One key area where progressives expected to encounter little to no difficulty with President Obama was on the issue of racial justice. But here, too, such was not to be, especially during his first term. He’s our first African-American president, a living symbol of the immense progress we’ve made in this country in burying the ugly and official racism of the past. Yet at times, Obama thoroughly frustrated African-Americans by his reluctance to speak out more strongly on racial issues.
In truth, race has always been an issue for Obama—how could it not be?—but never the central issue as it is, for example, for Reverend Jesse Jackson or Reverend Al Sharpton. In his book Dreams from My Father, Obama talks openly and eloquently about his continuing struggle—as the son of a white woman and black man, raised by white grandparents—to learn his identity as a young black man. However, once involved in politics, Obama’s goal was never to be the first black whatever. It was to be the best at whatever he tried. And while I’m sure he’s proud to go down in history as America’s first black president, his real goal, it seems, was to be remembered as America’s first postracial president, introducing that magic time when Martin Luther King, Jr.’s own dream would finally come true: that day—sadly, still not yet arrived—when little children “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”1
That helps explain Obama’s initial awkwardness in dealing with unfortunate remarks made by his longtime Chicago friend and pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. For too long, Obama tried to ignore the mounting controversy over allegedly anti-American comments—“Not God Bless America. God Damn America!”—made during some of his Sunday sermons, which Obama claimed never to have been present for. He disassociated himself from Wright, but refused to condemn him. The point was, Obama didn’t want race to become a big issue in the campaign. He was running as the Democratic candidate for president, not the “black” candidate for president.2
But Wright wouldn’t shut up, and the controversy wouldn’t die down. So Obama finally stepped up, went to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia in 2008, and, in a speech titled “A More Perfect Union,” outlined his views on racism in America for the first time. He noted the great progress made on race relations, while pointing out that the struggle for equality was still going on. Indeed, he identified his own campaign as an extension of the civil rights movement “to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America.”3
Obama then directly rejected Reverend Wright’s stated views as “not only wrong but divisive . . . at a time when we need unity.” He couldn’t disown his pastor, he said—“no more than my white grandmother”—but he condemned him for presenting “a profoundly distorted view of this country—a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America.”4
It was a powerful speech, which generated wide media coverage. The Pew Research Center reported that 85 percent of Americans said they had seen or heard about parts of the speech. But, almost in defiance of Obama, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright followed with fiery, racist speeches before the NAACP and the National Press Club—after which Obama finally and formally cut all ties with him.5
The stage was thus set for the Obama presidency. Barack Obama, who proclaimed in his famous keynote address to the 2004 Democratic Convention that “there is not a black America and a white America,” decided not to make race relations a core issue of his presidency. He certainly didn’t want to be perceived as an angry black man. When he met early on with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, he rejected their plea that he specifically target black joblessness, even though the unemployment rate among black men has stubbornly remained twice what it is among whites. As he phrased his position in an interview later that year, “I can’t pass laws that say I’m just helping black folks.”6
July 17, 2009, brought the possibility of a truly historic occasion: the first African-American president helping the NAACP celebrate its hundredth anniversary. Obama recognized the great accomplishments of the civil rights movement—“I believe that overall, there probably has never been less discrimination in America than there is today”—while recognizing the many imbalances that still exist today, particularly in jobs, health care, and education. But again, he disappointed many by putting forth no specific policies or programs to narrow the gap, other than a general promise to “lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity that will put opportunity within the reach of not just African Americans, but all Americans [emphasis added]. All Americans. Of every race. Of every creed. From every region of the country. We want everybody to participate in the American Dream. That’s what the NAACP is all about.”7
Nobody could accuse the first black president of using his power just to help black people. Clearly, Obama wasn’t even going to address the issue of race, unless forced to by events. “He doesn’t want to be the black president,” former NAACP chairman Julian Bond later argued. “He wants to be the president, and that constrains him a great deal. I don’t think he’ll ever overcome that.”8
But just five days after the NAACP speech, events did force Obama’s hand. In one of his first news conferences, on July 22, President Obama had spent most of an hour taking questions about his plans for health-care reform when he offered the opportunity for a last question to crack reporter Lynn Sweet, Washington bureau chief for one of Obama’s hometown newspapers, the Chicago Sun-Times. Lynn dramatically shifted gears, asking him for his reaction to the arrest by a Cambridge, Massachusetts, police officer of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for allegedly breaking into his own home. Gates accused Sergeant James Crowley of automatically assuming he was a burglar just because he was a black man in a white residential neighborhood.
