Black culture and art flourished with the Obamas in the White House, showing America that blackness can be mainstream without losing any of its vibrance

There is a point in history where every former president ceases to be much more than a collection of cliches. This usually takes places after he dies; it’s much easier to malign or deify someone when he’s not around to tell you otherwise. Nixon was a crook. Reagan was a folksy Hollywood charmer who ended the cold war with a couple of cheeky speeches. FDR was a stern, disciplined commander-in-chief who saved the free world from a wheelchair. Lincoln was an ugly guy in a top hat who freed the slaves.

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America is a nation of storytellers, and our presidents are the protagonists in the narrative of the nation.

Barack Obama’s journey into history’s dusty pages already seems different, though. As our first black president (and our last president before handing over power to a rich despot with no concept of personal boundaries), Obama is already practically a saint to liberals – and more specifically African Americans. Whereas his immediate predecessors stumbled out of office in the wake of scandal or developing economic ruin, the mood around Obama seems wistful, elegiac and prematurely nostalgic.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Beyoncé with Barack Obama at his swearing-in ceremony. Photograph: Brooks Kraft/Corbis via Getty Images

For the black community, he represented the possibility that we had finally made good on the promises of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, that a dam of multiculturalism had broken. That it didn’t and we’ve collectively woken up to the reality that our nation is more divided than it’s been in the last 100 years hasn’t rendered his presidency any less meaningful for black folk. It’s just that the meaning behind it now feels more like the end of something, some impossible illusion, rather than the start of anything beautiful.

Obama’s run in the White House had all the superficial trappings of a hip-hop remix of Kennedy’s Camelot. Jay Z and Beyoncé performed at his second inaugural, a symbol not only of Obama’s connection to the dominant music of his culture, but also a sign of how far that music had risen in popular esteem. Later, he’d drop Spotify playlists of his favorite hip-hop songs and name-check rappers.

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The Obama White House opened its doors to black artists such as Queen Latifah, Prince and Stevie Wonder. It’s hardly uncommon for African American musicians to be invited to play for the president, but this was different. The Obamas gave black America its center and its north star. It’s fitting that Hamilton – the musical love letter to the nation’s founding and inadvertent valedictory address of the Obama era – had its genesis in a performance of its opening song in front of the first family.

There was a flowering that occurred in these last eight years. The brilliance of Chance the Rapper and countless other hip-hop figures came to the fore during Obama’s tenure in office. The ranks of vital black journalists has never felt fuller – Ta-Nehisi Coates and Wesley Morris among them. TV shows such as Empire and the Issa Rae-starring HBO series Insecure might not have been trendy green-lights for their networks in a world without the Obama effect.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barack Obama stands on stage with the musicians Jay Z and Bruce Springsteen at an election campaign rally in Columbus, Ohio. Photograph: Brooks Kraft/Corbis via Getty Images

None of this is going away on 20 January. In truth, all of the art and thought from black voices will be even more important in the next four years. What will change is the sense that the vista is limitless and that there is something better coming.

The police shootings and the rise in hate crimes should have been a sign to wake up, but how could we when the dream was so intoxicating? Barack and Michelle gave life to the ultimate black fairytale – hard work, education and intellect could tear through prejudice, even on the highest levels of the American class ladder. It was a dream far more seductive and potent than Martin Luther King’s vision of white children and black children being able to share a playground.

African American NBA players and pop stars started buying exotic modern art pieces, dabbling in fashion and grasping for a different sort of success than the one black culture had deemed appropriate or realistic in decades past. The ultimate sign that a black person had “made it” became owning a painting by Jean Michel Basquiat – an artist who struggled to be taken seriously in the lily-white art world only a few decades ago. A real “look at how far we’ve come” moment.

Unlike Basquiat, the Obamas strode effortlessly into the mainstream and were accepted with enthusiasm. Arguably, Michelle’s defining pop culture moment was her “mom dancing” on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

She followed that up later with a spot on James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke. She could be a formidable orator with a surplus of gravitas while also tweaking her status as America’s most famous matriarch. It’s remarkable that anyone could pull that off, let alone a black woman in the US – the land of the odious, harmful welfare queen stereotype. We require perfection from Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj and Rihanna, but we don’t from Michelle Obama.

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Even when feigning awkwardness, the Obamas are cooler than all of us. That dance typified a careful balancing act between aspiration and approachability; black hipness and the comfortable square quality one might associate with traditional white culture. Barack Obama could go from joking about LeBron James during the Cleveland Cavaliers’ NBA championship White House visit to sliding into a mundane conversation about nachos with Jerry Seinfeld on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. It’s the blueprint of the upwardly mobile black couple. It’s what we all envied about them: their uncanny ability to be accepted while never compromising their blackness.

The Obamas have many years left to add to their legacy, to continue striving for a more just world, but a little bit of their mystique is about to be left behind. Where does black America go from here? How do we define ourselves without our north star, our perfect illusion? If the rest of America is so intent on going back in time, then so must we – back to the struggle, back to the determination to overcome. The Obamas gave us a keyhole vision of a possible destination filled with material wealth, glamour and fame that just isn’t real for most black people in this country. It was a moment of great import, but it was merely a moment.

The only question left to resolve with the legacy of Barack Obama is whether his simplistic biographical sketch will start with “first black president” or “only black president”. Just because this is the end of something doesn’t mean that new beginning isn’t still ahead.