Things Obama Did That He Said He Would Never Do Again
I n the first hours of the new year's day in 2009, just weeks before Barack Obama was to be inaugurated as the next president, shots rang out in Oakland, California. A transit officer named Johannes Mehserle shot an unarmed 22-year-sometime black man who lay face-down in handcuffs on a public transportation platform. His name was Oscar Grant.
Dozens of witnesses, many of whom were returning to Oakland after New Twelvemonth's Eve celebrations, watched in horror. Some captured his killing on smartphones. Before long later, black Oakland exploded in palpable acrimony, with hundreds, and so thousands of people taking to the streets, demanding justice.
Perhaps this outcry would have happened under whatsoever circumstance, but the brutality of Grant's expiry in the few weeks before the country'due south start black president was to take part felt similar a shock of cold water. Police brutality had long been a fact of life in California, but the land was supposed to have entered into a mail service-racial parallel universe. The optimism that coursed through black America in 2008 seemed a meg miles away.
A local movement led by Grant's family unfolded across the Bay Area to demand that prosecutors charge and effort Mehserle. Protests, marches, campus activism, public forums and organizing meetings sustained enough pressure level to strength local officials to accuse Mehserle with murder. It was the get-go murder trial of a California police force officer for a "line of duty" killing in fifteen years. In the end, Mehserle, convicted of involuntary manslaughter, spent less than a year in prison, but the local motility foreshadowed events to come up.
Equally for President Obama, he turned out to exist very dissimilar from candidate Obama, who had stage-managed his campaign to resemble something closer to a social movement. He had conjured much hope, especially among African Americans – but with great expectations came even greater disappointments.
'Yes, nosotros tin'
In the heated race for the 2008 Democratic nomination, Obama distinguished himself from the institution candidate, Hillary Clinton, by campaigning clearly against the war in Republic of iraq and vowing to shut down the Guantánamo military internment camp. Every bit the campaign continued, he spoke of economical inequality and connected with young people who were underwhelmed at the prospect of voting for withal another old, white windbag in the form of John McCain.
Black people'south enthusiasm for the Obama campaign could not exist reduced to racial solidarity or recrimination. Obama electrified his audiences, equally in this speech from January 2008, after the New Hampshire primary:
We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.
But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything simulated nearly promise. For when we have faced down impossible odds, when nosotros've been told we're not ready or that we shouldn't try or that we tin can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums upwardly the spirit of a people: yes, we can. Aye, we can. Yeah, nosotros can.
It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: yes, we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: yes, nosotros can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: yes, we can … Yep, we can heal this nation. Yep, we can repair this world. Yeah, we can.
Only it was only in March 2008 that Obama finally gave a comprehensive oral communication on race, in which he pulled off the feat of addressing the concerns of African Americans while calming the fears of white voters.
Obama had been pressured for weeks to rebuke his pastor, the Rev Jeremiah Wright, who had delivered a sermon titled God Damn America, referring to the incorrect the United States had committed in the world. Obama's political enemies had unearthed the sermon and tried to attribute Wright's ideas to Obama. Obama used his platform in Philadelphia to distance himself from Wright, whom he described as "divisive" and with a "profoundly distorted view of this country".
He went on to contextualize Wright'southward aroused comments and condemnations equally based on his having come of age in a US where legalized bigotry – where black people were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were non granted to African American business owners, or blackness homeowners could non admission FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions or the constabulary force or the burn down department – meant that blackness families could non amass whatever meaningful wealth to bequeath to time to come generations.
No one running for president had ever spoken so directly about the history of racism in government and guild at large. Notwithstanding Obama's speech communication too counseled that a more perfect United States required African Americans "taking full responsibility for our own lives … past enervating more than from our fathers, and spending more fourth dimension with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face up challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny."
Obama couched his comments in the language of American progress and the vitality of the American dream, but the speech was remarkable withal in the theater of American politics, where cowardice and empty rhetoric are the typical fare. In that sense Obama broke the mold, just he also established the terms upon which he would engage race matters: with dubious even-handedness, even in response to events that required decisive action on behalf of the racially aggrieved.
He spoke quite eloquently about the nation's "original sin" and "dark history" merely has repeatedly failed to connect the sins of the by to the crimes of the present, when racism thrives, when police force stop-and-frisk, when subprime loans are reserved for black buyers, when public schools are denied resource, and when double-digit unemployment has become so normal that information technology barely registers a ripple of recognition.