Obama surprised us all by responding with unusual candor:
“Now, I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts what role race played in that, but I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry. Number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. And that’s just a fact.”9
Even more than the Philadelphia speech, it was the first window into what Obama felt about the state of race relations in America today, and especially the issue of racial profiling. But he proposed no plan to deal with it, other than to invite Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley to the White House for a “beer summit” and apologize to the latter for calling him stupid. Indeed, there was no mention of race or race relations from the White House, until almost three years later.
That second window opened on February 26, 2012, with the killing of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin as he was walking home from a convenience store to his father’s girlfriend’s home in Miami Gardens, Florida. At first, there was no official comment from the White House on Martin’s death at the hands of vigilante George Zimmerman, the local police department’s bungling of the case, or the applicability of Florida’s so-called Stand Your Ground law. When he did finally react to Martin’s death, at a news conference on March 23, President Obama surprised reporters with a personal response: “If I had a son he would look like Trayvon and I think they [his parents] are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves.”10
Off and on, for over a year, we reporters tried to get some further reaction out of the White House, but Press Secretary Jay Carney steadfastly declined to comment on a matter that was still before the courts. It was not until July 19, 2013, three days after a Florida jury found Zimmerman not guilty, that Obama interrupted Carney’s daily briefing, took over the podium, and for the first time offered his own reaction to the Trayvon Martin verdict, again referencing his own experience with racial profiling.
“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.”11
He continued: “There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happened to me—at least before I was a Senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.12
“And I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida.”13
After these powerful words, many African-American leaders were hoping Obama would follow these remarks with a comprehensive agenda to address racism and economic injustice. “The president is now in his second term,” argued Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League. “I think that the table is set for the president to think about how he can address these issues not just in words, but renew some of the issues that he’s championed.” “As far as I’m concerned, he does not have to put a dashiki on, wave a red-black-and-green flag, put up a black power fist,” said Congresswoman Gwen Moore. “What I need him to do is try to level the playing field to make sure that African-Americans have the same opportunities.” But no such luck—it was radio silence on race all over again.14
Until three similar, explosive days in 2014: the killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice—two unarmed black men, and one black twelve-year-old with a toy gun—all three by white police officers. Protests against racial profiling and excessive use of force by police officers began in August in Ferguson, Missouri, with the shooting of eighteen-year-old Brown on August 9—and soon spread nationwide. Brown’s apparently senseless murder also prompted the media to re-examine the case of forty-three-year-old Eric Garner, killed by a police officer’s chokehold on Staten Island on July 17. Facts surrounding his death had been largely ignored until an amateur video appeared, showing Garner thrown to the ground by several policemen, placed in a chokehold, and held down by one officer until he succumbed—after pleading “I can’t breathe” eleven times. On August 1, the New York City medical examiner ruled Garner’s death a homicide by chokehold. Use of the chokehold is prohibited under NYPD rules.15
For the next few months, sporadic protests continued and tension remained high—until it broke wide open after three more related events. On November 25, a Ferguson grand jury announced its decision not to file charges against Officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown. On December 3, a Staten Island grand jury announced that no charges would be filed against Officer Daniel Pantaleo, despite the shocking video of Eric Garner’s murder, which had gone viral on the Internet. And in Cleveland, on November 22, police officer Timothy Loehmann responded to reports of a man carrying a gun—which the caller admitted was probably a fake gun. Arriving at the scene, Loehmann jumped out of his squad car and within two seconds had shot and killed twelve-year-old, toy-gun-wielding Tamir Rice. Loehmann and his partner then stood by, doing nothing to help Rice. Meanwhile they handcuffed his fourteen-year-old sister and blocked her from approaching little Tamir as he lay on the ground.16 The boy received no help until a third law enforcement officer arrived within four minutes and administered CPR until paramedics arrived almost ten minutes later.
And during all that time and turmoil, where was President Obama? Nowhere to be seen or heard. Aides said he was deeply troubled by the latest examples of racial profiling and police brutality, but publicly he said and did nothing beyond a few token gestures. He sent Attorney General Holder to Ferguson to meet with local officials. He sent three low-level White House officials to Michael Brown’s funeral. He called New York mayor Bill de Blasio to congratulate him on peaceful protests held in the wake of the Staten Island grand jury decision, even as the NYPD embarrassed themselves with wrongheaded protests of the mayor at police funerals.17
The day after the Ferguson grand jury decision, as I was walking into the Northwest Gate of the White House, I was surprised to encounter Reverend Al Sharpton and a small group of civil rights leaders walking out. Sharpton told me they’d just come from an Oval Office meeting with the president, where they pressured him to be more visible and vocal in demanding reforms in police conduct. That was a secret meeting. It was not posted on the president’s official daily schedule.
