We’re living Barack Obama’s legacy in real time.

Barack Obama’s legacy here started early.  Not quite in office for six months Obama showed his hand with his characterization that “The police acted stupidly” in reference to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates a professor at Harvard who, locked out of his house, broke in.  A neighbor, not recognizing Gates, called 911.  The police arrived and things didn’t go well and Gates was arrested. 

When asked about race and the incident a week later, Obama responded:  "I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home, and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately."

Without the facts Obama stated the police acted stupidly and implied that racism might have played a role. Nothing however about Gates’ reported “loud and tumultuous behavior” just racism and police misbehavior. 

But this was just the beginning.  After George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Trayvon Martin, Obama said:  “You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son...Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.”

Again.  All race, no facts.

But there’s more. 

About the killing of Michael Brown Obama said: “In too many communities around the country, a gulf of mistrust exists between local residents and law enforcement… Too many young men of color feel targeted by law enforcement — guilty of walking while black or driving while black, judged by stereotypes that fuel fear and resentment and hopelessness.”

About the jury not indicting the NYPD officer involved in the killing of Eric Garner Obama said: “that we are going to take specific steps to improve the training and the work with state and local governments when it comes to policing in communities of color; that we are going to be scrupulous in investigating cases where we are concerned about the impartiality and accountability that’s taking place.”

In these instances and more Obama made the killing of a black man by police about race. It’s no surprise that the BLM movement began under Obama nor that the fiction of “systemic racism” took hold or that the black victimization ideology became omnipresent.

That’s unfortunate.

Like Rod Serling might have said, imagine if you will if Obama had handled those differently. 

What if he had said about Gates:  He should probably have remembered that the police were simply trying to protect his neighborhood after neighbors called them. Misunderstandings happen.

Or this about Brown:  Michael Brown was killed after stealing from a store, attacking the proprietor and attacking a policeman.  Had Mr. Brown not done these things he’d likely be alive.

What if he had responded to the riots in Ferguson, Missouri after the death of Brown by taking to the airwaves and told black Americans that the problem in their communities is not racist police, but criminal activity and fighting with police? 

What if he had nationalized national guard troops to restore peace in Baltimore or Ferguson rather than standing by and later coercing police forces around the country into “consent decrees” which invariably increase crime.

But he didn’t do any of those things.  Instead Barack Obama reinforced the notion that blacks are victims of systemic racism, that they cannot win on an even playing field and that in any negative outcome racism must be the cause.

It is that victimization that leads us to where we are today.  The Internet is simply bulging with videos of blacks behaving badly. Flash mobs robbing stores. Punching random people on the street. Pushing people in front of trains.  Running over bicyclists. Attacking bus drivers.  Destroying merchandise in stores. Rioting on cruise ships. Attacking airline workers. And more.  Sure, we have to state the obligatory reality that other people commit crimes too, but the fact of the matter is, blacks do so at far higher rates.

Race relations is reaching a boiling point. To put this in perspective, in 2007 75% of whites and 71% of blacks thought race relations in America were either good or very good.  By 2021 those numbers were down to 43% and 42% respectively, and no doubt they’re lower today. 

The reality of that dichotomy can be seen in two events from last month.   

In April Karmel Anthony, a 17 year old black high school student knifed and killed fellow 17 year old Austin Metcalf at a track meet in Frisco, Texas.  The family, claiming self-defense, has raised over $600,000 in support, with many of his supporters posting explicitly anti-white racist comments. 

Later that same month Shiloh Hendrix a white woman in Rochester, New York was captured on video calling a black child a nigger – vile word for certain, but one frequently used by blacks but arbitrarily off limits to whites.  After claims of death threats and pleas for security she raised over $700,000, with many of her supporters posting explicitly anti-black racist comments. 

Combine all of that with the growing phenomena called “Black fatigue” and cities, states and members of Congress calling for reparations and you get an idea of where America’s  temperature is on the scale of race relations.

And that’s where we are today. Obama had the opportunity to go down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents. He not only didn’t take it, but he made it worse. 

For longer than I can remember we’ve been told that America needs to have a Conversation about Race™.  We did, for generations, but it was always about whites abusing or keeping blacks down. That is, or at least is now, the wrong conversation. The conversation America needs to have today is pretty much the opposite. Far too many blacks see the system, the police, whites and society at large as racist, see themselves as victims and feel like they can do anything without consequences. That’s a recipe for disaster. Both for blacks and for America.  And that’s Barack Obama’s legacy. 

