Obama Brought Racism Into This Country Again.
Obama
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Through a collection of securely reported stories, videos, photographs, documents and graphics, feel Barack Obama's historic time in office: as the start black president, as commander in chief, equally a domestic and foreign policymaker, and as a husband and father.
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Obama'southward Legacy The First Blackness President
Obama'due south effort to heal racial divisions and uplift black America
Barack Obama'due south presidency signaled a "post-racial" America at first, but the racial conflict followed disproved that.
Barack Obama's watershed 2008 election and the presidency that followed profoundly altered the aesthetics of American commonwealth, transforming the Founding Fathers' narrow vision of politics and citizenship into something more expansive and more elegant. The American presidency of a sudden looked very different, and for a moment America felt different, too.
The Obama victory helped fulfill 1 of the great ambitions of the civil rights struggle past showcasing the ability of extraordinarily talented black Americans to pb and excel in all facets of American life. Commencement lady Michelle Obama, and daughters Sasha and Malia, extended this reimagining of black American life by providing a conspicuous vision of a healthy, loving and thriving African American family unit that defies still-prevalent racist stereotypes.
But some interpreted Obama's triumph as much more than.
Members of the oversupply in Gary, Ind., seek to shake the candidate's hand or touch his head equally he thanks them for their support in October 2008. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Mail)
The victory was heralded every bit the arrival of a "post-racial" America, one in which the nation's original sin of racial slavery and post-Reconstruction Jim Crow discrimination had finally been absolved past the ballot of a black man as commander in chief. For a while, the nation basked in a racially harmonious afterglow.
A blackness president would influence generations of young children to cover a new vision of American citizenship. The "Obama Coalition" of African American, white, Latino, Asian American and Native American voters had helped usher in an era in which institutional racism and pervasive inequality would fade as Americans embraced the nation'south multicultural promise.
From the archives
Obama makes history
Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois was elected the nation's 44th president yesterday, riding a message of promise and change to get the first African American to ascend to the White House.
Seven years later, such profound optimism seems misplaced. Almost immediately, the Obama presidency unleashed racial furies that have just multiplied over fourth dimension. From the tea party'south racially tinged attacks on the president's policy agenda to the "birther" motion'due south more overtly racist fantasies asserting that Obama was not even an American denizen, the national racial climate grew more than, and not less, fraught.
President Obama is feted in Chicago on November. 6, 2012, the night he is elected to his second term as commander in primary. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Postal service)
If racial conflict, in the form of birthers, tea partyers and gnawing resentments, implicitly adumbral Obama'due south first term, it erupted into open warfare during much of his second. The Supreme Court's 2013 determination in the Shelby v. Holder case gutted Voting Rights Act enforcement, throwing into question the signal achievement of the civil rights movement's heroic period.
Beginning with the 2012 shooting expiry of black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida, the nation reopened an intense debate on the continued horror of institutional racism evidenced by a string of high-profile deaths of black men, women, boys and girls at the hands of police enforcement.
The organized demonstrations, protests and outrage of a new generation of civil rights activists turned the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter into the clarion call for a new social justice move. Black Lives Matter activists have forcefully argued that the U.S. criminal justice system represents a gateway to racial oppression, one marked by a drug war that disproportionately targets, punishes and warehouses young men and women of colour. In her bestselling volume "The New Jim Crow," legal scholar Michelle Alexander argued that mass incarceration represents a racial caste system that echoes the pervasive, structural inequality of a system of racial apartheid that persists.
A supporter hugs President Obama as he works the rope line following a rally in Denver in October 2012. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Mail)
Obama's start-term caution on race matters was punctured past his controversial remarks that police "acted stupidly" in the mistaken identity arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University's prominent African American studies professor, in 2009. Four years later he entered the alienation once more than by proclaiming that if he had a son, "he'd look like Trayvon."
In the backwash of racial unrest in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, and a racially motivated massacre in Charleston, South.C., Obama went further. In 2015, Obama establish his voice in a series of stirring speeches in Selma, Ala., and Charleston, where he best-selling America's long and continuous history of racial injustice.
Policy-wise Obama has launched a private philanthropic effort, My Brother's Keeper, designed to aid low-income black boys, and became the showtime president to visit a federal prison in a call for prison reform that foreshadowed the assistants'south efforts to release federal inmates facing long sentences on relatively minor drug charges.
Despite these efforts, many of Obama's African American supporters take expressed profound disappointment over the president's refusal to forcefully pursue racial and economic justice policies for his most loyal political constituency.
From this perspective, the Obama presidency has played out as a cruel joke on members of the African American community who, despite providing indispensable votes, disquisitional support and unstinting loyalty, notice themselves largely shut out from the nation's mail service-Great Recession economical recovery. Blacks have, critics suggested, traded away substantive policy demands for the largely symbolic psychological and emotional victory of having a blackness president and start family in the White House for eight years.
Others find that cess harsh, noting that Obama's well-nigh impressive policy achievements take received scant promotion from the White House or acquittance in the mainstream media.
History volition decide the total measure of the importance, success, failures and shortcomings of the Obama presidency. With regard to race, Obama's historical significance is ensured; merely his impact and legacy are up for contend. In hindsight, the burden of transforming America's tortured racial history in ii iv-year presidential terms proved impossible, even every bit its promise helped to catapult Obama to the nation'due south highest office.
President Obama wraps upwards his campaign with a final stop in downtown Des Moines on Nov. 5, 2012. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)
Obama'south presidency elides of import aspects of the ceremonious rights struggle, peculiarly the teachings of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. King, for a time, served as the racial justice consciousness for two presidents — John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Many who hoped Obama might be able to serve both roles — as president and racial justice advocate — have been disappointed. Yet at that place is a revelatory clarity in that disappointment, proving that Obama is not King or Frederick Douglass, but Abraham Lincoln, Kennedy and Johnson. Even a black president, maybe especially a black president, could non untangle racism'due south Gordian knot on the body politic. Yet in acknowledging the limitations of Obama's presidency on healing racial divisions and the shortcomings of his policies in uplifting black America, nosotros may accomplish a newfound political maturity that recognizes that no one person — no matter how powerful — can single-handedly rectify structures of inequality synthetic over centuries.
Peniel Joseph is professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Republic and the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.
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This story is part of a virtual museum of President Barack Obama'south presidency. In five parts — The First Black President, Commander in Chief, Obama's America, Obama and the World and The Commencement Family — nosotros explore the triumphs and travails of his historic tenure.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/obama-legacy/racism-during-presidency.html
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