Before Ferguson, Obama's Philadelphia speech communication was every bit close equally he had e'er come to speaking truthfully about racism in the Usa, even though he presented himself as an interested observer, a thoughtful interlocutor betwixt African Americans and the country as a whole, rather than a United states senator with the political influence to effect the changes of which he spoke.
The 'informed observer'
Obama would continue in his function as "informed observer" fifty-fifty as president.
Obama has and will always poll high among African Americans, simply that should not be mistaken for blind support for him or the policies he champions. Equally long every bit members of the Republican party treat Obama in a brazenly racist manner, black people volition defend him because they sympathise that those attacks against Obama serve as a proxy for attacks on them.
Early in his administration, however, with the full furnishings of the recession still pulsing in blackness communities, conflict between the black president and his base of operations could be detected. Black America was in the midst of an "economic freefall" as blackness wealth disappeared.
As black unemployment was climbing into the high double digits, ceremonious rights leaders asked Obama if he would arts and crafts policies to address black joblessness. He responded, "I have a special responsibility to look out for the interests of every American. That's my task every bit president of the Usa. And I wake up every morn trying to promote the kinds of policies that are going to brand the biggest departure for the most number of people so that they tin live out their American dream."
Information technology was a disappointing response, fifty-fifty if that disappointment did not manifest itself in his approval ratings. In 2011, with black unemployment above xiii%, 86% of black Americans canonical of the overall chore the president was doing, but 56% expressed disappointment in the "area of providing proper oversight for Wall Street and the big banks".
For African Americans, Obama'southward presidency had been largely divers by his reluctance to engage with the ways that racial discrimination was blunting the impact of his administration's recovery efforts. Obama has not shown nearly the same reticence when publicly chastising African Americans for a range of behaviors that read similar a handbook on anti-black stereotypes, from parenting skills and dietary choices to sexual mores and television receiver-watching habits.
In that location is something disingenuous in focusing on poor and working-course black people without whatsoever discussion about the means that the criminal justice system has "disappeared" black parents from the lives of their children.
When Obama talks about absentee black fathers, he never mentions the disparity in arrests and sentencing that is responsible for the asymmetric number of missing black men. Few media discussions about Obama's candidacy mentioned curbing the nation's criminal justice system'southward voracious ambition for black bodies: a million African Americans are incarcerated, and one in four black men betwixt twenty and 29 are under the control of the criminal justice system.
Over the course of his first term, Obama paid no special attending to the mounting problems involving police enforcement and imprisonment, even as Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow described the horrors that mass incarceration and corruption throughout the legal organisation had inflicted on blackness families.
None of this began with Obama, only it would be naive to call up that African Americans were not considering the subversive bear on of policing and incarceration when they turned out in droves to elect him. His unwillingness to address the furnishings of structural inequality eroded younger African Americans' confidence in the transformative capacity of his presidency.
The legacy of the 'American spring'
There was one moment when blackness America collectively came to terms with Barack Obama's refusal to utilize his position equally president to intervene on behalf of African Americans.
Troy Davis was a blackness man on decease row in the state of Georgia. It was widely believed that he had been wrongfully bedevilled, which would mean that in the fall of 2011 he was facing execution for a criminal offense he had not committed.
Davis'southward cries of innocence were not a voice in the wilderness: for years he and his sis, Martina Davis-Correia, had joined with anti-decease-punishment activists to fight for his life and exoneration. By September 2011, an international campaign was under way to have him removed from death row. The protests grew larger and more frantic as the expiry engagement crept closer. There were protests around the world; support from global dignitaries rolled in as the international movement to stop Davis's execution took shape.
The European Matrimony and the governments of France and Federal republic of germany implored the Us to halt his execution, every bit did Amnesty International and the former FBI manager William Sessions. A Democrat in the Georgia senate, Vincent Fort, called on those charged with carrying out the execution to reject to do it: "We telephone call on the members of the Injection Team: Strike! Exercise non follow your orders! Do non first the period of the lethal injection chemicals. If you lot refuse to participate, you make information technology that much harder for this immoral execution to be carried out."
As Davis's execution drew nigh on the evening of 20 September, people from around the globe waited for Obama to say or do something – but, in the cease, he did nothing. He never even made a argument, instead sending printing secretary Jay Carney to evangelize a statement on his behalf, which but noted that it was non "advisable" for the president to intervene in a land-led prosecution.
