and the beaches that Natalie is describing, the police presence has dramatically intensified as the weather has gotten warmer. There is a lot of fear around groups of Black teenagers just gathering, and it is pretty stark, the difference in how people are policed in that area. So I’m excited to hear that, you know, we’re all supposed to be able to use the park grounds, and I think that it’ll be really beautiful. And the summer, I think, will be a contentious time. Tends to be a contentious time.
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DEMBY: When we come back…
KHWAJA: I do think that even people that love Obama and that love the center have not been able to argue with the facts of, like, the affordability crisis and the displacement.
DEMBY: Stay with us, y’all.
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DEMBY: Gene. Just Gene for this part. CODE SWITCH. And we’re talking about the impact of the opening of the Obama Presidential Center on the South Side of Chicago. So I’m talking to some locals, Maira Khwaja, a writer and organizer who’s worked with students at the school, kind of next door to the center, and the journalist Natalie Moore.
Natalie, you have been following this, obviously, from the moment this center was announced, right? You’ve been following the story for a while. And, you know, from the beginning, there’s been all these concerns around, like, what putting the Obama Center in this location would do to the rest of the neighborhood. There’s been really intense pushback from people in the neighborhood from organizers trying to stop it from being built. Like, could you talk about the universe of concerns that they had in the early stages when this was, like, in the sort of gestational stages of the center being built?
MOORE: You know, one of the stories that I did early on was there was a lot of concern that this was going to be a land grab for the University of Chicago.
DEMBY: Yeah. That was one of the things I heard, too. Yeah.
MOORE: Yeah. And so a project that I did with another reporter was we created a boundary and said, let’s see who the biggest landholder is in East Woodlawn. And it was not the University of Chicago. It was actually the city of Chicago because these were vacant lots, like, houses that were torn down, property that the city inherited. So the city really had more of the power to help shape because of what they owned. So that was the big takeaway.
DEMBY: Gotcha.
MOORE: And I remember doing that story. The late Mattie Butler, a housing organizer, did affordable housing, said there is enough room for everybody in this community because there’s so much vacancy that people don’t have to leave. There’s no need for displacement because there’s so much to build on.
KHWAJA: Totally. And Miss Butler and, like, the tenant unions that she worked with – they really did say throughout their 10-year campaign that – we’re not anti-Obama Center. Like, we just want to be able to stay here to enjoy it. And that’s also what the young people at Hyde Park have said over the past 10 years of interviewing them – was, like, we feel like we’re going to be pushed out or our family’s going to be pushed out. Like, it seems really cool. I hope my younger siblings get to enjoy it.
DEMBY: Have we seen any of that happen? Like – but have we seen people displaced? Have we seen housing prices go up?
KHWAJA: So yeah. So the Illinois Answers Project recently put out a story that had some really helpful data. In the past 10 years, the median sale price of a single-family home in Woodlawn has jumped 4.6 times. So…
DEMBY: Jeez.
KHWAJA: The real estate speculation has been dramatic. If you’re just browsing on Zillow, you’ll see homes for $1 million in Woodlawn. So, yes, people have been displaced.
DEMBY: I’m curious about how the Obama Foundation was responding to all these complaints – right? – to all the sort of pushback they were getting from South Siders.
MOORE: Not much. They’ve stayed on message about, this is development for the community. We want to be on the South Side. This community is important to us. It’s near where Michelle Obama grew up. It’s addressing some of the things that she said that she didn’t see as a kid. And I also think that they were able to punt because, like I said, the city owns so much of the property.
DEMBY: Like, they could say, it’s not our – it’s like, this is not our question to solve.
MOORE: Yeah. And I would just say in general, you know, just to broaden this out, like, outside is so expensive. Like, Woodlawn is not the only neighborhood that is suffering from affordability issues.
DEMBY: Right.
MOORE: You know, the city hasn’t been able to pass other measures that housing advocates have wanted. Like, rent is really high. You know, there is a citywide housing crisis that is going on, and there are very few neighborhoods that are exempt from that.
DEMBY: Right. I’m curious about when people are organizing, you know, to – and pushing back on the Obama administration. There’s, like, the singular effective representational power of the Obama presidency – right? – for Black folks in particular. And I imagine part of what the organizers had to deal with was also just people who rock with the Obamas, who were, like, Obama fans. Was that a dynamic that was present on the ground? Like, were people – were there Obama stans, for lack of a better word, who were sort of, like, hey, hey, hey – not too much of our president? You know what I mean?
