Barack Obama has become a paradoxical figure of the United States. He is one of the most popular “lame-duck” presidents in history. He handily won his election and reelection, and has reinforced the democratic base. He has given African Americans a voice and has proven that African Americans can be powerful and effective leaders despite a congress that will openly work against them. From out of the woodwork, we now have a Republican presidential candidate who is seemingly racist, who is commended by his supporters for speaking “the truth” regarding black, Hispanic and Muslim people and citizens. Obama provided us with the first inkling of affordable healthcare for people in poverty (of which a majority are minorities) and has helped lessen the severity of mandatory sentences for possession or distribution of drugs used mainly in minority communities, has allocated more federal money to make improvements to subsidized housing and made education fair, and helped to stop Republican gerrymandering of districts with majority black voters. At the same time, by Republicans coming out of the woodwork as overt racists, we know where the struggle still stands. Obama has been an overwhelmingly good figure for race relations, even if it means exposing people in and out of power as being the ugly racists they truly are.
Many of Obama’s positive effects on race have been indirect, and in this way have gone unnoticed as being laws that further racial equality. The first example mentioned in the introduction is providing more healthcare under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. A commonly held belief by even many democrats is that the ACA is completely at the cost of people who could afford health care in the first place. What it really does is level the playing field between all hospitals, clinics and doctors, and gives them incentives for more effective patient care. One of the leading causes of death in this country is medical error. A lot of this error comes from the population of mostly minority patients who cannot afford insurance, therefore do not have a steady doctor or medical record.
Relying on people to remember their medical history is ridiculous, and once they are treated for an illness that they have probably waited until the very last minute to treat, allergies can occur, interference with another procedure could take place, and then the person who has little intention or means of paying the hospital back is forced to take up a bed and undergo expensive restorative surgeries, taking doctors off of their normal routines, costing the hospital and general public hundreds of millions of dollars per year. By making sure these people are covered, they can begin seeing the same doctors, and more efficient, quicker care can be given. This is just one small example of how Obamacare helps minorities.
On the same side of the coin as healthcare, the American justice system has been turned into an inefficient and broken system for rehabilitating people who come from the underground world of drug use. This is a multi-layered problem, one that is finally being addressed by Obama. Drugs are entrenched into the minority economy in several ways. First, for many minorities, black, Hispanic, and disparaged members of the LGBT community, selling illegal narcotics is the only way to make real money. It does not seem that very many Republicans have an answer for the question “Would you be able to raise your family on a single minimum wage income?”. They avoid the answer and instead point to other opportunities that do not exist for these communities. “Well, if they only went to college?” or “well, if each parent commits to working 2 full-time jobs.” Some truly racist or eugenics supporters will go further by saying that these minorities should not have families.
Meanwhile, back in reality, there are typically not colleges around the parts of town that projects exist, so there is the lack of transportation viability. Going to school means less work, meaning less money. Many downtrodden families are single-parent families, if there are, in fact, parents at all. If anybody old enough is working, this means daycare will be needed for twice the time, and afterwards, this usually means that the person working is only netting a $4-5/hr. profit. It is hard enough being a college student with the help of family, working full-time on minimum wage, it is unimaginable for someone with children.
This is all directly relatable to the drug trade, because this is often the only answer that minority families have for making a living. This is simply how the bills get paid, no two ways around it. There is no other reasonable way for these families to make enough money to care for themselves. The cost of living continues to skyrocket in the face of just overcoming the Great Recession, On the other side of this, there are the people, mostly minorities, who have just given up. They need to forget the hell they are living in for a while by consuming the drugs, most dealers do not want to be drug dealers. It is probably a life of always having to watch their backs and stay clear of the police who are constantly on the beat in their neighborhoods to meet their drug quotas. Far less people would do drugs if they even felt as though they had an opportunity to receive help, and opportunities to showcase something they are good at. Money distribution and the lack thereof in minority payments is the setup of the imprisonment cycle.
These people, when caught, are charged, tried and convicted as felons. If they were convicted of using or dealing crack, this use to be a life sentence before Obama. This is despite the fact that the same exact drug, cocaine, carries far lesser penalties, and can even be tried and treated as a misdemeanor. This is racist law 101. The reasons Crack is sold in the poor black community over cocaine involve who it is sold, very quickly, and who it is sold to, often homeless people. Crack is sold in the form of rocks for easier transport, and it is far easier to smoke a pipe exposed to the elements than it is to try to sniff a line. The penalty for crack, which was a mandatory minimum, was 100 times greater than that for cocaine. 100 times six months, for instance, is still 50 years. Obama wanted mandatory minimums to be taken out of completely, but members of the ATF and National Security disagreed with him. He was, however, able to lower the mandatory sentence to just 18 times, or in other words, 9 years instead of 5o. This is still extremely harsh for a non-violent crime, but at least it probably will not be a life sentence.
As a side note, Barack Obama’s attempts failed to end the structure of for-profit prisons, or the Prison Industrial Complex, which are set up eerily like British prison camps in Africa during the slave trade. By these prisons being able to bid on prisoners for specific types of virtually free manual labor, we have effectively begun a new slave trade system (Gordon and Parnell, 2010), one that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have “promised” to get rid of. Easier said than done though.
So that new generations of minority students can potentially have a brighter future, schools must now compete with each other on a national level for increased funding. Common core teaching methods may be considered controversial, and changes need to be made, possibly including schools who achieve well over these standards, but by featuring this teaching method, and using it as a way to grade schools, we are insuring that “no child left behind” is an operational statement. The parameters of this type of model were set up several years ago, Barack was the first to really enact them in schools, especially those that are underfunded. This gives the schools and teachers a chance at more federal level funding, if they can prove, via test results, that they are using these standards. Once again, Barack has succeeded in leveling the playing field, even if the program does need a little work.
