Posted on 07/22/2013 3:48:29 AM PDT by markomalley
To African-Americans, President Obama just gets it.
Obama’s notably personal comments on Friday about the verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman, and on race in America, struck a chord. They vividly underlined the fact that, for the first time, the person in the Oval Office has lived an African-American experience.
To black supporters, that is more important than Obama’s inability to narrow racial inequalities during his four and a half years in office, something that has frustrated members of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), a former head of the black caucus, was in the middle of a phone interview with The Hill when Obama appeared at the White House briefing room podium to address the raw feelings exposed by the “not guilty” verdict on the man who had fatally shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager.
Pausing to listen to an office television for several minutes, Rangel said: “I don’t see how a person not-of-color could possibly do the job that he’s doing.”
Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said, “I was glad that he spoke about it in a very personal way. I thought it was very powerful conversation. He could really make a significant impact in terms of race relations and in terms of not sweeping this under the carpet.”
For the vast bulk of the African-American political class, the sense of identification and empathy with the nation’s first black president has almost always taken primacy over whatever disappointments they have with his record.
The disappointment is perhaps strongest on the economy, since black people are worse off now than they were when Obama first took office, according to virtually every major indicator.
They have fared worse than whites throughout Obama’s time in the White House. Their plight, therefore, cannot be pinned on the general malaise that has afflicted the nation since the financial crash.
In January 2009, the month Obama took office, black unemployment stood at 12.7 percent, outstripping white unemployment, which stood at 7.1 percent.
The national unemployment rate and the rate among whites have both ticked down since then, but African-American joblessness has actually worsened. It now stands at 13.7 percent, while the white rate is just 6.6 percent.
Statistics for home ownership tell the same story. The most recent figures, which cover the first quarter of 2013, show that 43.1 percent of African-American families own their homes, a decline of 3 percentage points since Obama came to power.
White home ownership also declined over the same period, but the fall (from 74.7 percent to 73.4 percent) was only about half of that experienced by black people.
The pattern repeats itself on income. Adjusted for inflation, white per capita income declined by only a negligible amount ($36) from 2008 to 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available. During the same period, black per capita income fell by $502.
Back in 2005, the first year of President George W. Bush’s second term, black per capita income adjusted for inflation was $801 higher than it is in the most recent figures.
Most black liberals lay the blame for the widening gaps at the door of history, and what they see as present-day Republican obstructionism. But Obama has not been immune from black criticism.
Academic Cornel West and broadcaster Tavis Smiley have leveled especially strong charges. Back in 2011, West accused Obama of being a “black puppet of corporate plutocrats.”
Obama’s remarks on Martin evidently did not alleviate Smiley’s dissatisfaction.
“Took POTUS almost a week to show up and express mild outrage. And still, it was as weak as pre-sweetened Kool-Aid,” he tweeted soon after Obama left the briefing room. But if Smiley and West have become the standard-bearers of black dissent, there has been a conspicuous lack of other prominent people rallying to that flag.
Rev. Al Sharpton, the activist and MSNBC anchor, has been among Obama’s staunchest defenders.
“Do people want rhetoric to make us feel better or action that makes our lives better?” he asked in a phone interview with The Hill.
Many people argue that because African-Americans have always been poorer than whites, it is natural that they would suffer more sharply in the Great Recession and its aftermath.
Sharpton offered a more specific observation, noting that black Americans have tended to find proportionately more employment in the public sector than the private sector, in part because of discrimination from private employers.
It was therefore virtually certain that blacks would be harder hit by the succession of cuts and fiscal crises that pared public sector jobs.
He added that a number of the White House’s top priorities, from the stimulus to ObamaCare, served to help poorer people most, and that many African-Americans benefitted.
“Have they done it in the names of African-Americans and Latinos, like I would do? No. But would that way have produced a more positive result? Probably less positive. The right would have said, ‘They’re just doing it to help them.’ ”
Among black progressives, there is also a wariness about fueling the fires of Republicans and conservatives who are seen as too often being personally disrespectful toward the president.
“Many progressives and Democrats will avoid like the plague giving ammunition to the professional Obama haters and the GOP,” said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a political analyst and author.
Still, he added, “It would be totally irresponsible not to raise principled, political criticisms and offer constructive criticisms, whether it be on his drone policy or urging him to do more for the black poor.”
