Chicago – Obama Racial Legacy: Pride, Promise, Regret _ And Deep Rift

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    President Barack Obama, center, greets supporters at a campaign event for U.S. Senate candidate Gary Peters and gubernatorial candidate Mark Schauer at Wayne State University, Saturday, Nov. 1, 2014 in Detroit, Mich. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)Chicago – He entered the White House a living symbol, breaking a color line that stood for 220 years.

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    Barack Obama took office, and race immediately became a focal point in a way that was unprecedented in American history. No matter his accomplishments, he seemed destined to be remembered foremost as the first black man to lead the world’s most powerful nation.

    But eight years later, Obama’s racial legacy is as complicated as the president himself.

    To many, his election was a step toward realizing the dream of a post-racial society. He was dubbed the Jackie Robinson of politics. African-Americans, along with Latinos and Asians, voted for him in record numbers in 2008, flush with expectations that he’d deliver on hope and change for people of color.

    Some say he did, ushering in criminal justice reforms that helped minorities, protecting hundreds of thousands of immigrants from deportation, and appointing racially diverse leaders to key jobs, including the first two black attorneys general. These supporters say he deserves more credit than he gets for bringing America back from the worst recession since the Great Depression, the killing of Osama bin Laden, and a major expansion of health care that secured insurance for millions of minorities. They celebrate his family as a sterling symbol of black success.

    But Obama also frustrated some who believe he didn’t speak out quickly or forcefully enough on race or push aggressively enough for immigration reform.

    And his presidency did not usher in racial harmony. Rather, both blacks and whites believe race relations have deteriorated, according to polls. Mounting tensions over police shootings of African-Americans prompted protests in several cities and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement.

    Perhaps most strikingly, the president’s successor, Donald Trump, is seen by many as the antithesis of a colorblind society, a one-time leader of the “birther” movement that spread the falsehood that Obama was born in Africa. Trump’s strong reliance on white voters was in sharp contrast to the multiracial coalition that gave Obama his two victories.

    “President Obama represents the face of the future — multicultural America. Donald Trump represents the old racial order of the black-white divide,” says Fredrick Cornelius Harris, director of the Center on African American Politics and Society at Columbia University. “And for the next decades to come, there will be a battle between those two viewpoints of what America is.”

    It took more than two centuries for America to elect a black president. It will take many years after he leaves office to sort out what it all meant.

    ___

    “If he can do it, I can do it, too.”

    —Cheryl Johnson, of Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens public housing project, on Obama as a lasting symbol.

    ___

    Two iconic images of the Obama presidency:

    The president patiently bends over as a 5-year-old black boy touches his head, after the child asked Obama if they had the same kind of hair.

    A 106-year-old black woman joyfully dances with the president and first lady, beaming as she declares: “I am so happy. A black president. Yay!”

    Born a century apart, these two visitors to the White House convey the potent symbolism of Obama’s presidency, a luster that hasn’t dimmed. For many black Americans, it’s not so much what policies Obama proposed but his mere presence in the Oval Office that has mattered most.

    “You can’t put a price tag on that,” says Loretta Augustine-Herron, a former community activist who worked with Obama in Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens in the 1980s. “If he never did anything else for African-Americans, just the fact that he occupies the White House, it lets us see ourselves in a different light. … We see a chance for us to fit into the United States society in a way we’ve never fit in. Just knowing that opportunity is not everybody else’s, it’s OURS, too. … The sky is the limit. And it was never that feeling before.”

    Perhaps nowhere are those sentiments stronger than at Altgeld Gardens, where a 20-something Obama honed his political skills as a community organizer.

    It was there, in the shadow of rusted steel mills, where Obama had his first up-close exposure to a black community mired in poverty. In his memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” Obama describes the sprawling housing project in “a perpetual state of disrepair” with crumbling ceilings, backed-up toilets and burst pipes. He helped residents agitate, rally and fight City Hall to improve their lives.

    Three decades later, Altgeld is in the middle of a massive renovation. Crime and poverty persist, but there’s also a sense of hope, especially for kids who, for the first time, see a president who looks like them when they walk by Obama’s photo on their schoolroom walls.

    Cheryl Johnson is among the few remaining residents who remember Obama’s organizing days. He plotted strategies with her mother, Hazel, a well-known environmental activist. Johnson, who followed in her footsteps, sees Obama as an inspiration.

    His presidency, she explains, allowed people to say: “If he can do it, I can do it, too.”

