[Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America’: HERE.]
By the early years of the twenty-first century, it looked as if America’s traumatic racial divisions really were receding into the past. It seemed as if genuine equality of opportunity had finally been achieved, and that Americans of whatever background had a level playing field upon which they could make as much of their talents as they wished, depending on how hard they were willing to work.
But then came the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama.
Obama, who is, of course, the child of a black father and a white mother, seemed to herald the dawning of the new post-racial America. He couldn’t have been elected, of course, without the votes of millions of white Americans, and his victory in itself showed that the nation was not racist. Many white Americans voted for him in order to show that they were not racist, but others voted for him because they were not racist and simply favored his policies. Still others voted for him because they were thrilled at the prospect of showing the world that the United States really was the land of opportunity, in which a member of a once-despised and discriminated against racial minority could become president. And so when he became president, Obama embodied the hopes of many Americans — and promptly dashed them.
Throughout his disastrous eight years as president, Obama did not work to heal what remained of American’s racial divisions. Instead, he stoked racial tensions repeatedly. When he took office, 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 exacerbated racial tensions even more. 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, who was white, 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.
Obama ultimately 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 that was indicative of lingering deep racial divisions and prejudice, and that required 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 the evidence was not actually on Obama’s side: 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 Ahmed Mohamed to the White House almost immediately after the boy faced discipline at his school, raising the question of whether the whole thing had been a set-up (how many other times do presidents get involved in high school disciplinary issues?). Obama made young Ahmed a symbol of the nation’s “Islamophobia” and the need to overcome it. Yet 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.
Throughout his presidency, Obama continually held to the line that black Americans and other racial and religious minorities were subject to systemic discrimination and ingrained hatred. It wasn’t true, but with Obama constantly assuming it to be true, racial divisions began to worsen. By the time he left office, they were worse than they had been in decades. That’s the legacy of Barack Obama.
