Obama, Trayvon, and Race in America

The rhetoric and uproar over the beating death of Trye Nichols by five Black police officers in Memphis, Tennessee, demonstrates how badly the “conversation” over race has deteriorated.  One would think that a crime involving Blacks killing another Black would lack a racial angle to exploit.  Alas, in today’s race-obsessed universe that is never the case.  Unable to help themselves, our nation’s top racialists, beginning with President Joe Biden, weighed in on the controversy hurling the standard epithets of “systemic racism” and “White supremacy.”  The media, and others, were happy to join in.

With the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 ending “separate but equal,” the Civil Rights legislation of the sixties, affirmative action, and “Great Society,” with its trillions of dollars of wealth transfers to Blacks, one might have considered that, nearly sixty years later, the nation would mend and race relations improve.

Indeed, the emergence of Barack Obama and his ascension to the Presidency in 2008 suggested that that moment had arrived. The event should have been an inflection point in America’s racial history.  Many thought it was.  How else to explain a White majority nation electing a Black President, other than that America had turned the corner?  Alas, Obama was not one to placate the nation.  Rather than use the opportunity of his rise to the White House as the crowning achievement of a long treacherous journey to racial reconciliation, he chose instead to agitate and polarize the nation further.  His presidency should have represented the fulfillment of the great dream of Lincoln, King, and of our Declaration of Independence, but became instead the basis of an ever-widening racial gap that may never be bridged.