Race Relations Have Gotten Worse under Obama?
Published at 08:16 on 11 July 2016
The claim that they have is in fact predicated upon some very racist hidden assumptions, as I shall now explain.
Police have been shooting unarmed Black men for decades and getting away with it. Until the era of social media and smartphones, such killings were inadequately documented and typically didn’t receive coverage outside of the local media.
Now that technological progress has changed both of those facts, the killings are getting nationwide attention and sparking well-deserved outrage. And it is those reactions that inspire the claim that race relations have gotten worse under the Obama presidency.
Race relations, in other words, are being judged to be more acceptable when suspicious killings result in passivity and widespread social acceptance than when they provoke outrage. Society is judged to be running off the rails not because racially-correlated killings are happening (again, they are nothing new), but because those being killed are no longer passively accepting this, as is apparently their duty.
In turn what does this imply? Obviously that Black people must be inferior. Such a belief only makes logical sense if Black lives aren’t as worthy of news coverage or outrage, much like the lost life of a young raccoon or opossum who dies as a result of a car running over it doesn’t warrant the news coverage that a human child suffering the same fate should.
And if it’s not racism to assert that it is the duty of some races to realize they are inferior and to passively acquiesce in this inferiority, then I don’t know what is.