KHWAJA: I would say – yeah. I don’t – I wouldn’t say they were organizing. But I do think that even people that love Obama and that love the center have not been able to argue with the facts of, like, the affordability crisis and the displacement. Some people want the displacement also. There’s a lot of hatred of poor working-class people. There – I think there are, like, not just developers, but I do think there are people who are like, yeah, I don’t want that housing to be so close to the Obama Center. I think that’s been a hard legacy in some ways of Chicago’s public housing crisis since demolishing high-rise public housing. I think there’s just a lot of feeling of, like, I don’t want people who are in public housing to be in my neighborhood. Like…
DEMBY: Yeah.
KHWAJA: Why are they here now? And that’s something that I have noticed in talking with people. But I would also love to add that I think one thing I did notice in terms of people feeling activated around the housing campaign, whether or not they got deeply involved, I think one of the things that made people more sympathetic to it was in the early days of the campaign. I think this is 2017. President Obama sat in, like, a conference – like, one of those community meetings. And he was directly asked about if the Obama Center would sign on to a CBA, a community benefits agreement.
DEMBY: What’s a CBA, for those of us who don’t know?
KHWAJA: Yeah. A community benefits agreement is basically, like, a packaged piece of legislation that provides protections that are negotiated around, like, housing or jobs – some set of agreements with the community. And so sometimes a CBA can be about environmental concerns. That’s been a – that’s a conversation right now in another part of the city. But the Obama CBA was specifically around housing protections.
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BARACK OBAMA: Michelle and I, as residents of the community, as people who have worked and lived there for a very long time, feel very confident in our ability to make sure that we have a very inclusive process where everybody has their say.
KHWAJA: And he basically was like, you guys – broadly speaking, he was like, there’s no community organization that speaks for all the community. We know what’s best. You should trust us. And he just shut it down.
DEMBY: That’s very fascinating, considering he is a community organizer, famously, right?
KHWAJA: Yeah.
DEMBY: Like, he would have been one of the people maybe on the other side of this in a different lifetime.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
OBAMA: I’ve been there. You know that? I used to be the organizer…
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: …Insisting on accountability for the community.
(APPLAUSE)
KHWAJA: But it – I remember, for me, it was jarring. It was really jarring to hear him just flat-out refuse to engage with organizers. And I think a lot of people like me were also kind of taken aback by it.
DEMBY: Natalie, from, like – from the outside, this seems kind of like, you know, your classic gentrification and revitalization story. Like, you got – this person wants to build something. They have deep pockets. They want to build something in a neighborhood, and that building might speed up the rise of housing costs, speed up displacement. But in this case, the deep-pocketed developer person is the first Black president. Is that too simple a framing here?
MOORE: I would say yes.
DEMBY: OK.
MOORE: This may be going on a tangent, so just bear…
DEMBY: Yeah. For sure.
MOORE: …With me here. Black South Side neighborhoods, in particular, have been stripped away and also starved from investment. So when things do come to a neighborhood, there are concerns about, who is this for? When I have heard organizers say, this is a wholesale attempt by the Obamas to just push us out – they don’t want us here – I don’t agree with that sentiment. I think that’s going too far. My take has been that there’s a lot of overstating on all sides. There are not white yuppies who are dying to move to Woodlawn to live by the Obama Center. I also don’t think that the Obama Center is going to spur this renaissance of Black-owned businesses on 63rd Street either. And, you know, Gene, you and I have talked about this. Gentrification is a fraught word because it often does not happen…
DEMBY: …In Black…
MOORE: In Black…
DEMBY: …Neighborhoods. Right.
MOORE: …Neighborhoods.
DEMBY: Right.
KHWAJA: Right. Totally.
MOORE: So what does that look like here, to have a beautiful development but making sure everybody gets to use it? I think that there are some bolder things the foundation could have done, given Barack Obama’s legacy as a community organizer. Michelle Obama grew up in South Shore. They got married at the South Shore Cultural Center. You know, they lived near the community. So I think their intent is not, we’re building this so we can push Black people out. That said, if you do feel left behind in this country or this city and neighborhood, I understand that more protections are needed. I also want to highlight the pushback from a white-led group called Protect Our Parks.
DEMBY: OK.
MOORE: Their issue was, we don’t think this should be built on park land. That was just their fundamental feeling.
DEMBY: I was reading about this.
MOORE: And this group kept suing. And the courts kept throwing it out. And, you know, there was a final ruling in 2018 that said, this isn’t going to happen. So when I see a white-led group called Protect Our Parks that doesn’t advocate for equity otherwise, that is a very intentional, curious choice to me.
