A new Obama emerges on race in second term
ANALYSIS - As he will make remarks Wednesday commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, this second-term Obama has now emerged in full...
The president still avoids some of the heated rhetoric around race that other top Democrats use. Earlier this month, Hillary Clinton cast a new law in North Carolina that limits early voting days and requires photo identification for people to cast ballots as a “greatest hits of voter suppression.” Holder has likened similar provisions to “poll taxes” of the Jim Crow era.
Obama nearly always avoids such language. When the Voting Rights Act was struck down in June, Obama chose to give his previously-scheduled remarks on climate change, not even publicly discussing the decision until a few days later.
Some Democrats argue that Obama is still not speaking bluntly enough about class or race. They say that Obama’s emphasis on inequality and class is insufficient in a country where racial divides still exist on major issues, like voter ID laws and New York City’s stop-and-risk police practices. They also argue that Obama overemphasizes class and downplay race as a challenge to Americans, particularly people of color.
“Even rising economic mobility and opportunity among blacks will not address the continuing problem of race and criminal justice,” said Frederick Harris, a Columbia University professor of political science who also directs the university’s Center on African-American Politics and Society. “As we have seen in the last four years, whether it is the Ivy League Professor Henry Louis Gates or Trayvon Martin, the child of working-class parents, the criminal justice system needs to be reformed. A police bullet does does not discern who is middle-class or poor in black communities.”
Heather McGhee, vice-president for policy at the progressive think tank Demos, said in an e-mail, “The problems in our economy are actually problems of democracy: do we have the political power and will to fashion fairer rules and a stronger safety net? And in a multi-racial democracy, our economy is only as strong as the social contract that binds us. So no, I don’t believe that we can, in a colorblind fashion, simply follow economists’ prescriptions for monetary and fiscal policy and fix the economic problem.”
The president is aware of these critiques, say administration officials, and understands the race-specific challenges of black Americans. And he is increasingly speaking about them, but very carefully.
“When it comes to the economy, when it comes to inequality, when it comes to wealth, when it comes to the challenges that inner cities experience, he would say that we have not made as much progress as the civil and social progress that we’ve made, and that it’s not enough just to have a black president, it’s not enough just to have a black syndicated radio show host,” Obama said in an interview with radio hosts Tom Joyner and Sybil Wilkes in discussing how close the U.S. is to achieving Martin Luther King Jr’s dream.
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