Chicago City Wire

Marquita Hanus, a resident of Chicago's South Side, once inspired by Barack Obama's historic election, now feels disillusioned by his presidency. She claims it failed to uplift her community, deepened racial divisions, and turned promises of healing into a legacy of identity politics.

"What I would find myself saying often was MLK, his vision was that we would be judged by the content of our character. And this administration fully reversed that," said Hanus. "You know, it was, what color am I and how do I vote? And that was, to me, a detractor from everything that we both had survived and then worked for as adults."

Steve Cortes, Founder of the League of American Workers and head of Cortes Investigates, has released a documentary titled "YOU DON'T KNOW BARACK: EXPOSING OBAMA," which examines President Obama's legacy. In the documentary, Cortes speaks with Hanus, who says that despite Obama’s populist rhetoric, his administration did not meet her expectations. As a single mother, she recalled waking her daughters to watch his victory speech in 2008, feeling that "the rhetoric that his candidacy was based upon was something that we would actually see play out in a tangible way." However, she later believed that Obama "drove us in the opposite direction," fostering division rather than healing.

According to Hanus, Obama's early handling of race-related incidents, particularly his public rebuke of the Cambridge police—calling their actions "stupid"—vilified law enforcement like her brother, a sergeant who survived the same streets. "He didn’t leave it better than he found it," she said. She asserted that his administration reversed Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of judging people by character rather than color and instead amplified identity politics that "became a bigger dividing point."

Growing up in Chicago’s Roseland neighborhood, Hanus said Obama's presidency left her community behind. "Anyone who wants to climb out of this neighborhood will have to do it without the help of Barack Obama," she said. She described how her own path to success came not from government intervention but from her grandmother’s insistence on self-worth and personal choice. While she once saw Obama as a symbol of progress—"wildly symbolic," she said he "corroded some of the healing" she’d seen in her youth by deepening racial resentment.

Cortes is also known as the Founder and President of the League of American Workers and serves as a senior political advisor to CatholicVote. He is a former senior advisor to President Trump and JD Vance and has been a commentator for Fox News and CNN. Cortes regularly releases documentaries and columns at cortesinvestigates.com.