Black folks did a hallelujah dance when Barack Obama took the oath of office this past January. From all of the backslapping, partying and general merriment, one would think Obama’s election heralded the second coming of Christ.
Finally, black people would get their forty acres and a mule. Or reparations. Or something approximating justice. We were finally moving to the front of the line from the caboose. No longer would we be outcasts in our native land or second-class citizens.
Hardly.
What black people got was a black president, not a savior. And nobody loves the black president more than black people, but the question is why?
Our children are still being undereducated; in fact, dropout rates exceed 50 percent in some urban school districts. Our children are dying on our streets. Our people are being incarcerated in unprecedented numbers. Black people have disproportionately high HIV/AIDS infections rates. Our men, the backbones of our families, have unemployment rates that far exceed the national average of 9.8 percent. The black community should be declared a federal disaster area.
I hate to use the E-word, but really, how else can one explain a Harvard law professor and his arresting officer being invited to the White House to talk about racial profiling over a beer with the president? What about the dozens of children who have died on the streets of Chicago this year? Their parents ought to get some presidential face time, too. And to be fair, the president has dispatched the education secretary, Arne Duncan, and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to Chicago to work on remedies for teen violence. Sorry Mr. President, you got that backwards, you should have let Holder handle the Gates kerfuffle, and you should have gone to Chicago and skipped Denmark.
No politician or single person can remedy the many ills facing the black community. We need a multipronged approach from multiple organizations, including the church, the NAACP, the SCLC, Operation PUSH and the Urban League — all of these organizations should play a role in fashioning solutions to our problems.
Obama may not be able to erase our problems by waving a magic wand, but our situation would probably have been far worse under McCain. To whit, we certainly would not have had the number of black people running various departments of government as has happened with this administration, health care would not be on the agenda at all, and jobs, well, let’s just say full employment would not be a top priority — not with empty prison cells to fill. –ml