In the finish, the black president succumbed to states' rights.
It was a moment of awakening for "Generation O" – and of newfound understanding of the limits of black presidential power, not considering Obama could non intervene, equally his handlers insisted, but considering he refused to do so.
The Troy Davis protests were certainly non in vain. The day later on the state of Georgia killed Davis, Amnesty International and the Entrada to Finish the Death sentence called for a "Day of Outrage" in protest. More than a thousand people marched, eventually making their way to a small encampment on Wall Street that was calling itself "Occupy Wall Street".
The Occupy encampment had begun a calendar week or so before Davis was killed, but it was in its fledgling stages. When the Troy Davis activists converged with the Occupy activists, the protesters fabricated an immediate connection between Occupy'due south mobilization against inequality and the injustice in the execution of a working-form black man. Later on the march, many who had been activated by the protests for Davis stayed and became a part of the Occupy encampment on Wall Street. Thereafter, a popular chant on the Occupy marches was "We are all Troy Davis".
The Occupy movement would develop into the nearly important political expression of the US class split in more than than a generation. The slogan "We are the 99%" and the motion'due south articulation of the divide betwixt the "one%" and the remainder of us offered a materialist, structural understanding of American inequality. In a country that regularly denies the existence of class, this was a critical step toward making sense of the express reach of the American dream.
Despite the move's difficulties in coherently expressing the human relationship between economical and racial inequality, its focus on regime bailouts for individual enterprise while millions of ordinary people bore the weight of unemployment, foreclosures, and evictions addressed some of the most important bug affecting African Americans. It was hard to ignore that blackness homeowners had been left to fend for themselves.
Non only did Occupy popularize the notion of economic and class inequality in the US by demonstrating against corporate greed, fraud, and corruption throughout the finance industry, it besides helped to make connections betwixt those issues and racism. The public word over economic inequality that followed rendered breathless both Democratic and Republican politicians' insistence on locating black poverty in blackness culture. While it obviously did not bury the arguments for culture and "personal responsibleness", Occupy helped to create the space for alternative explanations within mainstream politics, including seeing black poverty as a product of the system.
The cruel attack and crackdown on the unarmed and peaceful Occupy encampments over the winter and into 2012 also provided a lesson almost policing in the United states: the police were servants of the political establishment and the ruling elite. Non just were they racist, they were as well daze troops for the status quo and bodyguards for the one%.
'If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon'
The killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, in the winter of 2012 was a turning point. Like the murder of Emmett Till nearly 57 years earlier, Martin's decease pierced the mirage that the US was post-racial.
Till was the young boy who, on his summertime vacation in Mississippi in 1955, was lynched by white men for an imagined racial transgression. Till's murder showed the world the racist brutality pulsing in the heart of the "world's greatest commonwealth". To emphasize the indicate, his female parent, Mamie, opted for an open up-catafalque funeral to show the globe how her son had been mutilated and killed in the "land of the free".
Martin's crime was walking home in a hoodie, talking on the phone and minding his own business. George Zimmerman, now a well-known menace but then portrayed every bit an aspiring security guard, racially profiled Martin, telling the 911 operator: "This guy looks like he's up to no good, or he's on drugs or something." The "guy" was a 17-year-old male child walking home from a convenience store. Zimmerman followed the boy, confronted him, and somewhen shot him in the chest, killing him presently thereafter. When the police force came, they accepted Zimmerman's business relationship. Martin was black and the default assumption was that he was the assaulter – so they treated him as such. They tagged him as a "John Doe" and made no effort to notice out if he lived in the neighborhood or was missing.
Only the story began to trickle through the news media and, as more details became public, it was clear that Martin had been the victim of an unlawful killing. Trayvon Martin had been lynched.
Within weeks, protests bubbled up beyond the land. The demand was simple: abort George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin. The anger was fueled, in office at least, past the overwhelming double standard: if Martin had been white and Zimmerman black, Zimmerman would accept faced immediate arrest, if non worse.
The protests were national, as they had been for Troy Davis, simply they were much more widespread. This was the impact of Occupy, which had relegitimized street protests, occupations, and direct action in general. Many of the Occupy activists who had been dispersed by police force repression the previous winter establish a new dwelling house in the growing fight for justice for Martin. Protests in Florida and New York Urban center reached into the thousands, with smaller protests in cities beyond the country.
