Letters & Opinion

Have U.S. Race Relations Taken A Nosedive?

By Clement Wulf-Soulage

WHEN Barack Obama assumed office in January 2009, he unequivocally announced to America and the rest of the world that he was ā€œnot the president of black Americaā€ but rather ā€œthe president of the United States of America.ā€ Predictably, African-Americans and other ethnic minorities were palpably excited that the United States had finally begun to heal its divisions over race and atone for its past disgraceful misdeeds by electing its first black president. At any rate, the racial barrier had supposedly been broken and the historic election was celebrated and heralded by the rest of the world as the dawning of a ā€œpost-racialā€ era.

Now seven years later and nearing the end of his second term, Obama has traversed a tough road and the general feeling is that despite his fairly good performance in office, his presidency has not had much effect on race relations in the United States ā€“ a circumstance which a popular German newspaper has described as ā€œthe tragedy of Americaā€™s first black president.ā€

But seriously, did we really expect Obama to fix Americaā€™s age-old race problem? No one expected that Americaā€™s turbulent history with race would altogether stop with the momentous election of a black president. If anything, discrimination and racial profiling still remain deeply and systemically ingrained in U.S. society – a fact oftentimes revealed in official data.

In the mainstream media, racism may not always be so blatant, but it remains latent. Much to our dismay, presidential candidates continue to hold twisted notions on immigration, ethnic minorities and political history ā€“ and debates quickly devolve into a horror show of absurdities and infelicities as candidates unapologetically display disquieting prejudices and make racial appeals to mostly conservative white voters. In recent times, the nationā€™s once proud democracy has been reduced to a noisy race to the bottom by divisive demagogues like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

Yet despite the ushering in of a new political era through the historic election of an African-American president, the U.S. has maintained a plethora of racialized policies over the course of its history. Deep racial schisms are evident in responses about law enforcement and the criminal justice system. Above all, the events of the past two years, including the slaying of an 18-year-old African-American man in Ferguson, Missouri and the execution of nine people in an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina by a white Nazi adorned with the Confederate flag, have soured judgements about the current state of race relations. Of further disquiet is the fact that America still has little regard for African-American protesters who march for justice and who demand overhauls in policing under the ā€œBlack Lives Matterā€ movement around the country.

Some of us will recall in 2013 that the Supreme Court declared blatant racism a thing of the past and ruled that the Voting Rights Act of 1965, aimed at combating the disenfranchisement of African-Americans, was no longer valid. Needless to say, daily experience tells a different story.

But why should African-Americans still be complaining today about overt and persistent racism more than fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr. fought for equality and the end of segregation? Why does Baltimore, the city where the black teenager Michael Brown was killed – and whose population of 21,000 is two-thirds African-American have a police force that is 95 percent white? Has the system failed African-Americans or should they themselves be held responsible for their own state of poverty and disillusionment?

A flurry of new scholarly studies have warned that as America grows richer, a large pool of African-American men are becoming ever more disconnected from mainstream society – mired in a vicious cycle of underachievement and social immobility. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted recently, ā€œnearly six in 10 Americans, including heavy majorities of both whites and blacks, think race relations are generally bad, and that nearly four in 10 think the situation is getting worse.ā€

The irreducible truth is that the United States is still grappling with the problem of racism and with discrimination. Although the situation today is nowhere as bad as it was during the bloody 1950s and ā€˜60s, the recent killings of young black men by white police officers and the inexorable rise in islamophobia have reignited the debate about race relations in the U.S.

Meanwhile, the rise of far-right candidates and parties in Europe and America (the Tea Party, for instance) attest to the general fear of ethnic minorities and refugees ā€“ and attitudes toward non-Christians are also perilously shifting. For many, the Paris attacks as well as the violence and chaos that erupted in Cologne on New Yearā€™s Eve may have finally brought to light what they have always been saying: that too many foreigners in the country bring too many cultural and social problems along with them. Iā€™m afraid those events have the potential to easily trigger a radical shift in refugee and immigration policy in America, but especially in Europe.

