In the United States: Blacks, Obama's Poor Relatives

The historic 2008 election in the United States seemed to bode well for African-Americans. However, not only has their plight not improved, they are the first victims of the crisis.

Triumph, and then… nothing. If there was a community for which the fire of the “Obama Revolution” has fizzled, it would be the African-American community. Since the election of the first black president in the history of the United States, nothing has changed. And the losers are still the same.

There hasn’t been a day that did not bring its share of bad news or distressing events, such as the bake sale held by the U.C. Berkeley College Republicans, where they sold muffins at varying prices depending on the ethnicity of the buyer: where whites paid $1.25 and blacks paid only 75 cents…

With a poverty rate of 27 percent, up two points since 2009 (compared to 10 percent for whites), an unemployment rate of 16 percent, and increasing steadily (the national average is 9 percent)…. Obama or not, socioeconomic indicators for blacks are in the red. In New York, the situation is so worrying that Michael Bloomberg, New York’s wealthy mayor, took $30 million (22.3 million euros) out of his own pocket to finance a crash return-to-work course program aimed at young blacks and Latinos.

In Washington, however, this is not a top priority of the Obama administration. The time of affirmative action seems to have passed. Now considered old-fashioned, the policy also faces a reluctant Supreme Court.

Recent news have also brought dark times to America. In June, in Mississippi, a middle-aged black man was crushed to death by a car belonging to a teenager. The man had been previously assaulted by the teen along with a gang of white teenagers chanting “white power!” The 19-year-old prime suspect faces the death penalty. The execution of Troy Davis on Sept. 21 recalled the latent racism in the American judicial system — latent when it is not taken for granted, as in the sentencing of a black man to death in Texas in 1996, in which a psychologist affirmed on the stand that “the race factor, black, increases the [defendant’s] future dangerousness.”

A Liar

Denouncing the record proportion of blacks among 2.3 million incarcerated inmates, historian Michelle Alexander, in her controversial book,* does not hesitate to look at the results of the “new Jim Crow laws” (the name of the segregation laws enforced until 1960) that are still denying blacks access to citizenship. Among them is this chilling finding: There are now more blacks on parole — with a near-pariah status, especially since they are denied the right to vote — than enslaved in 1850…

The post-racial America that the historic election of Obama promised seems to be a mirage. Of course, this fiction allowed him get to the White House, but today no one is mistaken: The color line is far from erased. To many observers, it would explain the opposition’s ferocity in Congress; many Republicans hold a deep-rooted animosity, mixed with racism, toward Obama. Would the congressman, who interrupted the president during his speech in 2009 by calling him a liar, have done the same with a white president? Probably not.

What does the main person concerned think of all this? Not much, really. Anxious to be the president of all Americans, put off by the controversy that preceded his election — his friendship with Jeremiah Wright, a black reverend with radial views — Obama remains virtually silent on the issue. Only once did he abandon this neutrality. This was during the controversy between Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a prominent black Harvard professor, and a white police officer who had stopped the man on his own property, mistaking him for a burglar. The president had emphasized the persistent over-representation of blacks in arrests (86 percent of the cases in New York) before the two men met at the White House to end the incident over a beer.

Good Girl

In the few occasions he spoke about it, Obama urged the black community to take charge. In July 2009, he urged parents to do so by “putting away the Xbox and putting our kids to bed at a reasonable hour. … Your destiny is in your hands, and don’t you forget that.” He gave the same speech on Sept. 24 before the Black Caucus, the association of blacks elected into Congress: “Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complainin’. Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’. We’re going to press on. We have work to do.”

Until then, now, the good girl, the black community, is showing serious signs of weariness: According to an ABC-Washington Post poll on Sept. 18, 58 percent of black voters say that they have a favorable opinion of the president, compared to 83 percent from last April. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, a historic black neighborhood in Brooklyn, posters of the 2008 campaign still hold court on barber shop windows and supermarkets, alongside portraits of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Few openly express disappointment. “What could Obama do with the burden he inherited? Me, I’ll always be proud that there is a black in the White House,” said a man crossing to a community bookstore.

Nevertheless: irreconcilable voices are making themselves heard — such as that of Cornel West, a great black intellectual figure who, in a scathing editorial in the New York Times, wrote that Martin Luther King, Jr. would turn over in his grave if he saw Obama’s America.**

The president attempted to respond to these attacks on Oct. 16 in his speech at the inauguration of the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in Washington. “Our work is not done… let us draw strength from those earlier struggles,” he said.

*Translator’s Note: “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” The New Press, 2010.

**Editor’s note: Cornel West’s article is titled, and in fact said, “Dr. King weeps from his grave.”