Many people are expressing shock, dismay, and disillusionment that racism in the United States has worsened since Obama’s purportedly post-racial election in 2008.
President Barack Obama had hoped his historic election would ease race relations, yet a majority of Americans, 53 percent, say the interactions between the White and Black communities have deteriorated since he took office, according to a new Bloomberg Politics poll. Those divisions are laid bare in the split reactions to the decisions by two grand juries not to indict White police officers who killed unarmed Black men in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island, N.Y.
(Bloomberg News, December 7, 2014)
Ironically, no black American has been the target of this racist awakening more than President Obama himself (as old viral memes like “You lie,” “show me your birth certificate,” and “he’s a Muslim socialist” duly attest).
Meanwhile, this (ironic) racial narrative is trending to such degree that I caught commentators on the BBC program, Dateline London, discussing it on Saturday.
Except that I’m not sure why people are so “shocked, shocked” by this phenomenon (of Obama’s election giving White folks license to express “deeply rooted” racism):
I’m on record stating my suspicion that many Whites voted for Obama in 2008 more as a gesture of racial absolution than of political faith. These AP findings bear that out. And having thusly absolved themselves of their sins of racism (with this one, historic act), many of them now feel liberated to give way to their racial prejudices without fear of being called racists.
(“Romney vs. Obama: Race (Still) Matters,” The iPINIONS Journal, November 1, 2012)
On a more local level, Whites who voted for a White man with a Black wife to become mayor of the country’s largest city, New York, New York, probably feel doubly “liberated.”
Nonetheless, the greater irony is that, given this phenomenon, reactions to these grand jury decisions are not nearly as split along racial lines as the media would have you believe. You need only look at the media’s own coverage of ongoing protests – from New York to California – to see, with your own eyes, the multiracial nature of the protesters involved.
Frankly, based on the “split reactions” to the O.J. Simpson verdict, reactions to these decisions seem more kumbaya than polarized.
On the other hand, as shocked you might be by people feeling more “liberated to give way to their racial prejudices,” this is no cause for dismay or disillusionment. After all, the more people express their racism, the more likely it is that someone, perhaps even you, will disabuse them of it.
In fact, this is the kind of daily, honest, person-to-person conversation on race we should welcome; instead of that phony, politically expedient claptrap politicians are always blathering about every time the media inflame racist passions.
Moreover, these police shootings and grand jury decisions should not mislead us to believe that America is regressing to the bad old days of Jim Crow and race riots. Nor should they force the police into contrived (re)training programs to learn how to stop shooting unarmed Black men (especially given FBI statistics showing that they shoot more unarmed White men).
Rather, I repeat, these shootings and decisions should teach people that they are not entitled to resist when the police are trying to arrest them. What’s more, when they’re not blocking city streets and chanting “Hands up, don’t shot,” “I can’t breathe,” and “Black lives matter,” it behooves those protesting to help young Black men learn this existential lesson. Because failure to do so will only result in more thugs with no respect for authority – who feel entitled to prey on others … until they get arrested (or shot) by the police we call upon to protect us from them.
In the meantime, and this I repeat too, I urge more Blacks to seek careers in law enforcement to help redress the racial spectacle of all-White policemen policing Black neighborhoods like “invading armies;” I urge the police to wear body cameras (to demonstrate and vindicate their professionalism); and I urge cities to establish civilian review boards — complete with the power to refer any police shooting to an independent prosecutor — in order to effectively police the police, instead of leaving it to the police to police themselves.
All else is folly, especially those “die ins” and commando street marches, which are just traffic fatalities waiting to happen.
Related commentaries:
Romney vs. Obama…
Ferguson, NYC grand jury decisions…