Black against White

You knew it would happen. If you sow the wind you reap the whirlwind, This time the whirwind was Dallas.

Barack Obama's presidency promised to be an era of racial healing. Many people voted for the manifestly unqualified senator because they wanted to make a gesture, to give a vote of confidence to the African-American  comunity.

Americans on the left and the right patted themselves on the back for electing Obama, for electing someone based on race, not qualifications. Even those who did not vote for Obama allowed themselves to rejoice about what they perceived to be America's racial maturity. No one quite understood that ovecoming the sin of racism would not solve the financial crisis.

We now know that the American people miscalculated. The era of racial healing looks more like an era of racial animosity. The utterly composed and contained Harvard Law  grad began more and more to look like a deer caught in the headlights, in way over his head. It was not so much that the idol had feet of clay as that his mind had been captured by the black liberation theology of Jeremiah Wright.

Of course, everyone believed that Obama had renounced the Rev. Wright in a 2008 speech that sent a tingle up (or was it down) the leg of Chris Matthews. It takes a special blindness to believe that a habit of thought cultivated for two decades would disappear with a twenty minute speech. It is impossible to reconfigure one's mental processessing at mach speed. You might believe that you can, but then you will be fooling yourself or everyone else or both.

Anyone who believed that Obama's policies were going to improve the lives of black Americans were oblivious to reality. Economic advancement comes through hard work, coupled by the right policiees. Obama offered the wrong policies and allowed people to think that they no longer needed to put in the extra hours. He would take care of them, would liberate them from the oppressive shackles of white racism.

His constituents refuse to see Obama as a Pied Piper so they continue to keep blaming white people. Obama has not failed them. White racists have obstructed his agenda and did not allow it to benefit them. Yet, if you tell blacks that they are not responsible for their lives and tht anything bad that they do is the fault of their white puppet-masters, you are teaching a debilitating lesson. They are learning that they are not responsible for their own actions. If the deck is stacked against you, why bother?

Exonerating blacks while blaming white has been the hallmark of the Obama administration. It's motto should have been: blacks getting away with stuff.

When the New Black Panther Party intimidated voters in Philadelphia, Eric Holder's justice department dropped the case. When a white police officer in Ferguson, MO shot a black man, he was exonerated by all investigations. And yet, the meme pesists: the officer was guilty of murder. And the death of Freddy Gray was declared a homicide, even if the courts have clearly said otherwise. Anything to make blacks feel victimized. Anything to make them feel justified in rioting and burning down their neighborhoods.

Of course, if inner city Chicago becomes a killing field, and if blacks are killing blacks in record numbers, no one gives a damn. If it does not fit the narrative, it does not count.

The administration has cast a benevolent eye at Black Lives Matter protesters, When said protesters called for the murder of police officers, they were exercising their rights to free speech. If any of them actually committed a crime, the fault lay with guns, with the gun lobby, with the NRA, with Christian Republicans.

One recalls the remark of Nobel Prize winning biologist, Peter Medawar: "... it is the height of folly to blame the weapon for the crime."

This is not to say that injustice does not exist. It is not to say that no white police officer has ever committed  a crime against a black American. It does say that in a nation ruled by laws such incidents are best dealt with in the criminal justice system, where the accused retains due process protections.

Nothing, our now-anguished president and his Attorney General say, can possibly justify what happened in Dallas. And yet, the massacre in Dallas was simply the enactment of rhetoric that the adminstration and its enablers has been trafficking for years now. The Obama administration was playing with fire. It just got burned. The evident anguish was less for the deaths of the police officers than for the realization that the administration had failed miserably in its policies promoting racial healing.