As I recall the great hope was that he was the Great Uniter. Polling says racial trust became or was made worse. I guess this is a debate — why?
I can’t claim credit for this idea, but every time I think of the Obama presidency and what we have now, I think of a Yale professor David Blight, who points out that there have been revolutions, and then there are counter-revolutions. There was the Civil War move to ban slavery, and then there was Reconstruction and Jim Crow. There was the integration of the military and Brown v Board, and then there was racial violence of the 1950s and 60s. I think Barack Obama was a watershed moment, but one that was destined to have a push back, and Trump was it.
A lot of people pointed to Barack Obama’s victory as proof that we had moved past race in this country, and indeed many have. But many have not, and there has been a lot of racial and cultural anxiety that has been exploited in public discourse.
Obama is half African, and he became President. This caused a certain sector of the American public to suddenly feel threatened. (In technical terms, they ‘lost their shit’.) It was around this time that I started seeing more racist cartoons/memes/jokes/Losers’ Flags/etc., and an astroturfed political quasi-party advocating nationalist policies and (in some cases) racial purity became more vocal. Some people objected to these things, causing the racist movement to complain that they were under attack. The opposition pointed out that they wouldn’t be under attack if they weren’t deplorable. And so on.
Which wouldn’t have happened if we’d elected a White President.
Sadly, the very fact that a Black President dared to address racism at all was a horrifying afront to a certain class of white people who were already bothered by his skin tone and would have preferred that he be completely silent on the subject.
Race relations got worse under the Obama presidency, that doesn’t mean it was the fault of anything Obama did.
Two things that contributing to increased “white” identity politics were the rise of Black Lives Matter and the migrant crisis in Europe caused by the Arab Spring. (Which didn’t involve America, but we live in an international media environment, so white Americans were made aware of it). Obama wasn’t responsible for either of those things: Black Lives Matter was a (maybe ill advised, maybe entirely justified, depending on your viewpoint) grassroots movement, and the Syrian and Libyan civil wars started independently of US intervention as well.
Pretty good responses in my opinion, so far.
Obama did not himself run a campaign based around healing the racial divide, or even for the sake of addressing it. He ran in order to be President of the United States.
It was people around him who decided to make his Presidency a test case for racism, and those people were on opposite sides. One side wanted him to be some sort of beacon or test case proof that racism should not exist, and the other side (joined energetically and duplicitously by the Republican Party) wanted to use him as a tool to excite the white racists in particular to support all manner of unrelated issues, for the benefit of a variety of people.
Compare that to such people as George HW Bush, who ran as The Education President, and then proceeded to do nothing at all about Education; and Hillary Clinton who lost, in no small part, because she ran as the First Female President to be, rather than as a leader of the American People.
Bottom line, I think that if you want to make a judgement about whether or not a given leader accomplished any goal of your choosing or not, that you need to first show that that leader actually set out purposefully to accomplish that particular goal.
From the very beginning there were people saying he’s a Muslim terrorist and not a real American. He didn’t do anything to inflame racial tension. It just brought racism to the public sphere because a lot of people were offended by an “uppity” black man being on their news every day.
Obama’s first major foray into race relations, the Gates controversy, was badly botched. His statement on the matter was essentially, “I don’t know what happened but it was racism”. That set the tone and I’m not sure he ever really recovered.
Obama was supposed to be the first post racial president. A lot of that was the media, but it was clearly part of Obama’s appeal. He was the uniter here to heal the divisions of the Bush era.
“To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.”
- Isaac Newton
I find that this is true in life, politics, relationships, etc., as well as in physics.
I don’t know how anyone can blame Pres Obama for causing racial tensions when right out of the gate he was accused of being an African terrorist masquerading as an American citizen.
By our current president, mind you.
Oh really? I thought his quote was something more like:
There’s nothing in those remarks that even remotely comes to close to what you are suggesting. As I’ve pointed out in the past, the problem with conservatives is that they live in a world in which perceived truth is the same as factual and evidence-based truth. It’s a short journey from perceived truth to real-world biases. When people live in a world they perceive truth and live in a reality based on their very limited sets of experiences and interactions with ‘others’, they begin to frame the words and deeds of ‘others’. They see malice where it doesn’t exist. They see “race-baiting” where it doesn’t exist. They see threats where they don’t exist. And all of this engenders animosity and often produces an aggressive response to threats they think the see, irrespective of whatever evidence there is or isn’t to support it. I don’t even think it’s necessarily a conscious form of racism either - a lot of biases and what is termed racism operates on the subconscious levels.
