Obama has been the country’s biggest divider on race
Posted by: Jon Dougherty May 6, 2015
•Since his first weeks in office, President Obama set the stage to use race to divide, not unite, the country
So much for the election of America’s first African-American president serving as a seminal event in our history.
Barack Obama’s ascendency to the Oval Office was supposed to be a defining moment when, finally, after hundreds of years’ worth of racial tension and animosity, we would realize our founding vision of a colorblind society that was truly equal in all measures.
But alas, it was not to be. And much of the blame can be laid at the feet of the president himself.
Obama set the stage for what has happened in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore – as well as scores of other American cities since – long ago, just months after he took his first oath of office, when, perhaps baited by the media, he opined that Cambridge, Mass., police “acted stupidly” when an experienced officer arrested Prof. Henry Louis Gates, an African-American professor at Harvard and an Obama personal friend. The officer, Sgt. James Crowley, was white, and Gates essentially challenged him on that fact when he responded to Crowley’s statement that he was investigating a potential break-in with this jewel: “Why, because I’m a black man in America?” Gates, as director of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, obviously had a chip on his shoulder.
Obama piled on.
“I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played,” he said at a White House news conference. “But I think it’s fair to say, No. 1, any of us would be pretty angry; No. 2, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, No. 3 … that there’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.”
He added that the incident shows “how race remains a factor in this society.”
This, after the president first stated he had not seen “all the facts,” suggesting that the president’s comments were part of a pre-conceived narrative.
The media piled on. CNN rushed to have Gates on with Soledad O’Brien, herself the child of a mixed-race family (her father white, her mother black), who tossed Gates softball questions that essentially provided him a platform to air supposedly long-held grievances. “This is not about me; this is about the vulnerability of black men in America,” he said. Again, a pre-conceived narrative.
O’Brien would go onto to other race-based reporting for CNN, including producing a “report” entitled, “Who is Black in America?”
And the stage was set.
Since then we’ve had Trayvon (“if I had a son”) Martin in Sanford, Florida; Eric Garner in Staten Island; Michael Brown in Ferguson; and now Freddie Gray in Baltimore. In the meantime, according to the 2013 FBI crime stats, 90 percent of blacks were killed by other blacks (for context, 83 percent of whites were killed by other whites), but that alarming figure gets no play whatsoever from Obama.
After all, it doesn’t fit the “acted stupidly,” “African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately,” pre-conceived narrative.
Again, in recent days, the riots in Baltimore gave the president an opportunity to finally – finally – make some profound progress on healing the racial divisions in America that he and others, like tax cheat Al Sharpton – he of regular visitor status to the Obama White House – have stoked.
Instead, Obama did what he has always done: Piled on.
After perfunctory admonishment of the looters in Baltimore, Obama launched into another familiar pre-conceived narrative: The system. As in, the American system – is to blame: poor communities, where it’s more likely that children “end up in jail or dead than that they go to college,” and where drug dealers are the “primary employer for a whole lot of folks.”
“Since Ferguson and the task force that we put together, we have seen too many instances of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals, primarily African-American, often poor, in ways that raise troubling questions. And it comes up, it seems like, once a week now, or once every couple of weeks,” he said.
“What I’d say is this has been a slow-rolling crisis,” Obama added. “This has been going on for a long time. This is not new. And we shouldn’t pretend that it’s new.”
Obama then defaulted to another pre-conceived narrative: Blame Republicans. As reported by National Journal:
"As with other aspects of his agenda, Obama pointed a finger at Congress, plugging initiatives—early education, reforming the criminal-justice system, helping ex-felons get job training and jobs—that he has pushed for years, with little result. “I’m under no illusion that out of this Congress, we’re going to get massive investments in urban communities,” he said.
Never mind that Baltimore has been governed under one party rule – the Democratic Party, Obama’s party – for decades. Never mind that, since the War on Poverty began in the 1960s, there has been a $22 trillion transfer of wealth into programs that were supposed to eradicate the very problems Obama keeps harping on. And never mind that, every time our first African-American president has had an opportunity to move the country into new narratives that unite, he has instead chosen these pre-conceived narratives that divide.
As long as humans walk the planet, there has and always will be some forms of racism. There will likely always be poverty. There will be some bad actors in police uniforms. There will be a need to help others who cannot help themselves.
But in a rich, multi-ethnic society like America, these problems will always be exacerbated as long as those we choose to lead us – nationally, in local government and in our communities – resort to the kind of dishonest pre-conceived narratives that divide us.
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