What did appear prominently on the president’s schedule was a meeting of forty-seven activists he convened at the White House to discuss community/police issues on Monday, December 1: twelve civil rights leaders, eight youth group leaders, seven police officials, five mayors, four ministers, two academics, and nine administration officials, including Vice President Biden and Attorney General Holder.18
Afterward, he came into the briefing room to announce his plan of action. It was far from the robust push for reform civil rights leaders had hoped for in the wake of the recent tragedies. As the National Journal’s George Condon reported, “His response was Obama at his most thoughtful and his most cautious.” And, to many, his most frustrating.19
Obama outlined four timid next steps: (1) The administration would not stop the Pentagon practice of supplying local police departments with military equipment, but a government task force would study the program and make sure local cops got better training on how and when to use it. (2) The administration would not require police officers to wear body cameras, but would work with Congress to provide funding for communities that wanted to adopt them. (3) The attorney general would “convene a series of these meetings all across the country.” (4) The president would name a task force to further study the situation, leading a “national conversation on race.”20
The “national conversation on race” thereby joined the continuing “national conversation on gun safety” Obama had called for after Tucson. Neither one went anywhere. There was a lot of talking about the issues of gun and police violence, but no action.
Even here, responding to national outrage over the needless killing of young African-Americans, in Ferguson, Staten Island, Cleveland, and elsewhere, President Obama went out of his way to argue the problem was larger than race: “When anybody in this country is not being treated equally under the law, that’s a problem. It’s incumbent on all of us as Americans . . . that we recognize that this is an American problem and not just a black problem. It is an American problem when anybody in this country is not being treated equally under the law.” That’s true. It’s also true, of course, that African-Americans are far more likely to be abused by police.21
For President Obama, this was another one of those times when the train of opportunity stopped at his station—and he failed to jump on board. A few days after the White House meeting, the New York Times reported: “Mr. Obama has not been the kind of champion for racial justice that many African-Americans say this moment demands.” The Washington Post featured an article on disaffected blacks in Jacksonville, Florida, whose disappointment in Obama had led to a frustration with politics in general. Asked if she was going to vote in the next presidential election, twenty-three-year-old Regenia Motley told the Post: “What’s the point? We made history, but I don’t see change.” Obama was the first black president, faced with very important issues facing the black community, yet he seemed to feel more constrained by the presidency than empowered by it.22
One person not surprised by the president’s tepid response was Congressman Elijah Cummings. The Maryland congressman and former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus says he was amazed how many African-Americans felt that, after his re-election in 2012, the “real” Obama would emerge, now “liberated” to speak out more about race. By “real,” Cummings told the National Journal, “they mean, I guess, he’s going to show up in a dashiki.” Cummings said he tried to tell them to lower their expectations: “The president is who he was in the first term. And it would be foolish for me . . . to give them the impression that the nation and the world will see some kind of reincarnation of Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton.” Obama was cautious in his first term and started out cautious in his second.23
While disappointed with his leadership, most black leaders—with the notable exceptions of professor Cornel West and talk show host Tavis Smiley—hesitated to criticize Obama publicly. Tanya Clay House, director of public policy for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, couched her criticism in the mildest possible terms. “People appreciate the fact that he heightened the public awareness of this by making statements and making sure that the attorney general has been present,” she told the Times. “But there’s a desire to push the administration further.”24
But that wasn’t the end of it. In a way, what happened in Ferguson, Staten Island, and Cleveland merely set the stage for Baltimore. Yet another unarmed black man killed at the hands of police, in a city with a long, sad history of police brutality.
On April 19, 2015, just as everyone thought things were quieting down and maybe even some progress was being made in police/community relations nationwide, twenty-five-year-old Freddy Gray died in police custody from serious neck and spine injuries. A video showed him being dragged and thrown into the back of a police van a week earlier, after being arrested for no apparent reason.25
Several days of remarkably peaceful protests erupted into widespread violence and looting on April 27, the day of Gray’s funeral. A state of emergency was declared. The National Guard was called in. Within two days, order was restored and residents of Baltimore began to rebuild. And, unlike in Ferguson, Staten Island, or Cleveland, action was soon taken against police officers responsible for Gray’s death. On May 1, based on her own investigation and a report from the Baltimore Police Department, Maryland State’s attorney for Baltimore, Marilyn Mosby, declared Freddy Gray’s death to be a homicide and filed charges against six officers involved in the incident, including one charge of second-degree murder.26
On April 28, the day after the Baltimore riots began, President Obama strongly condemned the violence at a White House news conference: “There’s no excuse for the kind of violence that we saw yesterday. It is counterproductive. . . . When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot, they’re not protesting. They’re not making a statement. They’re stealing. When they burn down a building, they’re committing arson. And they’re destroying and undermining businesses and opportunities in their own communities.”27
Obama also again called on Americans to take meaningful action to solve poverty and law enforcement issues fueling what he described as a national crisis. But, as in similar cases, other than condemning the violence and urging collective action to heal police/community relations, he took no action and announced no new programs—giving rise to the charge that he was once again standing on the sidelines.
