U.S. race relations have gotten worse because of this man
This is not a rant about the President, his policies, his beliefs, and certainly not his color. It's a view of race relations simply because he took office.
This is an alternate view. For full disclosure, I like Obama. I think he has been an honorable person who did his best in very tough surroundings.
But...
Race relations are worse in the U.S. than at any time in recent memory simply because President Obama became the president. Yes, he perhaps has said some things during racially charge incidents like the Trevon Martin case, and the riots in Ferguson, that another President would not have said. But his weighing in, as he is so often blamed for doing, didn't get us to where we are today.
What got us to this point today, are expectations. Extremely high expectations that no President, no one man, no short span of time can fix.
When the United States elected its first black leader, it and the entire world was proud. Proud that prejudice was at least that far behind us that we could elect and stand behind a black person as our leader. But it wasn't 100% behind us. Prejudice exists everywhere in the world, against pretty much everyone depending on where you are. If you're black in America, there will be some. If you're white in South Africa, you'll get some. If you're simply a christian westerner in the Middle East, white or black, it will be there directed at you in some form.
It is simply the way it is.
Now picture yourself as someone who has either suffered racial intolerance or at least imagined so. Then imagine that the most powerful person in your country, is suddenly just like you. The almost automatic response is going to be that he knows how you feel, how you think, how you want change -- immediate change, to make it stop. But to make racial intolerance go away there needs to be a change in how people think and feel about particular minorities. Basically, they need to see them not as a minority, but of just another person. A regular run of the mill person.
That in turn, takes generations, not a few years. Unfortunately those high expectations were doomed from day one. It just couldn’t happen that quickly. So now there’s frustration and you see it coming to the surface regularly with Black Lives Matter, with marches, protests, riots, and so forth.
It’s too bad, because electing a black President was such a massive jump forward in the right direction. It would appear that the current turmoil may actually be erasing that great leap forward and pushing back that gain to decades even before that.
