Nation faces race crisis
Hopes of a new era when Obama was elected have been cruelly dashed.
The racially motivated mass shooting of police officers in Dallas, and the deaths of two black men at the hands of police that preceded it, have dragged America into its worst race crisis in a generation.
Eight years ago, the election of the first African-American president raised hopes that the country would finally shake off the burden of a painful history traversing slavery, the hopes and disappointments of the Civil Rights era, the Los Angeles riots and the O J Simpson trial of the 1990s.
Instead, Barack Obama’s second term in office has been marked by a new wave of protests against the killings of a lengthening roll of black people by mostly white police officers, in circumstances that have shocked and appalled the world.
The Black Lives Matter movement was formed in 2012 in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a Hispanic neighbourhood watch captain in Florida who shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old AfricanAmerican high school pupil, in the chest.
He said it was self-defence; prosecutors alleged it was a coldblooded There’s a war against our cops in this country, and I think Obama has fed that war. Former Republican congressman murder that reflected racial profiling.
The movement was reenergised two years later when another unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was shot dead by police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, tipping the town into several days of riots, looting and arson and setting off smaller disturbances in New York, Houston, Los Angeles, Boston, Dallas and Oakland, California.
Since then, Black Lives Matter has continued to mount protests in response to further black deaths in numerous other cities. In the past year it has also expanded its activities to play a disruptive role in the United States presidential election, with activists haranguing Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders at their rallies and other campaign appearances.
The movement has been extensively criticised for its confrontational approach which, though peaceful, has often provoked a violent response.
Its messages and strategies have failed to gain a foothold with the majority of Americans. According to a poll last September, fewer than a third thought that the movement focused on real issues of racial discrimination, with 55 per cent believing that it distracted from those issues.
In April, a poll for The Wall Street Journal and NBC News suggested that 32 per cent of Americans had mostly positive views of the movement and 29 per cent had mostly negative opinions, with 39 per cent neutral.
However, any sense of fatigue among supporters was gone after visceral, intimate video footage posted this week showed two more black men dying as a result of police violence.
The deaths fuelled fresh protests across the country on Friday, but the powerful impression that they made was quickly lost amid the rage, grief and soul-searching stirred by what happened in Dallas, where another protest began peacefully only to end in carnage.
Trump attacked Obama yesterday, saying that America’s first black president had only worsened racial tensions.
‘‘Our nation has become too divided,’’ the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said.
Trump, who has repeatedly been accused of ‘‘dog whistle’’ politics, added: ‘‘Crime is harming
Both Trump and Clinton called off campaign events yesterday. Trump had planned to address Hispanics in Florida but instead issued a statement calling the Dallas shootings ‘‘a co-ordinated, premeditated assault on the men and women who keep us safe’’.
He said the deaths of Castile and Sterling were a reminder of ‘‘how much more needs to be done’’ to restore public confidence in the police.
Clinton said that she mourned the officers killed ‘‘while doing their sacred duty to protect peaceful protesters’’.
She postponed a rally in Pennsylvania where she had been due to appear with Joe Biden, the vice-president.
She was still planning to travel to the state, however, and was expected to speak on the shooting at an appearance at the African Methodist Episcopal Convention.
The event highlights how Clinton is carving out time to court African-American voters – a constituency that propelled Obama to the White House and helped her to beat the campaign of Sanders, her socialist rival for the Democratic nomination.
The likelihood of progress on gun control is small, however. A tweet sent by Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman, signalled how charged the atmosphere has become.
‘‘This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you,’’ he wrote after the Dallas attack.
Walsh deleted the post but said he stood by the sentiment.
‘‘There’s a war against our cops in this country, and I think Obama has fed that war and Black Lives Matter has fed that war.’’