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View Full Version : Obama Soothed. Trump Stirs. How 2 Presidents Have Tackled Racial Flare-Ups.



jimnyc
06-06-2018, 11:54 AM
They write it, but don't point out or acknowledge that so many of the racial things that Obama addressed and got involved with - we for black folks. Trump, yes, has involved himself in things such as illegal immigrants and them killing Americans, or muslims coming from certain war torn countries and can't be vetted 100%.

But this is the NY Times, and it speaks just like the many liberals I know, both online and off. They just simply see things differently, even though it's right in front of them. Trump is far from perfect, that's for dang sure, but at least it's acknowledged, by the media of course, and his supporters.

And of course the left likes to look for "signs" that Trump is racist. :rolleyes: In other words, they make shit up!

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Obama Soothed. Trump Stirs. How 2 Presidents Have Tackled Racial Flare-Ups.

There was a time, not long ago, when the occupant of the White House held a beer summit to bring together a white police officer and the black professor he had mistakenly arrested. Another time, after the shooting death of a black teenager by a neighborhood watchman resulted in a storm of protest, that president remarked that the victim looked like he could have been his son.

When it comes to race, the most jarring difference between the Trump presidency and that of Barack Obama is not necessarily the nature of the ugly incidents playing out across the country under their watch.

After all, the arrests of two black men waiting at a Starbucks was preceded by Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor, being hauled away in handcuffs when a white neighbor thought he was breaking into his own home. The kneeling protests at N.F.L. games followed the death of Trayvon Martin, the black teenager killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer, not to mention a string of high-profile police shootings of unarmed black men.

The most striking difference between then and now is the responses of the commanders in chief, and how those reactions affect the country’s long-simmering racial tensions.

President Trump sometimes uses familiar phrases that seek to evoke America’s better angels — before signing a proclamation for Martin Luther King’s Birthday in January, he reminded that all are created equal “no matter the color of our skin.” But other words and deeds are racially inflammatory — around the same time he referred to Haiti and some parts of Africa as “shithole countries” in closed-door remarks that were leaked.

His predecessor, Mr. Obama, sought out a language on race that was heavy on balm. When Mr. Obama eulogized black parishioners murdered by a white supremacist at Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, S.C., he famously sang “Amazing Grace.”

Still, some people, mostly white, accused him of dividing the country when he spoke empathetically about the racism faced by black Americans.

The divergence in the way the two men have chosen to handle racial flare-ups was perhaps inevitable. Mr. Obama, as the first black president, had to overcome racism on his way to and during his time at the White House, including questions over whether he was actually born in the United States. And the very name of his more impulsive successor has become a kind of shorthand racial taunt.

“I think that sense that there’s no leadership, there’s no one sort of guiding Americans to question and to think about all of these tragedies that are occurring right now, makes it all the more anxiety provoking,” said Allyson Hobbs, a professor of history who is director of African and African-American studies at Stanford University.

But Mr. Obama was not without his own challenges when it came to leading the country’s racial discourse.

When he attempted in 2009 to be critical of the white police officer who had arrested Mr. Gates, saying that the officer had “acted stupidly,” he stirred the ire of police and conservative groups. And even in trying to backtrack and ease the flames, Mr. Obama invited more criticism, this time from African-Americans, who believed he was being too deferential.

Trying to heal the country’s racial wounds is an uphill battle for any president. A CNN poll taken near the end of Mr. Obama’s presidency found that 54 percent of Americans thought that relations between black and white Americans had gotten worse during his eight years in office. A Pew survey from last December found that 60 percent of Americans believed that Mr. Trump’s election had hurt race relations.

In speaking on highly charged racial incidents, Mr. Trump often equivocates, which observers say leaves the rest of the country fighting in circles about race. People often debate whether what the president did or did not say was a sign that he was racist. The question then turns to whether that makes his supporters racist, and they in turn push back, accusing their critics of fanning racial tensions that do not exist.

Mr. Trump’s most highly criticized response to a racial incident came in August, after white nationalists paraded and demonstrated in Charlottesville, Va., where they were met by counterprotesters. Mr. Trump assigned blame for the ensuing violence to both groups and spoke of “very fine people on both sides.”

In other cases, he has ignored or rejected the racial tensions at the core of some high-profile, combustible public issues.

Mr. Trump has emerged as the leading critic of the practice by some N.F.L. players of kneeling during the national anthem as a way to protest racial discrimination in policing. Mr. Trump personally, and successfully, lobbied some team owners, who earlier this month created a new anti-kneeling rule. He said his objection to the protests had “nothing to do with race,” but was rather about “respect for our country and respect for our flag.”

This week, he took to Twitter to respond to the tweet by the television star Roseanne Barr in which she compared a former Obama aide, Valerie Jarrett, to an ape. But Mr. Trump did not condemn the offensive tweet, or speak about race. Instead, he used the opportunity to complain that critics who had spoken ill of him had not apologized. The president continued on that theme on Friday morning, wondering on Twitter why Samantha Bee had not been fired from her show for using vulgar language to describe one of his daughters.

Mr. Trump manages to deftly turn racial issues into left-right political fights that are race neutral, said Ernest Lyles, a black private equity partner who lives in New York. In the case of Ms. Barr’s comments, for instance, Mr. Lyles said the president turned what was simply an issue of someone making a racist comment into a battle between a liberal television network doing wrong to a Republican like him.

Rest - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/us/obama-trump-race.html