He's just the first one who happens to be black.
It seems to be in vogue within the ranks of African American intelligentsia and Black academia to bash president Obama specifically because of his policy concerning African Americans in America. Or more to the point, because he doesn't write policy specifically for African Americans in America. Academic superstars like Cornel West and political powerhouses like Tavis Smiley are vocal in their disapproval. It seems that gone are the days where Obama was considered the new paradigm of black dynamism and the chic emblem of upward mobility. I haven't heard an Obama inspired remix from Will.I.Am in a minute. Feelings are bruised, some African American's are feeling betrayed. The black elites are now starting to brandish names like sell-out and Uncle Tom much like the blades the senate used as they gathered around Caesar. To be honest, I'm mystified by the vitriol and denunciations when as Jay-Z once said, it seemed like , "It was all good just a week ago"
This is not some nebulus anger over ethereal issuses, I know precisely where it comes from. It centers around one of the hard, fast, and oft-times under reported facts of the Great Recession. That while it's widely known that it's been the middle class who has borne the brunt of Bush's folly and Wall Street's fraud, what's not widely known is that it's been disproportionately hard on african americans. While the national unemployment rate has hovered around 9%, it's risen from 15.9% to 16.7% for african americans. Here's all you've got to know in a nut shell, Blacks comprise 12% of the labor market yet 22% of the unemployed. Obviously these numbers are disturbing and represent a whole generation of dreams deferred.
In this respect I agree with Obama's detractors that more needs to be done, I just don't believe that nothing has been done. In fact, my sense is that given the hydra of a recession that he didn't create, a strategically (and historically) uncooperative opposition party, and a stimulus weary public, he is doing about as well as you can do under the circumstances. If pressed, I don't know if I could name any programs that Obama has enacted/championed for a black guy like myself specifically. I really can't point to a black middle class employment initiative and my google search of "Obama African American jobs programs" only comes with up articles saying that he needs to make one. But If I look at our country as one nation, I can see where he's fought for the American middle class. I could point to his reclamation of America's auto industry and say that it was a courageous and politically unpopular move that saved a lot of jobs. You trying to sell me that they were no black jobs saved in the city of Detroit? De-troit? If you believe that then you've never been to Detriot. I mean this is Detroit that we're talking about here.
Another simple and sad truth is that minorities have historically always been disproportionately effected during times of economic turmoil. In my view the only true path to combating this is through education. A charge that I would levy against Obama if it weren't for his Race to the Top programs and other education initatives. I don't feel like these efforts are perfect or complete, but I do feel as though they are consequential. Obama's investment in community colleges, the ability for kids to stay on their parents insurance, and the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are all pretty big deals with actual financial benefit for African Americans in my book, but their benefits aren't instantaneous. We can debate as to whether or not this represents radical and targeted change but I feel that most would agree that these are at least steps in the right direction.
Personally, would I want Obama to be more of a fire-breathing ideologue? Heck Yeah! I secretly yearn for the day when Obama holds a press conference and has a collection of the realest moments ever televised. Where he tells the tea party where to go and how to get there and ends by telling Paul Ryan precisely what he do with his budget. But there's a problem with that (in addition to the obvious ones ) Obama has never claimed to be that guy. Obama's shtick was never that of a cultural warrior, he campaigned as a consensus building pragmatist. It's one of the reasons why Palin's charge that he was, "palling around with terrorists" never stuck. No one could buy it. Forrest Gump fit in better at Jenny's Black Panther party than Obama ever would. Obama's style bends towards the professorial and the deliberate. And he's deliberately said, time and again, that he's a president for all America, not just Black America. I don't think that there's much false advertisement here.
Obama's election was unquestionably symbolic and I believe that's a large part of the problem. It represented something different to everyone and as such, its meaning is open for disparate interpretations. I believe that there is a segment of African Americans who viewed Obama's win as the ascension of a modern day MLK. They saw him as the extension and fulfillment of the civil rights movement. A personal advocate in the highest of offices. The fact is Obama sees himself as more of a Reagan or a Lincoln, a President who enacts sweeping change over a broad swarth of issues. Ultimately, my sense is that Obama feels as though he is helping the African American plight, by addressing the plight of recession-racked Americans as a whole.
I feel that the election of a 'post-racial" president is something of a tacit agreement between the electorate and the elected. By assuming the mantle, Obama is free to view our nation's issues in a way that's beneficial to our country as a whole and not constrained by the myopic concerns of his own demographic. I feel that the black elites are free to do the same.