But I think all of this explains how a lot of white conservatives reacted to the election of Obama. Initially, political conservatives wanted to exploit race without getting slapped with the charge of being ‘racist’. Political opportunists on the right waited for an opportunity to say “See, this is what happens when you elect a black guy president - he’s out to get the white man!” The otherwise unremarkable arrest of a black person by a white officer provided that opening to exploit. Predictably, the usual shock jocks who have been pushing the boundaries of decency in public discourse for a while - the Rush Limbaughs, the Sean Hannities, and others - were the ones who kicked down that barrier and made it a little easier for everyone from right wing message board trolls to political office holders to push back against the trend of a post-racial America. Obama’s going to side with black thugs over police officers. Obama’s going to end border patrols and allow millions of brown foreigners to flood the country. Obama is a closet Muslim who hates Christian (White) America.
I think the tone was set when millions of people saw a non-white man with moderately liberal ideas get elected by their fellow countrymen, which is why white conservatives in this country are making it harder and harder for people in non-white communities to vote. White conservatives have feared the browning of America now in 2017 for the same reason they worried about freedman in 1867. They don’t want to lose power and status and be forced to share it with others. They live in a world of their own fears, based on their own wild perceptions about the intentions of non-whites and what they’re going to do to white folk once they get so much as a near plurality.
I am completely comfortable with his statement and can find no reason for any offense by anyone.
That wasn’t remotely what he said. Do you actually remember the incident or are you going by other people’s descriptions? He called it “stupid” or “silly” as I recall, not “racist”.
I thought Mr. Gates overreacted, but I didn’t see anything wrong with President Obama’s statement.
There are several parts of this statement. Number one is true - anyone would be indignant. Number two is stupid - if he doesn’t have the facts, he shouldn’t be saying the police acted stupidly. Number three is what a racial reconciler/post-racial President/whatever would not bring up. If he doesn’t know if race played a role, then don’t bring up race.
Obama made the same mistake that BLM did in the Michael Brown and Ferguson and Jamar Clark incidents - because it happened to a black guy, this must be race based.
I don’t think Obama did much to make things better, but he also didn’t do much to make them worse. I think that was more because black activists thought “finally we got someone who will listen to us” so they got louder in claiming what they had been saying all along.
What did he do to help race relations in the US? He was the first black President. Good for him, but we won’t be post-racial until a black President isn’t expected to do anything different about race than about anything else.
Regards,
Shodan
The Democrat party needs black people to vote as a bloc in order to win national elections. There are two ways to get people to vote as a bloc, either do a good job at addressing their concerns or make them scared of the other party. Since the first way is obviously out the remaining way is to stoke fear. So the accuse McCain of racism “Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, …, As one who was a victim of violence and hate during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, I am deeply disturbed by the negative tone of the McCain-Palin campaign. What I am seeing reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history… Senator McCain and Governor Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all.” Then they accuse Romney of racism “They’re going to put y’all back in chains.”
As long as it works they will keep doing it.
Clearly Obama did because he walked it back not too long after. Here’s how wikipedia described the impact:
What was wrong with it was that it was a political mistake. Trying to talk openly and honestly about these things sometimes is politically harmful. It took Obama a little while to figure this out, IMO, and then he became more polished and careful rather than trying to have a frank dialogue.
Comments such as “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon” made him seem biased and partial, as if it mattered more to him than if Trayvon wouldn’t have resembled a son of his.
That being said, I think he genuinely did try for the most part to be a president for all of America.
No, Obama was simply flat out wrong. Gates was 100% not targeted because he was black. He was investigated because someone called 911 reporting someone breaking into his home. If Obama wanted to use it as a teachable moment on race, the only lesson would be that you shouldn’t automatically assume a white cop is racist. The “long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately” was irrelevant to this situation except to explain why Gates was such a jackass.
I think it’s possible the cop treated him differently based on his race (i.e. arresting him after establishing that he lived there, simply because he was being “disorderly”). We’ll never know for sure, since we’re not psychic. But that there was a 911 call doesn’t mean that the cop had zero conscious or unconscious racial bias. I think it’s possible that some cops react differently to being yelled at by a black man vs being yelled at by a white man.