By that time, America’s continuing racial divide had yawned open once again. According to a CBS/New York Times poll taken April 30 through May 3, 2015, 61 percent of Americans rated race relations as “bad”—the worst reading since it reached 68 percent when race riots exploded in Los Angeles in 1992, following the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King. On race, the world had turned upside down. In April 2009, shortly after Barack Obama took office, 66 percent of Americans had ranked race relations as “good.”28
And then there was Charleston, South Carolina, where, as mentioned earlier, racist gunman Dylann Roof murdered nine black parishioners in cold blood at a Bible study group. Unable to hold back any longer, Obama responded with passion, frustration, and anger.
The president himself went to Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church to deliver a remarkable, soul-stirring eulogy for Pastor Pinckney, in which he not only praised the civic and religious leader, but traced the powerful history of black churches and spoke openly about the lingering and very real problem of racism in this country. Maybe Charleston would be the trigger, said the president, for us finally to take the effects of racism seriously. “Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty . . . or attend dilapidated schools or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career. Perhaps it causes us to examine what we’re doing to cause some of our children to hate. Perhaps it softens hearts towards those lost young men, tens and tens of thousands caught up in the criminal-justice system and lead us to make sure that that system’s not infected with bias . . . that we embrace changes in how we train and equip our police so that the bonds of trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve make us all safer and more secure.”29
Obama concluded his remarks with a call for change. “We don’t need more talk,” he said. Now was the time for action. After initial outrage over every such tragedy, he pointed out, the tendency is to fall back to “business as usual.” Not this time, pleaded Obama: “But it would be a betrayal of everything Reverend Pinckney stood for, I believe, if we allow ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again. . . . To settle for symbolic gestures without following up with the hard work of more lasting change, that’s how we lose our way again.”30
But, of course, that’s exactly what happened. South Carolina and other states took down the Confederate flag. But after Charleston there were no new initiatives announced by the White House on race relations, gun safety, chronic unemployment among young blacks, or police/community relations. It was, in effect, back to business as usual.
Responding to the criticism that Obama hasn’t done enough for the African-American community, the White House offers a multilayered response. First, it notes that African-Americans, like all Americans, have benefited from the president’s initiatives on health care, jobs, raising the minimum wage for federal contractors, and improving the economy in general. Second, it points to the Federal Sentencing Act, which mitigated (but did not completely end) the hundred-to-one mandatory sentencing disparity for simple possession of crack versus powder cocaine—thus contributing to the disproportionate percentage of African-Americans incarcerated for drug abuse.31
Most of all, it swells with pride over “My Brother’s Keeper,” a public/private initiative Obama launched in the East Room of the White House on February 27, 2014. Its goal, accomplished through an interagency task force, is “creating and expanding ladders of opportunity for boys and young men of color.” Obama said he was motivated to design a program aimed exclusively at young African-Americans because of the “persistent gaps in employment, education outcomes and career skills” that divided young black men from their white peers. In September 2014, he issued a challenge to towns and cities across the country to become “MBK Communities” and come up with plans to improve life outcomes for all their citizens, although it remains to be seen if this call is effective and how many cities actually develop such programs.32
Notably, “My Brother’s Keeper,” as good a program as it may be, is the only directly race-related program of the Obama presidency. While it and the new sentencing guidelines are universally applauded, they are far from addressing the whole range of issues affecting the black community—from racial profiling, to voting rights, to black joblessness, urban schools, affirmative action, criminal and penal reform, and “stop and frisk” practices—that African-American leaders, perhaps naïvely, were counting on Obama to tackle directly.
Harvard professor Randall Kennedy summed up their frustration in the July/August 2014 edition of Politico magazine, in an article titled “Did Obama fail Black America?”: “For many African-Americans,” Kennedy writes, “he has been a hero—but also a disappointment. On critical matters of racial justice, he has posited no agenda, unveiled no vision, set forth no overarching mission to be accomplished.”33
It’s one thing for Obama to praise leaders like Congressman John Lewis for his courage in fighting for change. But, Kennedy asks: “Why can’t Obama muster some passion of his own?” Why indeed?34