For weeks, Obama deflected questions, commenting only that it was a local case. It took more than a calendar month for Obama to finally speak publicly well-nigh the case, saying: "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon … When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids."
But he also said: "I think every parent in America should be able to understand why information technology is absolutely imperative that we investigate every attribute of this, and that everybody pulls together – federal, state and local – to effigy out exactly how this tragedy happened."
Obama could not come up out and say the obvious, simply the fact that he spoke at all was evidence of the growing momentum of the street protests that had been building for weeks. Martin'south killing was a national and international embarrassment. Black people may take understood that Obama could not pb a social movement confronting police brutality equally the president, merely how could he not utilize his seat to dilate black pain and anger? Information technology was exactly for moments like these that black people had put Obama in the White Business firm.
Information technology is impossible to know or predict when a detail moment is transformed into a movement. 40-five days after George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin in cold blood, he was finally arrested. It was the outcome of weeks of protests, many of which had been organized through social media, beyond the conservatizing control of establishment ceremonious rights organizations.
In the summer of 2013, more than a year after his arrest, George Zimmerman was found not guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin. His exoneration crystallized the brunt of blackness people: fifty-fifty in expiry, Martin would be vilified as a "thug" and an assaulter, Zimmerman portrayed as his victim. The judge even instructed both parties that the phrase "racial profiling" could not be mentioned in the courtroom, allow lone used to explain why Zimmerman had targeted Martin.
Obama addressed the nation, proverb: "I know this case has elicited stiff passions. And in the wake of the verdict, I know those passions may be running fifty-fifty higher. But nosotros are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken. We should ask ourselves, as individuals and every bit a lodge, how we can prevent futurity tragedies like this. As citizens, that's a job for all of u.s.."
What does it hateful to be a "nation of laws" when the constabulary is applied inequitably? In that location is a dual system of criminal justice: i for African Americans and one for whites. The result is the discriminatory disparities in punishment that run throughout all aspects of American jurisprudence. George Zimmerman benefited from this dual system: he was allowed to walk gratis for weeks earlier protests pressured officials into arresting him. He was not subjected to drug tests, though Trayvon Martin's dead body had been. This double standard undermined public proclamations that the U.s. is a nation built around the rule of police. Obama's call for quiet, private soul-searching was a way of saying that he had no answers.
Out of despair over the verdict, the community organizer Alicia Garza posted a simple hashtag on Facebook: "#blacklivesmatter". It was a powerful rejoinder that spoke direct to the dehumanization and criminalization that made Martin seem suspicious in the get-go place and allowed the law to brand no effort to find out to whom this male child belonged.
It was a response to the oppression, inequality and discrimination that devalue black life every day.
Information technology was everything, in three simple words.
Garza would go on, with boyfriend activists Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, to transform the slogan into an system with the same name: #BlackLivesMatter.
Zimmerman'due south amortization too inspired the formation of the important black Youth Project 100 (BYP 100), centered in Chicago. Charlene Carruthers, its national coordinator, said of the verdict: "I don't believe the pain was a result, necessarily, of shock because Zimmerman was establish not guilty … but of even so another example … of an injustice being validated by the state – something that blackness people were used to."
In Florida, the scene of the crime, Umi Selah (formerly known every bit Phillip Agnew) and friends formed the Dream Defenders; for 31 days they occupied the office of the Florida governor, Rick Scott, in protest at the verdict. Selah said: "I saw George Zimmerman celebrating, and I recall simply feeling a huge, huge, huge … collapse … I'll never forget that moment … because nosotros didn't even await that verdict to come up downwards that nighttime, and definitely didn't look for it to be not guilty."
Selah quit his job as a pharmaceutical salesman to organize full fourth dimension.
No one knew who would exist the adjacent Trayvon, but the increasing utilise of smartphone recording devices and social media seemed to quicken the step at which incidents of law brutality became public. These tools being in the hands of ordinary citizens meant that families of victims were no longer dependent on the mainstream media'southward involvement: they could take their instance directly to the public.
Meanwhile, the germination of organizations defended to fighting racism through mass mobilizations, street demonstrations and other direct actions was evidence of a newly developing black left that could vie for leadership against more established – and more tactically and politically conservative – forces.
The blackness political establishment, led by Obama, had shown over and over again that it was not capable of the most basic task: keeping blackness children live.
The young people would take to do information technology themselves.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/13/barack-obama-legacy-racism-criminal-justice-system
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