Saturday, July 09, 2016

Race relations will be Obama’s biggest failure


Obama Care is a huge problem that President Obama will leave his successor. And there is Iraq, Libya and so on.  Lots of messes for his successor to clean up indeed.  
In retrospect, race relations will be his biggest failure.
Back in November 2008, I voted for Senator McCain but looked forward that our first black president would bring us together. I was anticipating that he’d talk about the structural problems in the black community, such as the collapse of the black family unit and black on black crime in Chicago and other inner cities.
Instead, Obama has made things worse by focusing on the police and doing nothing about black districts lacking any hope or seeing no change.  
A few months ago, Gil Troy, a professor of history at McGill University wrote an article that looks rather interesting after Dallas:
The last Democratic president and the last Republican president both managed race relations more effectively than Obama has. Seven years after American voters made history by electing the country’s first black president, racial tensions have worsened.
It didn’t rank on Obama’s one-item list of his “few regrets” during his State of the Union address. But signs of Obama’s failure are on our streets, on our campuses and among our leaders, left and right.
“Ferguson” has become shorthand for African-American fury objecting to insensitive white cops harassing young blacks. 
The “Black Lives Matter” movement has spilled into American campus culture, as privileged kids attending the world’s finest universities bemoan their alleged oppression — bullying anyone who challenges them.
This black backlash has prompted a white backlash, personified by Donald Trump. 
Every justifiable police shooting called “racist,” every Halloween costume labeled politically incorrect, every reasonable thought censored makes Trump look like America’s last honest man.
Amid this tension, Obama has been disturbingly passive — even during America’s first serious race riots since 1992. 
He acts like a meteorologist observing the bad weather, not a president able to shape the political climate.
How embarrassing that Obama’s most memorable act of presidential leadership on race may end up being inviting a black professor and a white cop to the White House for his 2009 “beer summit.”
Yes, President Obama will be remembered for two things:
a) The articulate president who could not articulate a message to bring us together.  In other words, the man can speak but has little of consequence to say; and,
b) The first black president who did not understand the real problems in black communities.  
P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.   We discussed this topic with Professor Daniel Bonevac on our last show:
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