January 30, 2026

Since the 2024 presidential election, I regularly come across social media posts and comments—usually authored by white folks—calling on former President Barack Obama, former First Lady Michelle Obama, and former Vice President (and 2024 presidential candidate) Kamala Harris to step in and help “save democracy.” The framing is almost always the same: the house is burning, democracy is under threat, and where are they? Why aren’t they doing more to save America?

Almost inevitably, a Black person will respond. They’ll say some version of: they’ve done enough. They’re resting. They’ve moved on with their lives. And maybe—just maybe—white Americans should have appreciated them more when they were actually in office.

At this point, what more can they do that hasn’t already been done? 

***

America doesn’t summon Black truth-tellers in a crisis. It calls on Black translators.

Not just any Black leaders, but very specific ones—figures who are familiar, respected, and, most importantly, safe for white audiences. Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, and at times Kamala Harris are asked to step in because they can explain the danger without naming who lit the match. They can make urgency feel manageable, hope feel possible, and injustice feel contained. The expectation is not that they will disrupt the system, but that they will stabilize it.

At the same time, notice who is never summoned. Rev. Al Sharpton is not expected to save democracy. Roland Martin is not called upon. Organizers who speak plainly about white supremacy or structural failure are left out. These voices are too direct, too uncomfortable, too demanding of accountability. They are not seen as helpful. They are seen as threatening.

What is being asked for is not leadership, but reassurance. America wants to be told that things are serious but that everything will ultimately be all right, without needing to confront the role it plays in making things wrong in the first place.

So when Black people respond, saying that they’ve done enough, that they are resting, or that they’ve moved on with their lives, the unease it produces is not fear for democracy. It is the loss of a familiar voice, one that soothes anxiety without requiring change, one that translates danger into something comforting.

***

It’s not only that America delegates responsibility to certain Black figures. What is more troubling is the unspoken expectation that these calls will be answered. As if Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, or Kamala Harris are obliged to step in on demand, as if their lives, their rest, their own sense of purpose, should bend to meet the urgency of a country that has never fully valued them. There is an assumption that their agency is secondary to the collective anxiety of white America, that their choices should be defined by the needs of a public that has already asked—and received—so much.

This expectation is both personal and symbolic. On a personal level, it denies these individuals the right to rest, to live, to move forward on their own terms. Symbolically, it reinforces a broader cultural pattern: Black labor—intellectual, emotional, civic—is always assumed to be available, and rarely, if ever, optional. The extraordinary becomes ordinary, and the ordinary is expected to absorb anxiety it never caused.

The calls for these specific figures are rarely about leadership or accountability. They are about reassurance. They are about comfort. They are about maintaining the illusion that the system is under control, without requiring the people who benefit most from its stability to act. And when these figures choose not to answer, when they assert their own agency, the response is often framed as neglect or failure, rather than the perfectly human exercise of choice and self-preservation that it is.

***

The fantasy is not just that these figures will provide reassurance. It is that when they are summoned, they will obey. That when America signals danger, Black people—specifically the ones it deems acceptable—will drop everything and act. There is an unspoken entitlement baked into this expectation, one that stretches back through the history of slavery and Jim Crow. For centuries, Black labor—physical, intellectual, emotional—was demanded without consent. Obedience was assumed. Lives were not their own. Rights did not exist independently of white will.

Today, the language and context have changed, but the expectation remains. The call for Obama, Michelle Obama, Harris, or any “acceptable” Black figure carries the same undertone: do what is asked, set aside your own life and priorities, and serve the needs of a society that has never fully valued you. The extraordinary feat of Black leadership, excellence, and moral clarity is treated as ordinary duty, and refusal is framed as failure or selfishness.

It is not merely a desire for reassurance. It is the projection of a legacy of entitlement. A fantasy that Black people are always at the ready to absorb anxiety, to solve problems, to stabilize a system that has historically undermined and devalued them. And when they assert their own agency, when they step back or move on, it triggers discomfort, indignation, even moral panic—because it disrupts a long-cultivated expectation that Black labor and obedience are inexhaustible.

***

What often goes unspoken is that this expectation of obligation does not apply in the same way to everyday Black people. And that difference matters. While figures like the Obamas or Kamala Harris are constrained by legacy, optics, and the weight of national symbolism, the rest of us are not bound in the same way. We have a freedom they may not. We can say out loud what they are expected to soften, redirect, or leave unsaid.

Black people who push back in these online exchanges are not being flippant or dismissive. They are exercising agency. They are naming a boundary. They are refusing a script that says Black responsibility begins where white anxiety spikes. When someone responds, “They’ve done enough,” or “They’re resting,” or “White folks should have appreciated them more when they were in office,” that is not indifference. It is clarity.

There is something quietly empowering about that refusal. It breaks the fantasy that Black people exist solely to be summoned in moments of crisis. It challenges the idea that our purpose is to rescue, reassure, or redeem a system that has rarely extended us the same care. In speaking plainly, ordinary Black people expose what these calls really are: not a request for leadership, but an expectation of service.

This is not about abandoning democracy. It is about reclaiming the right to define our relationship to it. The freedom to say what prominent Black figures may not be able to say publicly—that we are not obligated to save a country that consistently resists saving itself. That our value does not lie in our willingness to absorb harm, manage fear, or show up on demand.

And in that refusal, there is power. Not because it withdraws care, but because it insists on dignity.

***

This is not a refusal of democracy. Black people are not walking away. We are not turning our backs on the collective stakes of our society. What we are doing is claiming the right to define how, when, and on what terms we engage. With every generation, we are learning to recognize the fantasies that white America projects onto us—the belief that our labor, our reassurance, our moral authority are always available, always unconditional.

And with that recognition comes power. Power to say no. Power to rest. Power to demand that our agency be acknowledged. Power to push back against a history that has treated Black compliance as a given. Each refusal, each boundary, is a statement that our value is not measured by how we comfort the anxious or stabilize the uneasy. It is measured by our own terms, our own choices, and our own communities.

In asserting these boundaries, we are not abandoning responsibility or fleeing the work of democracy. We are, instead, reshaping it. We are insisting that Black people are participants, not props; that our engagement is neither infinite nor automatically available; and that real accountability requires more than our labor—it requires structural commitment. With every generation, the line between expectation and exploitation becomes clearer, and the space to protect ourselves grows wider.