Much to their discredit, two major Republican candidates, Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, are advocating for the U.S. to officially discriminate based on religion, claiming implausibly that only Christians should be allowed to enter the country as refugees. Ted Cruz has even announced that he would introduce legislation to ban Muslim Syrian refugees from entering the country, following further incendiary remarks by former Governor Chris Christie that not even ā€œthree-year-old orphanā€ refugees should be allowed to enter the country. What is more, only recently a Muslim woman wearing a hijab was ejected from a Donald Trump campaign rally ā€“ an ill-fated action that plays further into the hands of the nationalists. Trump, the iconoclastic frontrunner, has previously called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S.

Sadly, all of this points to a desecration of American democracy and a new dangerous national mood that could trigger social unrest across ethnic, religious and other cleavages in a country that has depended and prospered on immigrants. Itā€™s about time America genuinely embarks on a journey of soul-searching and contemplate what it truly means to be a ā€œgreat nationā€. As Germany has shown, every nation has dark spots in its past, but the greatness of a country is reflected in how it deals with this past and the steps it takes to reflect and critically examine it. I believe even in modern America, it will be some time before racism truly becomes a thing of the past. Hence, in this respect, the United States is not the great nation it believes itself to be.

For comments, write to [email protected] – Clement Wulf-Soulage is a Management Economist, Published Author and Former University Lecturer.

3 Comments

  1. “… Obama has traversed a tough road and the general feeling is that despite his fairly good performance in office, his presidency has not had much effect on race relations in the United States….”
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    An American society, or any society for that matter, made-up of Asians, Africans, Native-Americans, and Europeans living side by side in peace and harmony is wishful thinking.

    It is as unrealistic as hoping for a ‘super-season’ that is made-up of: a little bit of spring, a little bit of summer, a little bit of autumn, and a little bit of winter.

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    The election of Obama, as the first African-American President of the USA (POTUS) is analogous to throwing water unto an oil fire while using your cooking stove — I did not say Gasoline; I did say water. The throwing of water to extinguish a fire seem logical, but it has quite the opposite result if applied to an oil fire on one’s stove while preparing dinner.

    Obama’s election to the POTUS, like water, applied to an oil fire, simply caused an eruption of the evil Racism that lies beneath the epidermis of the Caucasian Christians to spread over an expanded surface area, and with the ubiquitous presence of the video camera, exposed the real evil character of the incorrigible Caucasian Christians in the USA, France, Italy, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Russia, where the beneficiaries of the Slave Masters derived their enormous wealth from the enslavement of the Original Man and Woman, even as they murder black men, women, and children, for any imagined reason with impunity.

    THROWING WATER ON AN OIL FIRE

    https://www.facebook.com/elmananadenuevolaredo/videos/10156064342945338/?theater

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    This evil of white supremacy is instilled into the soul of the Caucasian child by means of subliminal seduction, which also affects the black child adversely, causing the Black children to hate themselves as a people who has never built and accomplished anything. This self-hatred manifests itself in the staggering rate of fratricide, hair straightening, skin bleaching, and the lust for the pale skinned woman, as is the case with Negroes like Vilon John, Rick John Wayne, and Derick Walcott, and the many other brain-damaged Negroes who by such actions testify to their hatred of their Mothers, Sisters, Aunts, and Cousins, by marrying a Caucasian woman as the best choice to mother their offspring – showing by their actions, that the Original Woman, known as the Black woman, who made it possible for these mentally ill Negroes to survive the TransAtlantic Slavery, has nothing attractive about her, and not deserving of the Negroe’s love.

    In St. Lucia we have adequate specimens of such reprobates and examples of mentally damaged products as manifested in a Peter Josie advocating for the banning of the Original Woman from beauty Pageants, because they are too ā€œBLACK AND UGLIERā€as he refers to the Queen of Creation.

    Of course, this self-hate is ubiquitous among the Original Woman, who is the Mother of the Universe, but now hates her beautiful features, bleaching her skin with Clorox, wearing fake weaves made from rope, while using ā€œPermā€ chemicals and hot irons to kill their beautiful hair to look like a Caucasian dead-hair woman, with the dead hair just laying flat on their scull like a Sarah Flood; at least my sister Mary Francis has not sunk to such a despicable behavior of self-hatred, even though she continues to worship a Dead Caucasian Man, nailed to a post as her God and Savior.

    CAUCASIANS STOLE MY LAND, KILLED MY PARENTS, CALLED ME INDEPENDENT

    https://www.facebook.com/717947878333399/videos/775086112619575/

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