In this accessible, engaging book, journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan argues that across two terms as President, Barack Obama solidified his status as something Black people hadn’t had for fifty years: a folk hero. The 1960s delivered Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, forever twinned as larger-than-life outsiders and truth tellers who took on racism and died in the process. Obama, Kaplan explains, is different: Not an outsider but President, head of the most powerful state in the world; a centrist Democrat, not the face of a movement. Yet he is every bit a folk hero, doing battle with a system that has historically kept people like him on the margins. He is unique among presidents and entirely unique among black people, who never expected to have a president so soon. In I Heart Obama, Kaplan offers an unapologetic appreciation of President Obama and what he means to Black Americans.