When President Barack Obama talked about being racially profiled before he became a senator during impromptu remarks to the press last Friday, he wasn’t kidding.
The president’s widely hailed remarks reminded some viewers of an infamous 2003 incident, where the then-state senator Obama was mistaken for the help at a swanky New York City party at the home of the Daily Beast’s Tina Brown and Harold Evans.
Katie Rosman of the Wall Street Journal wrote about the incident in a 2008 piece:
Standing by myself I noticed, on the periphery of the party, a man looking as awkward and out-of-place as I felt. I approached him and introduced myself. He was an Illinois state senator who was running for the U.S. Senate. He was African American, one of a few black people in attendance.
We spoke at length about his campaign. He was charismatic in a quiet, solemn way. I told him I wanted to pitch a profile of him to a national magazine. (The magazine later rejected my proposal.)
The following year I watched as he gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, and then won his Senate seat that fall. On Tuesday, Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States.
The president addressed this kind of casual prejudice in his speech on last week when he said, “there are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.”
“What I will always remember,” Rosman wrote in 2008, “is as I was leaving that party … I was approached by another guest, an established author. He asked about the man I had been talking to. Sheepishly he told me he didn’t know that Obama was a guest at the party, and had asked him to fetch him a drink. In less than six years, Obama has gone from being mistaken for a waiter among the New York media elite, to the president-elect. What a country.”