False Black Power? by Jason L. Riley

Author:Jason L. Riley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Templeton Press

Obama showed little interest in providing any clarity or context on racial disparities and instead chose to focus on doing what was politically expedient. Police are public servants, and police abuse is a serious matter that should never be downplayed or ignored. But the idea that police behavior in ghetto communities is the foremost problem—which is what activist groups like Black Lives Matter have alleged and politicians like Barack Obama have lent credence to—is rooted in liberal identity politics, not reality. The administration investigated nearly two dozen police forces around the country over allegations of civil rights abuses.29 And the president regularly invoked racial and ethnic bias when discussing drug laws, sentencing guidelines, and mass incarceration while rarely if ever mentioning the significant racial differences in criminal activity.

Criticism from black progressives notwithstanding, Obama played the race card plenty. He accused conservatives on the Supreme Court of weakening black voting rights and advocated for racial double standards in college admissions. He reflexively sided against law enforcement in local incidents involving black suspects and sympathized with antipolice Black Lives Matter activists—even appointing one of their leaders to a federal task force on policing. His support for looser drug laws and his decision to commute record numbers of prison sentences undermined law enforcement and gave the impression that he cared more about lawbreakers than their victims. Under Obama, federal housing officials forced upscale suburbs to import low-income minorities or risk losing government funding, even when there was no evidence that these communities were discriminating against anyone who could afford to move in,30 and education officials pressured schools to discipline students based on race, not behavior.31 In the final months of his presidency, Obama made overt and repeated racial appeals to black voters to support Hillary Clinton as his successor, even declaring that he would consider it a “personal insult” if they didn’t rally behind her.32

Given Clinton’s underperformance in the election among blacks in critical states that Trump won—Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio—Obama must have left office insulted. And his administration’s racial politics almost certainly harmed racial discourse. By 2016, race relations had reached their lowest point in nearly a quarter century. In a Washington Post–ABC News poll taken halfway through the final year of the Obama presidency, 63 percent of respondents said race relations were “generally bad,” and a majority agreed they were “getting worse.”33 A New York Times poll from around the same time showed similar results. “Sixty-nine percent of Americans say race relations are generally bad, one of the highest levels of discord since the 1992 riots in Los Angeles during the Rodney King case,” the paper reported. “Racial discontent is at its highest point in the Obama presidency and at the same level as after the riots touched off by the 1992 acquittal of Los Angeles police officers charged in Mr. King’s beating.34

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