(CNN) Cory Booker and Kamala Harris kicked off their 2020 campaigns like no other black presidential candidates ever have, including the only one who has won. Perhaps that's a privilege only they have -- afforded only after eight years of the first black US president.

There is a hilarious Key and Peele skit that sums up how President Barack Obama sometimes navigated his blackness.

Going through a receiving line of blacks and whites, he greets the whites with a stiff "How are you? Nice to see you." With the blacks he is all hugs and hand pounds, his blaccent on fleek.

The point -- Obama's blackness was situational, reserved for black people who keenly understood that code-switching and both-siderism on matters of racism were the only path for the first black president.

As they vie to become the second black president, Booker and Harris are making a different calculation.