Black lawmakers are highly reluctant to voice those criticisms, however. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) repeatedly criticized Obama in 2011 for being insufficiently concerned with blacks’ economic circumstances. But she was an exception rather than the rule — and has largely muted any expressions of negative recently.
“I was thinking you maybe wanted me to say bad things about the president,” Rangel noted at one point in an interview with The Hill, making plain he had no intention of doing so.
He acknowledged merely that any disappointment he felt was “only based on my expectations. I know that nobody else understands the problems we face as a people better than he does.”
And how is that to be accomplished electorally? Shifting demographics, which will take a seismic shift upon passage of the alien amnesty bill, likely will likely saddle us with race-based, Obama-type presidents into the unforeseeable future.
Blood is thicker than almost anything - except, perhaps, the Liberal mind.
I have always wondered if the blacks were a trojan horse delivered by the muslim slavers and wether iur response shoulde be “get off our lawn”. Or sometinhg else.
And their present calamitous situation is not a matter of black color, African origins, slave culture, or the risks of exobiology. It's something else.
How about a special legislative committee to study the “continuing effects of a culture of perpetual grievance, loss of father-headed families, and degrading welfare dependency” on African-Americans?
At the time of the Harlem Renaissance --- a wonderful outpouring of creativity in poetry, drama, dance, music, philosophy, literature, political and religious thought in the 1920's and 1930's --- 90% of the Black children in Harlem were living in households headed by their own married fathers and mothers.
Something catastrophically destructive happened to the Black community, not just before 1865, or between Reconstruction and the Great Depression, but between the 1930's and now. It wasn't some kind of exotic-afro-alienism. And it wasn't slavery.
Think, think.
Yes, the Shelby Steele article - it was excellent and I hope somebody posts it today.
One of the things that happened was the Great Society. Many blacks in NYC were fairly poor, but they were in the position of any immigrant group, in the sense that most of them actually were immigrants from the South and were trying to make their way into a different, more economically advantageous culture.
The black crime rate was always higher, but it was not the sort of blatant, callous crime that it reflects now. However, it wasn’t impossible for whites, whether Anglo or Hispanic, native-born or immigrant, to live in a black area because there was a large black working class who wanted the same things for their kids as everybody else.
When I was a child (1950s), the projects in Harlem were mixed, and families could only get in if the parents of the children were married and if one of them had a job. Then suddenly in the mid-60s, they dropped both of those requirements (and also started permitting unmarried mothers), and within no time at all the projects were all black and had become seething hotbeds of crime and destruction.
Decent black people did not like this at all, btw. I was a waitress when I was in college and one of my fellow waitresses was a black woman in her 40s or so who had several children (and a husband, of course) and lived in the projects. She was furious and said this was going to give all the wrong messages to black children. And sure enough, it did, even to her kids: a year later, her 16 year old daughter was pregnant and applying for her “own” apartment in the projects. She felt she had failed and she was very, very upset - but it was the times, and it was the message coming out in a very powerful way, with financial incentives, from the federal government, the city government and all of the media.
If journalists back then were what they are now, I’d want to see the birth certificate, the autopsy, and all the other things I had to hunt down on my own to get THIS story sorted out. But I hope you are right, and back then journalists really were objective and thorough and honest.
Although we lived just 3 blocks from St James A.M.E., we weren't much familiar with it except for one weekend every summer, when they had their Food & Faith Festival, blocked off the street, and sold sweet potato pies, fried catfish and hush puppies. And, dare I mention it, slabs of cold watermelon. White kids like my brother and I could freely wander over for catfish and stay for the music, early in the day it was Gospel, and later Old Timey and Blues.
There was a sense of "Ethnic Neighborhoods," but there was not race hatred. Black or white, you could get a good job right out of high school, because we had industries: a paper mill, a big G.E. plant, Westinghouse aluminum, Bucyrus-Erie, National Forge & Steel.
So lots of young adults got pretty good-paying jobs right out of high school,got married, got mortgages on houses, got families started. There was a lot of teenage childbearing, but it wasn't a problem because it was married teenagers at 18 and 19.
That's all long gone. We were first redeveloped (which devastated the parish neighborhoods and the Black churches as well), then de-industrialized, then de-populated.
I wouldn't go back there now. It's not Detroit, but it's just one more flake of Rust Belt corrosion.
In retrospect, its decline has the overall appearance of having been deliberate. From Redevelopment on down.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.