There may be a tiny sliver of hope, however. There are a growing number of black personalities and potential leaders who are pushing back on that victimization narrative.  Guys like Jason Whitlock, Byron Donalds, Charles Payne, Jason Riley and others are regularly telling their millions of followers how to succeed in life sans the victimization narrative, sort of a wider version of what Chris Rock did with his spectacular video How not to get your ass kicked by the police!

With Donald Trump at the helm Barack Obama’s legacy has the potential to be reversed as more Americans of all hues decide that the everything is racist shibboleth and more broadly the cancer of DEI get the derision they so badly deserve.

The tragic irony of turning Michael Brown and Eric Garner into martyrs

It seems like it’s almost impossible to get through a day without reading or hearing something having to do with the killing of black men by cops. Whether it’s endless Facebook posts or NFL players running out on the field with their “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” gestures or protests blocking rush hour traffic, it seems to be everywhere. From what you see one would think that black men in America are being killed like dogs in the street across the country. While they might be, it’s not by racist white cops, but rather, by other black men.

One example was a video a friend posted on Facebook of a man named McKenzie Cochran, a black man who died at the hands of three white mall security personnel in Detroit last January. Like the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, a grand jury decided not to indict the security officers.

According to the Huffington Post, Cochran had returned to the mall after being requested to leave, threatened to kill someone, refused when asked by security to leave once again and then continued to struggle with officers after being pepper sprayed.

Brown, Garner and Cochran were indeed black, and all three ended up dead at the hands of white police officers or security personnel. But this is far from a war on black men that Al Sharpton, Mayor De Blasio and Eric Holder seem to suggest exists.

The reality is, there were numerous opportunities for Brown, Garner and Cochran to change the outcomes of their interactions with police. Does anyone imagine that had Brown simply moved out of the street when told that he would have been shot? Does anyone imagine that had Garner simply allowed the police to arrest him that he would have suffocated? Does anyone who reads the story about Cochran imagine that he would have ended up dead at the hands of security officers had he simply left the mall when asked?

As painful as these situations are for the families, one wonders what might have happened had the police been more differential? Might Michael Brown have robbed another store – and maybe this time pushed someone so that they fell and struck their head on the floor – or might McKenzie Cochran have actually carried out his threat to kill innocents? Eric Garner is slightly different in that his crime was selling untaxed “loosies” or loose cigarettes, a viable pursuit because of New York’s $6.00 a pack taxes. Doing so is illegal. You can complain about the law being stupid, but it was the law and Garner was breaking it. The cops could have let him go, but just days before Garner died the city’s highest-ranking uniformed cop, Philip Banks, issued an order to crack down on loosie sales.

The point is, none of these cases, nor most of the cases the left throws up to demonstrate the institutional racism rampant in America, hold up to scrutiny. They simply demonstrate a confluence of events where people who chose to act badly had outcomes that resulted in their deaths. But such are the odds when someone chooses to act badly, regardless of the activity. Most drunk drivers don’t die behind the wheel, but some do. Most recreational drug use doesn’t result in an overdose, but some does. And the truth is, while police encounters sometimes turn out bad for black men – just as they sometimes do for whites, Hispanics, Jews, etc. – they also sometimes turn out badly for cops. This can be seen by the fact that fifty officers were shot and killed in the line of duty in 2014, a jump of 56% from 2013. The difference is, unlike Brown or Garner or Cochran, these officers were killed while seeking to serve and protect their communities rather than resisting arrest or threatening innocent civilians.

The tragic irony about the rioting and demonstrations and accusations seeking to turn Michael Brown et. al into martyrs for a false cause is the fact that it diverts attention from where it should be. There are no doubt bad cops out there. In any group numbering in the hundreds of thousands you will find some number who have betrayed their oaths. But when the left characterizes all cops as racist killers it makes it impossible to find and focus on the real bad actors. That’s the irony of the whole thing… by wrongly accusing the entire police establishment of being bad, protesters actually empower the cops who are to continue doing business as usual because their actions are lost in a sea of fictional claims of racism and oppression. It’s called hiding in plain sight… by ignoring the difference between bad actors and bad outcomes – admittedly, sometimes tragic outcomes – activists make it that much more difficult to truly weed out the bad cops that really exist. By making everyone a racist, then no one is a racist and real racism has no fear of detection. The result is that activists actually increase the odds of the exact outcomes they are seeking to eliminate by giving them camouflage with a sea of false accusations. But then this is liberalism… where rhetoric is more important than results.