This photo of Obama and a little visitor at a Black History Month celebration is remarkable

[babylonsister]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/20/this-photo-of-obama-and-a-little-visitor-at-a-black-history-month-celebration-says-a-lot/?postshare=131455981069415&tid=ss_fb-bottom

This photo of Obama and a little visitor at a Black History Month celebration is remarkable
By Janell Ross February 20 at 8:00 AM

https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=
Clark Reynolds, 3, is greeted by President Barack Obama during a Black History Month Celebration held Feb.18, 2016 at the White House in Washington, D.C. (Pete Souza/White House)


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He was excited. And once inside, he was in open awe. This, as Clark put it, is where the president lives. He met Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.). Someone snapped a photo of Clark and the First Lady. Somehow, Clark made his way to the front of the a rope line as President Obama worked his way across the room. Then, Obama noticed Clark too, touched Clark's check and bent down to exchange words while he straightened Clark's tie.

As we near the end of President Obama's second and final term, it can be hard to remember what the picture of Clark above -- snapped this week by Pete Souza, chief official White House photographer -- so ably captured.

Most of us, are by now aware that Obama's election was never the evidence of an entirely new and different America. It was never the proof that race had ceased to matter in elections or so many other aspects of American life. And, the notion of the central role white voters played in putting the nation's first black president in office was so often and casually repeated that larger and accurate truths about American life and the nation's electorate were obscured.

What remains in the inevitably imperfect residue of the Obama years is this thing, visible to even the most jaundiced of political eyes, in the face of a boy who visited the White House for the first time Thursday.

Whatever the Obama administration's victories and defeats, its achievements and its failures -- and those that remain to come -- one look at this little boy standing behind a White House rope line, shirttails un-tucked, jacket buttoned and tie somehow looped over said rope, really makes one thing clear: Our collective notion of what is feasible in the United States forever changed between February 2007 and February 2016.

On Thursday, before Clark left the White House, President Obama inscribed Clark's favorite book. Clark's mother brought it along. The inscription reads: "To Clark -- Dream big dreams! Barack Obama ."