With his time in office waning, President Barack Obama is speaking out on race and poverty in increasingly blunt terms as violent protests in U.S. cities highlight the unrealized promise of his election.
Searing images of a burning CVS pharmacy in Baltimore and armored vehicles arrayed along the streets of Ferguson, Mo., are a grim contrast to the elated, multi-racial crowd celebrating in Chicago’s Grant Park on the warm November night in 2008 after the nation elected its first black president.
Many of the hopes of that night haven’t been fulfilled. Polls show racial polarization in the U.S. is at its highest level in decades. Poverty is higher among Americans in general and blacks in particular, and the gap between rich and poor has grown.
A president who throughout his two terms has been restrained in addressing racial controversies now is raising his voice and declaring he’ll make lifting up impoverished communities and the young men within them the cause of his post-presidential years.
“He’s responding in a very deeply personal and emotional way,” said Valerie Jarrett, one of Obama’s closest advisers and a long-time family friend. “The experience that far too many African-American boys and men have in society of a lack of fairness, of a lack of equal treatment and of a lack of opportunities, is one the president feels obviously quite personally about since he is an African-American man.”
In the wake of the upheaval in Baltimore — riots triggered by the death of a black man injured while in police custody — those emotions have emerged more publicly.
Obama has urged a “soul-searching” national examination of the consequences of hopelessness in impoverished minority communities. Last week, he spoke of the missing love in his own childhood with an absent father, in helping to start an initiative to boost the life prospects of minority boys and young men.Today, Obama will speak at a summit of religious leaders at Georgetown University in Washington on overcoming poverty.
America has undergone big changes in the age of Obama. Same-sex weddings have become routine. The nation pulled itself out of the most severe economic downtown in generations. Seventeen million more people have gained health insurance. Cars are beginning to drive themselves.
Yet the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore reprised a familiar storyline: anger over what was seen by many as callous police treatment of a young black man spreads through economically depressed neighborhoods and explodes into looting and arson.
“I must confess to having shared that great optimism, especially because I had been so impressed personally with Barack Obama when he was my student and research assistant,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University. “It’s clear that many Americans expected more racial healing than any president could possibly deliver. The problems we face are too deeply embedded in our history and in our economic and political structure to be transformed by a presidential administration, or two or three.”
Sixty-one percent of Americans rated race relations as “bad” in a CBS/New York Times poll taken April 30 through May 3, the worst reading since race riots exploded in Los Angeles in 1992 following the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King.
The societal barriers are economic as well as racial, although frequently the two are intertwined. The U.S. poverty rate rose to 14.5 percent in 2013 from 13.2 percent in 2008, largely as a hangover of the recession. Blacks were harder hit, with 27.1 percent in poverty in 2013, up from 24.6 percent in 2008.
Wealth has become more concentrated, too, with the richest 1 percent of Americans holding 43 percent of U.S. assets in 2012, up from 39 percent in 2008, according to data compiled by Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics. The bottom 90 percent held 22 percent of U.S. wealth, down from 25 percent in 2008.
That may reflect gridlocked government and the powerful forces underlying racial and economic inequality as much as it does the success or failure of Obama’s presidency.
“It’s naive to expect that a president can move mountains,” said Robert Reich, labor secretary in the Clinton administration. “This president faced an enormous economic threat from the moment he moved into office that made it difficult for him to do much of anything besides turn the economy around.”
At this week’s summit on poverty at Georgetown, Obama will make the case “for why the solutions are within reach,” Jarrett said. “We just have to make the investment, particularly in young people.”
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