Obama's Legacy

The last year of the US presidency of Barack Hussein Obama is now half over and it is abundantly clear what his enduring legacy – that for which he will be remembered – will be. It will not be his disastrous attempt to give the United States a socialized health care system that has all the failings of ours up here in Canada and none of the more positive aspects. It will not even be the relentless jihad his administration has waged against traditional Christians on behalf of birth control, abortion, gay rights, and other aspects of the ongoing sexual revolution. Rather it will be a legacy of racial division and strife.

It would not have taken a great degree of prescience to have predicted as much in the fall of 2008 when Obama was first elected president. At the time media progressives in an orgy of self-congratulatory rejoicing proclaimed that the election of Obama was ushering in a new age of a new “post-racial” America, oblivious to the reality that in a republic which, for the first time its history, had chosen its president largely on the basis of his skin colour, race was obviously more important than it had ever been before. Less than a month after Obama’s first inauguration, his Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. provided another clue as to the direction in which this administration would lead the United States when he berated Americans as a “nation of cowards” that has “still not come to grips with its racial past” and called for a “national conversation” on the subject of race. What Obama and Holder meant by “conversation”, of course, was not a dialogue, an interchange in which varying points of view are respectfully heard and discussed, but a monologue in which blacks voice their complaints and everyone else listens and grovels.

Then began the long stream of incidents in which the media shamelessly politicized the private suffering of black families who had lost a son to the gunfire of police or, in the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case that started it all, a neighborhood watch co-ordinator, and Obama, even more shamelessly, interjected himself, and tried to make it all about him. “Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago.” “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”

This gave birth to “Black Lives Matter”, which started as a banal cliché and then grew into a radical protest movement. The movement is founded upon the idea that the United States of the present day is a white supremacist country in which black lives are devalued and the police, the agents of white supremacism, systematically target blacks with violence causing a disproportionate number of black deaths. This idea is, of course, completely contra factual, although every smug, snarky, self-assured, progressive on the planet seems to be convinced of its truth.

As was reported last year, far more whites die at the hands of the American police each year, than blacks. In Philadelphia, at least, black and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot at blacks than white cops. Forty percent of cop killers in the United States are black, making blacks much more likely to kill cops than the other way around. For that matter, violent interracial crime in the United States is overwhelmingly black on white rather than vice versa. Finally, far more blacks die at the hand of other blacks each year, than at the hands of the police. If anyone devalues black lives in the United States, if anyone thinks that black lives do not matter, it is not white police officers, but other blacks.

If the people who parade under the banner of “Black Lives Matter” really believed their own slogan, they would be preaching at other blacks, rather than at white cops.

The slogan and the movement, however, have never really been about bringing down the black death count in America so much as stirring up bitterness, anger, and hatred against white people and especially against white cops. That there was an abundance of such bitterness, anger, and hatred already is quite in evidence in the statistics referred to above. To deliberately stir up more can only be regarded as an act of pure malice especially in the light of the deadly consequences that we have seen over the last couple of weeks.

On Tuesday July 5th a black man named Alton Sterling was shot and killed by police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and the following day another black man, Philando Castile was killed by a police officer in St. Paul, Minnesota. The media immediately began to fit these killings into their narrative of racist white cops killing innocent blacks – despite there being plenty of facts which do not fit that narrative (1) - while politicians like Obama and his heir designate Hillary Clinton took the opportunity to do the usual grandstanding and posturing. Then on Thursday, July 7th, at a protest over these killings organized in Dallas, Texas by Black Lives Matter, a black army veteran named Micah Xavier Johnson, having declared that he “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers” put this wish into action and went on a shooting spree, killing five officers and injuring about a dozen other people before holing up in a college building, where, in a bizarre sci-fi twist to the story, a police robot armed with a bomb took him out.

It did not end there, naturally. The next day similar incidents, albeit on a smaller scale, took place in Bristol, Tennessee, Valdosta, Georgia and Ballwin, Missouri. On the Saturday night after that someone began shooting at the police headquarters in San Antonio and that same weekend protests in Baton Rouge and St. Paul turned violent, with protestors in the latter attacking the police with crude projectiles and Molotov cocktails. Then, on July 17th, a man named Gavin Eugene Long, who referred to himself as a “black separatist,” shot six police officers in Baton Rouge.


At the recent Republican National Convention, David A. Clarke Jr., the Sherriff of Milwaukee Country, Wisconsin called these events “guerilla urban warfare against the police”, which seems an apt description. Perhaps it would be more apt, however, to paraphrase the notorious remarks of the American president’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, and say that “Obama’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

At the beginning of his presidency, Obama’s administration asked for a national conversation on race, and at the end of it, what he has given America is a race war. This will be all that history will remember him for.

(1) Among other contra-narrative facts were that both men were armed, Sterling was resisting arrest, and the cop who shot Castile was not white.