This week’s killing of five white Dallas police officers and injuring others causes me to reflect on the leadership of President Obama, the man who was to be the answer to help end racism in our country.
“There is not a Black America and White America … there’s the United States of America,” were the words of a young Illinois state senator by the name of Barack Obama in his keynote address at the 2004 Democrat Convention.
Years of sitting in the pew, Barack Obama soaked up the inflammatory words of the Rev. Jerimiah Wright in Chicago. (blog.lefgaro.fr)
In 2008 there were those who were so eager to elect our first black president that they ignored the fact that he sat for years in the pew of the Rev. Jerimiah Wright, soaking up inflammatory words like “God damn America.” Even Republican candidate John McCain chose to ignore that relationship and banned running mate Sarah Palin from assailing the Obama-Wright friendship.
Six months into his presidency, when Cambridge, MA police officers arrested black professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. after a woman reported seeing black men breaking into a home, President Obama’s public criticism that Cambridge police officers “acted stupidly,” caused the International Brotherhood of Police Officers to say that the president had alienated public safety officers across the country.
Although it was later determined that it was Gates’ home, he was charged with disorderly conduct after he yelled at the white officer and accused him of racial bias and refused to calm down when asked to show identification to prove that he lived there.
That same year, the president’s black attorney general, Eric Holder, in a speech celebrating Black History Month, claimed that “though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial, we have always been and we – I believe to be in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.”
During his speech he outlined his agenda of using his legal clout to equalize outcomes for selected racial groups in the U.S.
After the shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager in 2012, President Obama foolishly weighed-in on the event, going so far as to say that, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
On Aug. 18, 2014, President Obama again inserted himself into the death of another young black man, Michael Brown, who was shot and killed when he ignored a Ferguson, MO police officer’s commands after having an altercation with that officer.
“I have to be very careful about not prejudging these events before investigations are completed. I’ve got to make sure that I don’t look like I’m putting my thumb on the scales (of justice) one way or the other,” President Obama said in his press conference as he painted a picture of poor young blacks and Hispanics in the country. He sent then Attorney General Eric Holder to Ferguson as FBI agents and DOJ personnel conducted an investigation.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus were duped into believing that Michael Brown had his hands up when he was shot in Ferguson. (bossip.com)
Though it was later proven that Brown did not have his hands up when he was shot, “Hands Up” became the chant during protests there and in cities across the country. Democrats in Congress were taken in and were photographed with their hands up.
The police officer who shot Brown was cleared in the shooting, but his career in law enforcement ended.
By inserting himself into events that should have been handled by local and state law enforcement agencies, President Obama emboldened anti-police agitators and we saw the birth of the radical Black Lives Matter group. In New York City and Philadelphia, police officers were executed while sitting in their patrol cars.
At a Netroots rally members were permitted to disrupt a Bernie Sanders’ campaign stop. He had the audacity to say “all lives matter” and was swept from the stage. Gov. Martin O’Malley went so far as to apologize for adding, “white lives matter, all lives matter.” You know that Hillary Clinton supports Black Lives Matter.
In Prague yesterday, President Obama again blamed the lack of gun control measures. Now we await his return from the NATO meeting, cut short by the event in Dallas.
We can expect that he will carefully play to the Black Lives Matter crowd, while praising law enforcement, as he closes out the remaining six-months in office, leaving another eight-year lost opportunity to pad his legacy.
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