Barack
Obama, both substantively and symbolically, ran in 2008 as a
much-needed healer. He was to bring the nation together as never before —
a vow taken to heart by millions of voters of all backgrounds who
ensured Obama’s 2008 victory. His biracial background and his uncanny
ability to navigate through both Harvard Law School and the politics of
Chicago community organizing seemed to make him ideally suited to usher
in a postracial era — as was acknowledged, albeit quite crudely and
insensitively, by both Harry Reid and Joe Biden in the 2008 campaign.
Yet quite the opposite development tragically has followed from
Obama’s election. From the beginning of the 2008 campaign — evident in
the exasperation of Bill Clinton (“they played the race card
on me”) during the Democratic primaries — racial tensions have
heightened, rather than lessened. We get a glimpse of the new strains in
popular culture from the widely different reactions to the Trayvon
Martin case: Black leaders point to racism in the treatment of “white
Hispanic” George Zimmerman; whites cite rush-to-judgment bias against
Zimmerman, as, in comparison, the wholesale carnage among black. youth
in Chicago is hardly discussed.When the president announced that the son he never had might have resembled Trayvon, one wondered what would have been the reaction had Bill Clinton weighed in right in the midst of the O.J trial, lamenting that the second daughter he never had might have looked like the slain Nicole. Are the daily accounts of black-on-white violence and flash-mobbing that splash across, say, the Drudge Report racist in their emphases, or are the mainstream media’s efforts to ignore the incidents completely more likely to be racially illiberal?
Read more: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/309616/barack-healer-victor-davis-hanson
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