Race Relations in the ‘Age of Obama’

[QueEx]

Race relations arguably worse in ‘Age of Obama’

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McClatchy Washington Bureau
By Anita Kumar
December 11, 2014


WASHINGTON — When President Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first black president in 2008, it suggested a move toward a post-racial America, the kind of society that Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned in his “I Have a Dream” speech a half-century before.

No doubt, the votes of a majority of U.S. voters for an African-American was a watershed of monumental proportion. But six years into the Age of Obama, relations between blacks and whites are arguably worse in communities across the nation.

As protesters take to the streets after a pair of grand juries decided not to charge white police officers for killing unarmed black men in Missouri and New York, it’s clear that America’s longstanding racial divide not only remains but has deepened[/b.

“We are more racially fractured and fragmented,” said James Peterson, director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.

“It has exposed more wounds than it has healed,” he said of Obama’s election. “It has exposed how racist our society still is.”

Obama has pushed for a slew of policies to boost blacks, with some success: increasing access to health care, making college more affordable, and changing sentencing guidelines. And he launched My Brother’s Keeper, a program designed to empower young minority men.

Yet vast disparities between blacks and whites remain. Blacks earn less money, graduate from college at lower rates and are imprisoned at disproportionately higher rates than whites. The unemployment rate for blacks is more than double the national average, 11.1 percent, while it’s 4.9 percent for whites, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/12/11/249786/race-relations-arguably-worse.html#storylink=cpy

 

[QueEx]

Personally, I don't see race relations right now being worse than before Obama.
Seems to me, the election of Barack Obama has merely further exposed the true
condition of race in America.

 

[QueEx]

Obamas on Race:
We've Been Treated Like the Help
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President and Michelle Obama personally identify with everyday experiences of racial bias in America that have underpinned recent protests across the country, they told People magazine in an interview to be released Friday.

“Barack Obama was a black man that lived on the South Side of Chicago, who had his share of troubles catching cabs," Michelle Obama told the magazine.

On one occasion, she said, her husband “was wearing a tuxedo at a black-tie dinner, and somebody asked him to get coffee.”

President Obama said he's even been mistakenly treated as a valet.

“There’s no black male my age, who’s a professional, who hasn’t come out of a restaurant and is waiting for their car and somebody didn’t hand them their car keys," he said, according to excerpts of the interview released today.


The first lady also described being mistreated at a Target store in suburban Washington, during a shopping trip she took in 2011.

PHOTO: First lady Michelle Obama, wearing a hat and sunglasses, stands in line at a Target department store in Alexandria, Va., Sept. 29, 2011.
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"Even as the first lady," she told the magazine, "during the wonderfully publicized trip I took to Target, not highly disguised, the only person who came up to me in the store was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf."

She said the incidents are "the regular course of life" for African-Americans and a "challenge" for the country to overcome.

Though they've lived inside the White House bubble for six years, the Obamas have been making the point that they are still in touch with the experience of minority communities.

President Obama has pushed back against criticism that he has not been aggressive enough in talking about issues of race and justice, particularly involving African-American men.

"If you look at after what happened with Michael Brown, if you looked at what happened after Trayvon, if you looked at the decision after Eric Garner, I'm being pretty explicit about my concern, and being pretty explicit about the fact that this is a systemic problem, that black folks and Latinos and others are not just making this up," Obama told BET in an interview earlier this month. "I describe it in very personal terms."



The president told People that he applauds the efforts of other prominent African-American athletes and celebrities to speak out against police brutality using the "I Can't Breathe" slogan, inspired by the case of Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who died after he was put in a choke hold by a New York City police officer. President Obama has not directly weighed in on the case.

“I think LeBron did the right thing," Obama said of Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James, who wore a shirt with the slogan on the court. "We forget the role that Muhammad Ali, Arthur Ashe, and Bill Russell played in raising consciousness. I’d like to see more athletes do that -- not just around this issue, but around a range of issues.”
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http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obam...dents-racial-discrimination/story?id=27636612

 

[gene cisco]

Personally, I don't see race relations right now being worse than before Obama.
Seems to me, the election of Barack Obama has merely further exposed the true
condition of race in America.

I do think exposure did happen, but I also think the Internet community has grown and more people live in 'bubbles' of what they want to read and hear.

Social media has grown a lot since Obama took office. And much like school lunch tables from middle school on, social media is segregated. People are self segregating more than ever before -- and it isn't because of Obama. It's due to technology.

And I always thought having a black president would amplify the 'get over it effect' that has been in place for quite some time.

Now white people can easily log onto the Internet and find 'friends' who feel the same 'get over it effect' and it makes them feel more empowered(they can feel they aren't racist since their 'liberal' friends 3000 miles away feels the same). Likewise, black people can find bubbles where folks are like 'white people mad at Obama' but they fail to look deeper into politics and the financials behind the game.

Obama's post-racial schtick has always been a fear of mine, but I didn't anticipate Internet segregation that could amplify racial divide -- that happens even if Hillary won the democratic nomination in 2008.