Barack Obama left office, mercifully, six months back. You remember him, of course; his contemptible legacy still remains, hard as heck to overcome but worth the effort.
While the media were salivating back in 2008 when Obama was running, and Chris Matthews of whatever network he's on was having tingling feelings up and down his leg, Obama was touted as the first "post-racial president."
I don't pretend that I didn't know what that was supposed to mean; I did. It was supposed to mean that race no longer would matter; that once the first (half-)black president was elected, at the very least American race relations would be vastly improved.
And, of course, we would all get money from Obama's "private stash", as explained brilliantly here -- .
But I digress.
With Obama's term in the rear-view mirror, I suppose that we can celebrate the wonderful improvement in race relations. Certainly they are far better in Ferguson, Baton Rouge, Charlotte, Dallas, Baltimore and Chicago than before Obama was elected. Never been better there, right?
OK, enough sarcasm. Let's look at the facts. Race relations have been really terrible for a lot of American history. Certainly the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s helped erase the last legal impediments to racial harmony, and implemented defenses for all races to be protected from inappropriate government and commercial discrimination.
So what could Obama have done? Well, that's an interesting question, because there are two parts to the answer -- the proactive and the reactive. And sadly, he failed in both areas, which is one of the reasons that, where race relations could have improved markedly in his term, they are in a very bad place right now as we begin the Trump Administration.
Obama has done essentially nothing proactively as far as race relations are concerned. In my view, the problem has been that he saw the solution in his shaving mirror and not in the office. In other words, to the extent that Obama even wanted race relations to improve (a separate topic when you recall that he is a loyal Saul Alinsky follower and desires chaos), he thought that simply his being the president would improve those relations.
He didn't seem to feel the need to make compelling speeches from the start of his administration. He could have addressed his approach to improving those relations, whatever he might have been thinking would be possible. He could have set himself with a policy, an approach, with leadership.
Rather, he did nothing until police-based events overtook him. And the more they did -- the Cambridge Police mess, then Ferguson, Baltimore, etc. -- the worse he got at dealing with them. In every case, he assumed them to be racially-based, and took the side other than the police. Worse, he used his Attorney General as a battering ram, generally on the wrong side, generally making presumptions before 1/10 of the facts were in, and generally interfering where the Federal government didn't belong.
And the nation took his lead. If every single one of those incidents was enough to get the Obama "Justice" Department out there assuming the side of the injured or killed black person, well, then we had to assume that police (Cambridge, Ferguson, Baltimore) and the courts (George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin) must be bigots.
When it was clearly determined that, in Ferguson, Michael Brown was a thug who had just strong-arm-robbed a convenience store, and had rushed the policeman and tried to grab his gun, and the officer had done his duty to protect the citizens and himself from Brown, the real criminal, Obama was silent.
He didn't call off his Attorney General. He didn't say "*In this case, police acted appropriately, there was no hands-up-don't-shoot element, and by the way, my fellow black Americans, this Michael Brown was a piece of crap you shouldn't be rallying behind." He didn't say that. He didn't try to explain that there really are bad people of all races, and when they do bad things they might end up getting killed.
I don't know if he felt that he would have been thought of as an Uncle Tom if, say, he had called the mayor of Baltimore and told her that her DA had wildly overcharged the six policemen in the Freddie Gray case. He could have told America that we need to listen to and obey the instructions of police officers who are trying to protect the citizenry, and if you run away -- especially if you have a rap sheet as long as Freddie Gray's -- you are putting yourself at risk.
He could have distinguished cases. He failed in letting the Attorney General take the wrong side in the Michael Brown case, showing there have been justified shootings by police of black citizens. He needed to have focused on the facts and helped black America understand that each case has its own facts -- black America knows it has an immoral criminal element in it; Obama needed to be a leader on all such cases and get on the right side in all those cases and explain which ones are justified. But no, he is appallingly silent, to the detriment of race relations throughout the USA.
To the extent Barack Obama wanted to heal race relations here, he literally did nothing to help and much to exacerbate it. He could have been a leader in healing.
You have to wonder if he never really wanted to heal.
Copyright 2017, 2016 by Robert Sutton