Gerrymandering, or toying around with voting districts to ensure the majority voice is not heard, was growing rampant all over the South and parts of the Midwest. There are states in the South where the white population is the minority, yet these states continue to go for a party that the black and Hispanic communities have opposed since the 19th century ended. It seems rather odd that states like Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina continue to be Republican led states, that vote nationally for the Red Party over and over again, and when one looks at their legislatures, there is a lot more diversity. Every single year for only the best statisticians know, this trend of oddly distributing districts into less meaningful areas has continued ever since we can remember, and ever since it has been made a criminal offense.
Some districts are even split into two or more unjointed areas. Do to statements made on behalf of Obama’s Attorney General, with the help of several others, these district vultures were taken to the Supreme Court, a monumental case they just lost about a month ago.
Unfortunately, a lot of tragedy has occurred during the time that Obama has been in office, though it is not really through any thought of his own. An “Obama Derangement Syndrome” of sorts has occurred, with white people believing that having a black president is positively the worst thing that could have happened for this country. Sadder than this, they have no problem being public about it.
Membership in the KKK is the highest it has ever been, and its leader, David Duke, has come back into the public eye, and he is featured, along with Donald Trump, as being a voice of reason. For those unaware, David Duke is one of the head Grand Wizards of the KKK, and he has been its spokesman for decades. They believe that a black person being in any position of power over the white man is an abomination, which, to them, is worse than mortal sin. Although it is unclear how a sin can be worse than being mortal, it does seem to justify renewed violence against people of color, and people who are not Christian. Giving people live Duke a public voice again and validating a known hate group once again is a sign of just how sick we Americans are.
There are many people who settle for the terminology of “I just don’t feel in my heart that it is right,” somehow making the leader of the free world a choice you make with your feelings rather than your logic. Why are conservatives constantly given the luxury of the “heart” argument when it comes to things like being pro-life, allowing for discrimination of other people based on their or sexual orientation and gender identity or religion, but liberals cannot use the same arguments for the opposing views. This is a double standard caused by the message that the conservative party is one of family values. So, apparently, you have to be white and against many different types equality or fairness to be a person of family values. At some point, this moniker for the Republican party needs to be stripped from it and exposed. The election of Obama has made many of these people come out of hiding. Because of Obama we now have a much clearer composite biography for a person of bigotry and intolerance.
Furthering the argument of intolerance of the right wing, we have people everywhere who are both citizens and cops, who are killing innocent people in the name of standing their ground. Not only that, but these people are being released without punishment, some going back to their lives of criminal mischief and abuse. The death of Trayvon Martin in Central Florida is probably the first and most enduring case of these racial killings, not only because the predator and murderer, George Zimmerman, followed Trayvon through a neighborhood, stalking him like any other criminal stalking a minor (people forget that Trayvon was, in fact very much a minor). Trayvon was actively sought out and brutally shot down by Zimmerman, who won his case based on standing his ground, even though he was not being threatened by the kid, the child was completely unarmed, and had only his feet to walk on, unlike Zimmerman and his vehicle. After being acquitted, Zimmerman has gone on to be a continuous menace to society, and is now auctioning off the weapon he used to kill Trayvon as a “significant piece of second amendment history,”
With Trump’s candidacy looming, the trajectory of hate speech and hate crimes has skyrocketed. Unfortunately, many of those perpetuating the violence are the police themselves. Typically, it is only black people that are arrested at the rallies, even if they were accompanied by white friends. Their white counterparts, who were doing everything the black protestors were, were able to leave without insult or injury. Tons of video footage was released of these events, though it should be noted that this has taken place at every other Trump Rally, and Huffington Post (2016), though admittedly usually leftist, has provided data documenting every racist action to take place at trump rallies.
Why are these miscarriages of justice good? In the short term, they most certainly are not. They are horrendous reminders that racism and poor race relations still exist, even under the nose of an African American President. Obama has had to watch on the sidelines with open disgust, knowing that for him to say or do anything could only fuel the flames more. But in the long term, we now know how far away we still are from acknowledging that everybody is equal under the law, that being black, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, or Asian does not make a person any less capable of doing anything. It shows people with common sense that much more needs to be done.
The United States, for now, remains a shining example of democracy in action. We have a constitution, which is more than a lot of countries can say. We recently celebrated the LGB community with the right to marry. We have finally elected a black president, who, despite all the messages of hate, still has stunningly great popularity. We risk losing all of that respect, all the windfall we have had for the case of civil rights, if we risk the presidency on a candidate who has not made anything clear, other than he is an unabashed racist. Not only has Obama improved race relations for his presidency, but he has enacted timelines for other parts of civil rights to be strengthened over the next ten and twenty years. The people who have hysteria over the fact that a black man won the popular vote twice are now out in the wide open, and we can reach out to them, and hopefully help them awaken to our inevitable future as a country that guarantees life, liberty and justice for all.
Work Cited
Frej, Willa. “Here’s A Running List of Racist Things That Have Happened at Trump Rallies.”
The Huffington Post. 2 Mar. 2016. Web. 15 May 2016
Gordon, Beverly and Johari Parnell. “Slavery Re-imagined: Examining the Effects of
Neo-slavery & the Prison Industrial Complex on African American Education & Life.”
Oklahoma State University. 2010. Web. 13 May, 2016