    “It’s the influence, the motivation that he has given to people who may have been hopeless in their life, like, ‘I can’t get this far,'” Johnson says. “Now you hear young people, young as 5 and 6, saying, ‘I’m going to be the next president of the United States.'”

    Obama changed perceptions of black people, says Ellen Singletary, a youth specialist at Altgeld. “The media depicts us … in such an unfair and defaming way,” she says, “and to see the pride of who we really are demonstrated on the world stage means the world to me.”

    That attitude is part of what Michael Eric Dyson, a Georgetown professor and prominent African-American commentator, described in a New York Times op-ed as black America’s “unrepentant love affair” with the president. That pride, he wrote, overlooks Obama’s failings, including skimping on black cabinet appointees until his second term, forgoing the nomination of a black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court and a “reluctance to highlight black suffering.”

    Still, Obama maintained an 80-90 percent approval rating in the Gallup Poll among African-Americans for virtually his entire presidency.

    Many black supporters are proud of how he weathered the birther movement, racial slurs, photos depicting him, among other things, as an African bone-through-the-nose witch doctor or an ape, and other indignities such as a Southern congressman interrupting the president’s health care address by yelling, “You lie!”

    “One of the sayings we have down in Alabama is when you wrestle with a pig, the pig enjoys it and you’re the one that gets muddy,” says Glennon Threatt, an assistant federal public defender in Birmingham, Alabama. “The president has not gotten in the mud.

    “What he has done is shown that a black man can be a successful president and a successful husband and a successful father,” he adds. “I think that’s an extraordinary thing.”


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    12 Comments
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    puppydogs
    puppydogs
    7 years ago

    Missing one other word “Failure”

    7 years ago

    This article is regretful. It actually embarrasses Obama big time. It is not nice to blacks either. It highlights serious questions about Obama’s background, some of the questions about the records being news items in non-mainstream media. It speaks a bit about his having virtually no credentials to serve in public office. It refers to his obsession with race, and the result of this being greater racial divide than existed before slavery was abolished.

    Obama prioritized his race, his passion for golf, his love for Islam and the terror it uses, his hate for America, his anti-Israel sentiments, his out-of-control ego, his drive for a legacy that sounds PC even at the expense of ruining the country, his socialistic beliefs, and his craving for agendas that defy morality or reality. He boasts of a scandal free presidency, but the list of true, serious scandals is long.

    Yes, a black man lived in the WH. The wreckage he leaves behind will take a long time to fix. Trump must reconstruct the government. May G-d give him the resources and power to accomplish that.

    7 years ago

    he didn’t create the race issue in America but he DEFINITELY helped DIVIDE America between Black & Whites, DemocRATS & Republicans, Legal Citizens & ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS to whom he gave precedence over Legal American Taxpaying Citizens

    grandbear
    grandbear
    7 years ago

    Nobody has mentioned the skeleton in the closet ,that is his mixed racial birth . I’m quite sure that this had a major role in his feeling towards his american life.His early life as a moslem learning in a madrasa played a major part in his adult life and he wished to create a new american that would let him feel comfortable.

    Lieba
    Lieba
    7 years ago

    Obama will be remembered for promoting the will and desires of all the gays, tags, fairies, homosexuals, lesbians. Allowing them to adopt children and destroying American and morality.
    Obama will also be memorialized for promoting rape by allowing people to go to whichever bathroom they please.
    Obama will be remembered for pardoning rapists and drug dealers .
    Was he really someone to emulate?

    Lieba
    Lieba
    7 years ago

    You only print responses that you are not intayedfrom
    You must be in a really bad mental atate
    Too bad

    Buchwalter
    Buchwalter
    7 years ago

    He authorized the sale to Israel on credit of the most advanced fighter jet in the world the F 32

    ALLAN
    ALLAN
    7 years ago

    Obama has a wonderful talent of taking minor issues of right and wrong and manufacturing them into black versus white. He was the worst thing to happen to race relations in decades.
    His obvious contempt for Law enforcement allowed riots to go on with the police afraid to enforce law and order.
    He intervened in local issues where black criminals were killed by police.
    He never addressed issues of increasing antisemitism but pushed hard for gay rights. His bias towards Israel shows what he thinks of the one and one democracy in the middle east. He in my opinions almost makes Jimmy Carter look better.
    I for one will be thrilled when January 20 arrives and he is out of the White House.

    7 years ago

    He did a lot of good things but his policy towards Russia and Israel were massive failures and thats going to taint his accomplishments.