How much will Obama’s being black matter in the end? In, say, 20 years, will it be a major or minor aspect of his presidency and, to the extent that it will matter, in what specific way will it matter most?

Barack Obama’s blackness will remain the most significant aspect of his presidency for generations to come. His two administrations will be analyzed by historians in light of previous presidents whose terms were marked indelibly by a racial realignment of the electoral map of the nation. He will be compared, favorably and unfavorably, to none other than Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Baines Johnson, all of whom expanded the boundaries of America’s multiracial democracy.

Obama’s favorable legacy will be defined by the strength of his individual character, his exceptional personal biography, and his authenticity. He is a man of principle and strong convictions and truly believes as so many children of immigrants before him in the American Dream. As an Ivy-educated black man, devoted father and faithful husband, his achievements are kryptonite to the enduring strength of racial stereotypes. He is a living embodiment of American exceptionalism, of the capacity of any individual, in a free nation, to aspire to the zenith of success and achieve it by dint of hard work and ambition. He is everything Lincoln, FDR, and LBJ could have imagined as the prized harvest of the racial seeds they sowed.

And yet biography is not history. A generation from now, historians will do a postmortem and pronounce the exceptional man an unremarkable leader on America’s most enduring challenge. They will dissect in a thousand ways with precision and compassion the promise and possibility that a single black body—truly African and American—could hold a nation together and suture its deepest wounds.

Obama is the apotheosis of the assimilation society and the end of aspiration as the currency of racial change. He is the dreamer’s dream unrealized. America is redder and bluer, whiter and blacker, richer and poorer, more unregulated and less free. The rhetoric of a more perfect union as ballast through the storms of congressional obstructionism, state-sanctioned violence, voting restrictions, binge incarceration, and poverty not seen in more than half a century will have proved insufficient to right the ship of our racial state. He will have taught us that our leaders must lead knowing history is not a linear arc of progress from Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall. That the present can fall back into the past and that no man or woman’s singularity can bring us to shore alone. In these ways, he will have navigated us to our Third Reconstruction, better prepared to face the challenges before us.