Upon his election in 2008, President Obama was heralded as America’s first post-racial president, a politician of quasi-mystical power who — with powerful oratory and a million-dollar smile — would take America into a new chapter of racial harmony.
But with less than a year to go until he leaves office, it is now clear the Obama presidency has resulted in the exact opposite. Race relations are worse than they’ve been decades — the number of Americans concerned about race relations has skyrocketed and the percentage of Americans who think race relations are in good health has plummeted.
The number of Americans concerned about race relations has skyrocketed.
Thirty-five percent of Americans are worried “a great deal” about race relations, according to a March 2016 Gallup poll — the highest percentage since the company first began polling on the topic in 2001. That same poll revealed that only 45 percent of non-Hispanic whites and 51 percent of blacks believe race relations are somewhat or very good — the lowest percentages for both groups since 2001.
A December 2015 Wall Street Journal poll found race relations to be at their worse in 20 years. Sixty-four percent of Americans said race relations were bad, while just over a third said they were good. Other recent polls from Fox News and Bloomberg found a majority of Americans believe race relations have worsened since Obama first took office.
The negative outlook marks a staggering turn of events for the nation’s social fabric. In 1994, Americans were split evenly on their perception of race relations.
This is Obama’s true and lasting legacy. “He built this racial divide,” noted Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke in 2014. “It was a wound that had been healing for a number of years, a number of decades … and he reopened it with his divisive politics,” Clarke noted. “He’s taken sides in these issues. He’s fanned those flames.”
Indeed, throughout his presidency Obama has seemingly taken every opportunity to fan the flames of racial discord. At key moments of racial crisis, the president has cast his weight in with whichever side supports the narrative that black Americans are perennial victims of white racism.
In 2009, Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested outside his own house after Sgt. James Crowley responded to a 911 call reporting an individual trying to force entry into said house. But Gates was “breaking into” his own home as the door was jammed. He became confrontational with the officer, resulting in his arrest for disorderly conduct.
Obama leaped at the opportunity to cry racism and made the astonishing claim the officer “acted stupidly.” Of course, he failed to say what exactly the officer did that was stupid. Respond to a 911 call? Stop and question someone who appeared to be in the middle of making a forced entry into a home? Arrest him once he became confrontational and belligerent?
Obama’s race-baiting only grew more brazen — and dangerous — thereafter. After black teen Trayvon Martin was shot by George Zimmerman — rather than calling for calm until the full facts came out, Obama remarked that if he had a son, he would have looked like Trayvon.
Then, when Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in the midst of a dangerous physical confrontation — Obama lent his administration’s support to the since-discredited media narrative that Brown was shot with his hands up. The administration sent three representatives to Brown’s funeral. These incidents sparked the “Black Lives Matter” movement, which has engaged in violent protests, encouraged violence against police, trampled free speech, and furthered the deterioration of U.S. race relations.
The officials chosen by Obama to serve in his administration seem similarly obsessed with the crusade to worsen race relations and wield alleged-pervasive white racism as a political weapon. Eric Holder’s entire tenure as attorney general was marked by efforts to see fewer blacks come into contact with the justice system regardless of whether or not they had committed crimes.
In 2009, he refused to prosecute the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation, saying “When you compare what people endured in the South in the 60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, to compare what people subjected to that with what happened in Philadelphia … I think it does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line for my people.”
His people. His allegiance and the implications thereof could not be clearer.
Only this past Thursday, National Security Adviser Susan Rice actually claimed that the U.S. national security community was too white. We “have not yet drawn fully on the strengths of our great nation,” Rice said.
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“Minorities still make up less than 20 percent of our senior diplomats [and] less than 15 percent of senior military officers and senior intelligence officials,” she said. “Why should we care? For starters, a diverse national security workforce enables us to unlock all of our nation’s talent.”
This is ideological partisanship at its most terrifying, and the implications of Rice’s words are resoundingly evident. The only concern of the National Security Adviser should be national security, but Rice makes it clear she cares more about racial quotas and forced equality of outcome more than the safety and security of all Americans.
The inescapable fact is that rather than making any effort to unify the nation, President Obama and his administration, without so much as a feint of impartiality, approached American race relations in the stark terms of “us against them.” The result has been a historic collapse of race relations and the buildup of dangerous tension in the nation that was supposed to have reached a post-racial plateau.
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