Obama, Trump and race

In line with those opinions, the poll also found that 73 percent of blacks considered racial discrimination against blacks a very serious problem, up from 55 percent in May 2009. Among whites, the respective figures were 34 percent and 17 percent. And all this was before Trump’s ascent to the presidency .

You cannot reasonably lay all the blame for this decline on Obama’s shoulders. He was the first nonwhite American President, a mulatto called black; he had to tread very carefully indeed. Whites were on the lookout to pounce on any perceived favours from him to blacks, many of whom expected to be favoured. He was the President of all Americans, he would say, and it was only towards the end of his second term that he allowed himself public sympathy with the black condition .

But the evil of race cannot be extirpated merely by the incantation of noble phrases, whether all-embracing or sympathetic to a disadvantaged group. In any case, nothing that he said or did would impress many whites, who had not accepted him in the first place, and would never accept him .

He was black, therefore inferior, and his wife was “an ape in heels,” as one woman so colourfully put it. They resented the fact that he was obviously much brighter and tougher than they; he was an “uppity n---er.” They rewrote their country’s history to fit their prejudices; “alternative facts” sprouted like mushrooms .

This is Kathy Miller, a Trump campaign chairman in an Ohio county, speaking to an interviewer in September 2016: “Growing up as a kid (in the 1960s), there was no racism, believe me… (There was none) until Obama got elected.” So for her, and the many others who think like her, racial segregation and discrimination in the USA, and the civil rights movement, never existed. The massive March on Washington never took place, and Martin Luther King’s soaring vision of freedom and fairness that day in August 1963 was never given voice. Astounding. But she had more to say .

“(I)f you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years,” she asserted, “it’s your own fault .

You’ve had every opportunity given to you… you had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it. It’s not our fault, certainly.” “Your” and “our.” No racism, of course .

But there were many blacks whom Obama did not impress either .

Yes, he was black, and if he could run again for the presidency they would, out of racial solidarity, vote for him. But there was spreading disappointment: the same CNN/ORC poll indicated that 40 percent of blacks felt that race relations had worsened under Obama, up from a mere two percent in 2009. Eddie Glaude, a black Princeton University professor, dismissed him last year: “(B) lack people have suffered tremendously on Obama’s watch… (He) sees exactly what we want and what we fear and adjusts himself accordingly… In 2008 and again in 2012, (he) sold black America the snake oil of hope and change… maybe black people believed he represented real change. Maybe we didn’t… (T)he reality, amid the thick fog of unmet expectations, is that very little has changed in this country. In fact, things have gotten worse.” Under President Trump, they will get even worse: many, if not most, African-Americans think they have a very good idea of what his slogan “Make America great again” really means for them. As Demos Action said in its media release of November 9, 2016, the day after Trump’s t r iumph, “race remains the organising principle of American politics, and racism is alive, well, and, in fact, popular.”