Fixing America’s ‘racial issue’
I was recently asked why we didn’t fix “this racial issue” when we had a Black president for eight years.
In my opinion, there were several reasons. The first of these is that President Obama is a moderate in philosophy and temperament. His instincts run to conciliation and compromise rather than confrontation. His incremental approach to change was ill-suited to a foundational problem requiring transformative change. His election led to the false hope that we had entered a “post-racial” age in our history. Donald Trump and the “Birther” nonsense, among other things, eventually dispelled that hope. President Obama, in my opinion, was too concerned about being labeled an “angry Black man” to publicly address systemic racism. I will return to incremental steps that his administration took to address some of the worst problems.
President Obama was elected at a time when the US was facing its worst economic crisis since the great depression. His administration’s immediate focus was on economic recovery. His actions led to the longest period of economic growth in history. That growth continued under President Trump, but economic performance under his administration was, until the COVID-19 pandemic, on a par with that of the last three years of his predecessor.
President Obama was also faced with total opposition from Republicans in Congress. Republican Congressional leaders actually met on the eve of his inauguration to pledge not to work with him on anything. Mitch McConnell
publicly stated that his most important priority was ensuring that Barack Obama would be a one-term president.
President Obama’s second major policy initiative was focused on trying to remedy the health care crisis in our country, something that presidents had attempted to do over the course of many decades.. The Affordable Care Act extended health insurance to millions of previously uninsured and uninsurable Americans, coverage that President Trump’s administration is trying to take away.
Given those two major policy initiatives, President Obama had relatively little “political capital” to address other issues. There was some improvement in race relations under his presidency. Hate crimes decreased each year of his two terms in office until President Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, stoking White grievances and initiating a yearly increase in hate crimes that has continued throughout his presidency.
During President Obama’s two terms in office, the Justice Department used three tools to address the problem of mis-use of force by police against people of color. Pattern and Practice investigations allowed a systemic look at individual police departments to identify civil rights violations. Consent Decrees enabled judicial review of compliance with remedial actions to address civil rights violations when they were found. Finally, restrictions on the transfer of surplus military hardware to police departments slowed the increasing militarization of policing. All of those tools have been abandoned by the Trump administration, forcing each allegation of civil rights violations to be treated in isolation.
I would be remiss if I did not address Black Lives Matter and “White privilege.” From its inception, American society has viewed Black people as “less than”. We were bought and sold like livestock. Although we were denied the vote, we were counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of electing representatives to Congress. After the Civil War, Reconstruction allowed Blacks to vote and serve in public office. Jim Crow ended that. When Blacks were able to build successful communities, Whites rioted and destroyed them. To this day, Black people are treated differently than Whites by our economic and justice institutions. “Black Lives Matter” means that Black lives matter as much as White lives. It does not mean that only Black lives matter.
“White privilege” means that you are not considered “less than” (threatening, lazy, unintelligent, dirty, immoral, law breaking, untrustworthy, etc.) based on the color of your skin. It does not mean that you have lived a life of ease.
Ironically, it took the election of a president who stoked the flames of White grievance, emboldening neo-Fascists and other White supremacists to come out of the shadows, to elevate the “racial issue” to a level where we, as a society, can no longer ignore it. I do not believe that all of President Trump’s supporters are racists or Fascists, but their continued support of a leader who has consistently demonstrated himself to be the former and has recently given glimpses of his inclination to the latter makes them complicit in the forces that divide us and stand in the way of justice.