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Ahh Obama.
His presidency has brought joy and pain (like sunshine and rain). Joy, as many across the world rejoiced at the fact that an African-American man, (yes I know he is part-white but widely perceived as Black, don't hate), a Democrat, and someone who at least on face value seems relatively sane, is President.
The pain is that many who seem to have, umm, issues with a brother in the White House are foaming at the teeth. We have the Birthers, the Tea Partiers, people who hide behind his "Magic Negro" status to blame him for not pulling out of Afghanistan as soon as they would like and actually trying to provide adequate heath care to those who desperately need it, and those who plain out just want him dead.
But the worst are those who feel that because a brother is Commander-in-Chief that racism has suddenly dissolved. That Black folks can suddenly, as they always seem to think,(even though statistics prove otherwise), that not only is racism over, but many of the issues that Black folks apparently "whined" about for decades and generations, are now refutable.
But according to a recent article in the New York Times, this is not so.
That race remains a serious obstacle in the job market for African-Americans, even those with degrees from respected colleges, may seem to some people a jarring contrast to decades of progress by blacks, culminating in President Obama’s election.
But there is ample evidence that racial inequities remain when it comes to employment. Black joblessness has long far outstripped that of whites. And strikingly, the disparity for the first 10 months of this year, as the recession has dragged on, has been even more pronounced for those with college degrees, compared with those without. Education, it seems, does not level the playing field — in fact, it appears to have made it more uneven.
Outside of a smattering of articles and of course, Affirmative Action and Employment Equity here in Canada, the public perception of the struggle for equal access to job opportunities has always been cynical. The Times has written other stories this year on joblessness, and marginalized people that have referenced the economic recession, but recently it seems like while people are starting to think about this issue instead of “blaming the victim” they are blaming the President. Oliver Willis discusses the reaction from Conservative columnist Ben Shapiro:
How can blacks truly approve of Obama more highly than they did when he was elected? The black unemployment rate is 15.6 percent today, as opposed to 11.9 percent in December 2008, over 50 percent higher than the white unemployment rate. There is no rhyme or reason to the continued support for a man who has driven the economy off the rails.
From Willis:
Ben Shapiro’s column may as well have been titled “N*gg*rs Can’t Learn, Right?”. It continues the great tradition of the right brushing off, minimalizing and attacking black people. To them we’re never intelligent enough to make decisions on our own. It’s always that we’re duped, we’re racist, we’re on the plantation. It could never be that when you put the two parties side-by-side on their core beliefs and who they include in their decision making that the Republican party clearly has no interest in black people.
Democrats are far from perfect on these issues, but it’s not a coincidence that the only one of the two parties with black elected officials at the federal level is the Democratic party. It’s not a coincidence that the first black president is a Democrat, and that the first black RNC chairman is a clearly unqualified figurehead with no actual sway over the rank and file.
Even The Root weighs in:
After weeks of flak from his own party, Obama has finally put jobs on his rhetorical radar. He outlined Tuesday his broad ideas for getting America’s 15 million unemployed back to work. He wants to spend an unspecified amount—in the billions, to be sure—to launch new infrastructure projects; to spur green jobs through incentives for weatherizing homes; to give tax breaks to small businesses and to extend benefits like unemployment insurance and COBRA. Most controversially, he’s embraced the idea of using the “savings” from left over bailout money to create jobs—a plan that unions and progressive economists