DEMBY: Got you.
KHWAJA: I appreciate you bringing that distinction up because I think that that was part of the reason that the housing campaign had to be so strong in its messaging about saying, yes Obama center, no displacement. Because in media, specifically national media, it’s hard to make that distinction of, like, not all these people organizing around issues related to the center are on the same page. And I know that they’ve had to turn down, you know, interviews from outlets that are kind of secretly right-wing because they’re like, wait, what’s the angle on why they’re trying to be critical of the center? It makes it really hard to talk about this, which is why I think even Natalie and I are being, like, so careful with our words, too, because I don’t – I just never wanted to be, like, disrespectful because I know also how much this does mean to so many people.
MOORE: It just means – to people.
KHWAJA: It means – I, like, really can’t understate, like, how excited so many people really, deeply are.
MOORE: How many Black family reunions are going to be coming here every summer.
KHWAJA: Exactly.
DEMBY: A thousand percent. Like, it’s going to be a site of pilgrimage for a lot of people who, like, you know – if my mom and I find myself in Chicago, this is going to be on our list.
KHWAJA: As it should be. And then, also the people that live around there, like, I’m like, I’m sure I’ll take the kids I babysit to go play on that playground. That’s going to be the nicest playground in the area, like, absolutely.
DEMBY: Absolutely, yeah.
KHWAJA: So, you know, I’m always like, I don’t want what I’m saying, this ideally nuanced critique, to become fodder for a white supremacist who just hates Obama.
DEMBY: Well, I mean, to that point, I mean, this Obama center is coming into being on Juneteenth, at a time when, again, the vibe, friends, the vibes are trash.
KHWAJA: (Laughter).
DEMBY: They’re absolute trash. Democratic voters are pissed at Trump. They’re just as angry at Democrats in Washington. In the decades since he left office, like, that Obama-era hope is increasingly hard to feel. And, like, the most cutting appraisals of his presidency are coming from the left, like, not just the right. So how does a building dedicated to optimism around democracy and the American project, like, how does that land differently right now for y’all?
KHWAJA: So I haven’t been inside yet. But I will say that friends of a variety of backgrounds that have gotten a preview of the center all said that they cried and that basically that it felt like the promise of 2015. And so you just feel this stark contrast between, like, how bad the vibes are in 2026 and, like, what so many of us believe to still be possible in 2015. And the contrast sounds devastating. But, yeah, I’m curious. Is that how you felt about it, too, Natalie, that it felt like it was a monument to how we felt in 2015?
MOORE: Yeah, so the piece that I wrote after the press day was a take about, what does it mean to have a museum talking about democracy when democracy is falling apart? And I think we should – we keep saying Jackson Park. We haven’t said who it’s named after. The park is named after Andrew Jackson.
DEMBY: I was wondering about that.
MOORE: A slave-holding president. So there are these interesting juxtapositions that are there. So it’s so hard not to think about Trump’s presidency in this moment.
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MOORE: The museum opens not with the Obamas but with other struggles, like suffragists, labor movement, you know, Black Panthers. So they are talking about movements that have worked, and have also floundered, before you even get into the Obama story. So I think that the museum is really designed for people just to have some nostalgia and think about that moment of hope, but to leave there and feel like they can do something, no matter how small it is, especially given the moment. Now, they’re not – they don’t ever say the word Trump. And when you ask – don’t even ask them that. Just talk about democracy. But that is their way. And they have to know that people are thinking about this.
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DEMBY: Natalie Moore, Maira Khwaja, thank you for talking to us. Appreciate you.
MOORE: Thanks for having us.
KHWAJA: So good to see you guys, see both of you.
DEMBY: By the way, we reached out to the Obama Foundation for comment. But we did not hear back from them in time for this episode. And, y’all, that is our show.
PARKER: And just a reminder that you can follow CODE SWITCH wherever you listen to podcasts, so you never miss an episode. This episode was produced by Jess Kung. It was edited by Courtney Stein. It was engineered by Kwesi Lee.
DEMBY: And thank you to Maira Khwaja and the Invisible Institute for sharing some of the interviews they did with students from Hyde Park Academy. And we would be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive. That’s Christina Cala and Xavier Lopez, and Dalia Mortada and Leah Donnella. And Barton Girdwood, and Maya Dangerfield, and Yolanda Sangweni. As for me, I’m Gene Demby.
PARKER: And I’m B.A. Parker.
DEMBY: Be easy, y’all.
PARKER: Hydrate. Happy Juneteenth, y’all.
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