Order Robert Spencer’s new book, Holy Hell: Islam’s Abuse of Women and the Infidels Who Enable It: HERE.
Throughout his tenure, Barack Hussein Obama stoked racial tensions rather than calming them. In the nine years he has been out of office, the American left continues to sow racial division and hatred, apparently in the belief that racial strife means electoral victory for the Democrats. This is the playbook they learned from America’s undeservedly lauded first black president.As Rating America’s Presidents details, when Obama took office in January 2009, the Justice Department was pursuing a case against the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation in Philadelphia. Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, abruptly dropped the case in May 2009 and refused to cooperate with further investigations, giving the impression that the Black Panthers were getting away with voter intimidation because of their race.
Obama’s response to several widely publicized incidents likewise exacerbated racial tensions. On July 16, 2009, black intellectual Henry Louis Gates found himself locked out of his Massachusetts home and began trying to force his way in. An officer arrived to investigate a possible break-in; Gates began berating him, and was arrested for disorderly conduct. Obama claimed that the police “acted stupidly” and noted the “long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by police disproportionately,” although there was no indication of racial bias in this case. He invited Gates and the police officer to the White House for a “beer summit,” which the media hailed as a manifestation of his determination to heal racial divisions, when in fact it was just the opposite: he was taking a case of misunderstanding and disorderly conduct and portraying it as a racial incident requiring presidential reconciliation.
Obama also made matters worse when a young Hispanic, George Zimmerman, on February 26, 2012, shot dead a young black man, Trayvon Martin, in what was widely reported as a racial hate crime. NBC edited a recording of Zimmerman’s call to the police to give the false impression that Zimmerman was suspicious of Martin solely because he was black. Instead of trying to calm the situation, Obama stoked the idea that Zimmerman acted out of racial hatred and said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” Yet Zimmerman was acquitted of murder and the Justice Department declined to prosecute him for a hate crime.
Obama made a similar rush to judgment in the case of Ahmed Mohamed, a Muslim high school student who was arrested in September 2015 after bringing what appeared to be a suitcase bomb to his Texas high school. Mohamed claimed it was a homemade clock and that he was a victim of “Islamophobic” bigotry. Obama invited him to the White House, making the boy a symbol of the nation’s “Islamophobia” and the need to overcome it. Mohamed’s father filed a lawsuit against the school district, which was dismissed when he failed to establish that the school had engaged in any prejudice or discrimination.
All this was paradoxical in the extreme, as many hailed Obama’s first election in 2008 as an indication that America had finally left behind the racial divisions that had so marred its past, and was now giving the world an example of a truly post-racial society. Instead of working to heal remaining racial divisions, Obama exacerbated them, giving credence to the fanciful notion that a phantasmagorical “systemic racism” still plagued America. Despite his career of success and privilege, he continued to claim that black Americans suffered from institutional barriers to their success and well-being in this country.
In 2020, he even spoke directly against the mythology about the significance of his election: Here’s one thing I never believed – right? – was the fever of racism being broken by my election. That I was pretty clear about. I never subscribed to the, we live in a post-racial era. But I think that what did happen during my presidency was, yes, a backlash among some people who felt that somehow, I symbolized the possibility that they or their group were losing status not because of anything I did but just by virtue of the fact that I didn’t look like all the other presidents previously.”
In speaking in this way, as he did so many times, Barack Obama created and exacerbated hatred where there had been harmony. That is his malignant legacy.
