Will 2016 be Obama's blackest year yet?
As President Obama enters his eighth and final year in the White House, 2016 is destined to be his blackest year yet.
As President Obama enters his eighth and final year in the White House, 2016 is destined to be his blackest year yet.
African-Americans have embarked on a new era of consciousness and political activism. They say these days that black people have nothing to lose but their chains. This is black America at its blackest, resolved to speak the truth and confront our adversaries and detractors, or better yet, just do the damn thing and ignore the haters.
And the nation’s first black president, technically a lame duck who refuses to go out like one, really has nothing to lose. Yet, as someone who is in the process of cementing his legacy, Obama is poised to make it blacker as he makes his way out the door.
The events of the past year provide an indication of where the nation’s commander-in-chief is headed. After all, look at what the president accomplished in 2015 on issues of great concern to African-Americans.
In the area of criminal justice reform, President Obama became the first siting U.S. president to visit a correctional institution, putting a human face on incarceration. He chose to use the bully pulpit to help bring about the beginning of the end of a broken system of mass incarceration and a war on drugs that has been devastating to black families and the black community in general. The president spoke out against solitary confinement, and he just commuted the sentences of 95 drug offenders, the third such action he has taken over the past year. This as the president announced executive orders to assist ex-offenders with job training, education grants, legal assistance and children’s services, and the Justice Department released 6,000 federal inmates under new retroactive sentencing guidelines for drug offenders.
Currently, the Obama Justice Department under Attorney General Loretta Lynch is addressing one of the cutting edge issues of our day — police violence. Lynch recently announced a civil rights investigation into the patterns and practices of the Chicago Police Department, following the brutal death of a black teenager named Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer.
Further, Obama has called for a limit to mandatory standardized testing, in an effort to move away from the national obsession of high-stakes testing that detracts from teaching and from students’ learning. The First Lady even released a new rap video encouraging students to go to college.
Looking at foreign policy, this year, the president made an historic trip to Kenya and became the first sitting president to visit the African Union. In addition, he opened the U.S. Embassy in Havana after more than 54 years, restoring ties with Cuba, to the anger of his adversaries who continue to fight the Cold War.
What does the new year bring? Well, for one, the president plans to give a nontraditional State of the Union address, his final address in office. Further, he has expressed an interest in visiting Cuba and closing the Guantanamo Bay military prison.
Also, it is expected that President Obama will make use of his executive order pen, especially on issues such as gun control and expanding background check requirements for gun dealers. Gun violence is a plague upon the nation, and a uniquely American problem in terms of the carnage. Following the Oregon shooting, the president reportedly said he was “pissed.” Surely he is not alone. The black community is well acquainted with the impact of gun violence as a major public health crisis in America and a leading cause of death among young black men.
Obama has used executive orders on reentry, immigration and climate change, and he is well positioned to act unilaterally — without Congress, as he is entitled — on this issue of gun control. This would have been unspeakable just a few years ago, but the tide is turning. And the president realizes that he does not need the Republican Congress, dysfunctional, unproductive and recalcitrant as it is.
This is Obama’s time to work on his legacy, as he will accomplish nothing waiting for the help of those Republicans to whom he reached out early on — perhaps for far too long — only to be met with indignities and disrespect, antagonism and outright racism. Republicans have fought him every step of the way, all the while calling him everything but a child of God. They treated him as illegitimate. They fought the big, bad black man’s economic stimulus, and they did not want his Obamacare, or anything that would give the president credit and make him look good — or benefit the country and their own states, for that matter.
Now, however, unfettered and liberated, President Obama makes fun of his adversaries, as he should, dismissing the GOP on the matter of Syrian refugees as being “scared of orphans and widows.” And what is blacker than playing the dozens? It should be a good year.
Follow David A. Love on Twitter at @davidalove
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