After a gunman unsuccessfully attempted to bust into the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night, Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett decided what the situation called for was a post on social media comparing the shooter to Barack Obama. Or, more accurately, Obama’s hypothetical son — who Barnett presumes would be a violent threat to society.
He put this up at 4:12 p.m. on Monday, by the way. So this was not an ill-advised, heat of the moment Saturday night post. He had a full day-and-a-half to workshop this gem.
That description may sound like a hyperbolic account designed to cast a luminary of the conservative legal movement in a shockingly racist light, but if anything it undersells his post:
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In case you’re missing the context — and the level of sheer racism is distracting — Barnett is trying to mirror Obama’s 2012 remark that “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” which the former president offered after George Zimmerman stalked and killed a Black teenager for walking through the neighborhood with a bag of Skittles. Obama got emotional imagining this, Barnett jokes about it because, you know, racism. Barnett’s conservative fellow travelers are hailing the quip as clever satire, because snarky callbacks to 14-year-old political speeches about the violent death of innocent children is kneeslapping entertainment to the sort of people who say “why can’t we tell jokes anymore?” and then this is the joke.
Barnett’s version trips over its own laces before it gets to the punchline. The point of Obama’s line was about appearance — about how Black kids in this country with nothing else in common can be killed simply because there are white people who’ve decided based on mere appearance that they pose a threat. Barnett’s supposedly clever inversion crafts something meaningfully stupider: that someone who looks like Obama’s son would necessarily be a violent menace to society. Rather than inverting Obama’s observation, Barnett reveals himself as precisely the sort of white guy who thinks how someone looks makes them a threat.
Adam Serwer of The Atlantic diagnosed the problem succinctly:
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You really cannot overestimate the level of status trauma a lot of white Americans experienced at the election of Barack Obama and how much of our politics is still influenced by it.
Because Barnett’s attempt at comedy isn’t just racist. It’s the entire psychic boo boo of right-wing politics distilled into a Tweet. It’s always about having to watch a Black guy be powerful for 8 years. That’s the lens.
Lately, Randy Barnett has embraced a role as one of the loudest cheerleaders for the Trump administration’s effort to read the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment out of the Constitution. He co-authored the New York Times op-ed attempting to slap together the pseudo-intellectual scaffolding for Trump’s executive order to deny citizenship to children born here to non-citizen parents. But, despite fancying himself a Fourteenth Amendment expert (who wrote a 2021 book titled The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit), Barnett seems to have never previously considered the idea that the birthright citizenship clause and the 125 years of precedent that goes with it meant anything other than what it says.
Apparently, his years of scholarly attention to the Fourteenth Amendment totally whiffed on this point until Stephen Miller pointed it out. Originalism is, after all, a serious endeavor.
This all springs from the same place. Consistency and principle are unnecessary trifles in a politics fully defined by lashing back against the event of a Black president. If the law professor needs to make a racist joke about Obama’s hypothetical son to register his objection to that fact, he’ll make the racist joke. If he needs to discover, a century and a half after ratification, that the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t mean what every court has ever said it means, he’ll discover it.
There is no honest reading of Barnett’s tweet that isn’t ugly. It is racist as a literal claim, as an attempted joke, and as a matter of revealed worldview. But it is refreshing to see one of the figures charged with providing the bogus intellectual cover for retrograde bigotry drop the charade for a second and reassure everyone that there isn’t a high-minded argument for this project. It’s just racism and Obama-era grievances all the way down.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.