At the Obama Foundation Summit meeting on October 29, 2019, in Chicago, former president Barack Obama again strongly criticized the “woke” identity culture that puts a premium on moral outrage over race without actually doing anything concrete.

“I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, that the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people and that’s enough,” Obama said.

Yet the former president, as usual, ignored his own culpability for the current toxic environment.

For eight long years, the former political organizer and part-time law professor used the language of racial identity politics to further his own career, even if it meant, on occasion, fabricating incidents that didn’t actually happen.

For example, in his bestselling memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama claimed he broke up with a white girlfriend over her insensitivity to a black play they watched together.

“After the play was over, my friend started talking about why black people were so angry all the time,” Obama recalled in the book. “I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said—and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said that anger was just a dead end. We had a big fight, right in front of the theater.”

The problem is, none of that happened. 

When investigative journalists began looking into this incident, Obama was forced to admit the girlfriend in question didn’t actually exist but was a “composite” of people he had met.

Like Jussie Smollett and other people who fabricate racial crimes to further their political agendas or careers, Obama invented an incident of alleged racial bias or insensitivity that didn’t actually happen.

The former president is right about the moral blight of racial identity politics.

But he, as much as anyone, helped to create it