President Obama's View on Race in American History

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President Obama’s view of race in American history is rather simple: both blacks and whites have faced different types of discrimination. For blacks, the racism has oftentimes been explicitly stated or codified, be it during the time of slavery or the Jim Crow laws. The instances of implicit racism are too numerous to take into consideration here, though Obama makes note of them when he spoke of blacks being barred from working on local public payrolls, such as the police and fire departments. Almost all of this has been engineered by white people at various levels, from the local judge all the way up to the nation’s highest office. As unfortunate as this is, it simply cannot be denied by anyone with the facts at his disposal.
On the other hand, white people face an endogenous discrimination amongst the strata of classes existing within the entire ethnic population; mainly, working and lower-middle-class whites being treated as 2nd class citizens by the privileged white aristocracy, comprised mainly of individuals working for the major corporations and Washington lobbyists. When one takes a step back to survey President Obama’s aggregate message, it is crystal clear; both blacks and poor whites share a common enemy: rich whites.
President Obama makes many references to his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, best known for his incendiary racial remarks against whites that, once public, forced President Obama to denounce him. Given the narrative perpetuated by President Obama that he himself transcends race and can look past such issues, it is curious to see him associating with someone so racially divisive and wholly against the values and virtues President Obama champions during his campaigns. To say that it raises a val...

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...ess must necessarily produce one result: racial divisiveness. Harmony cannot be an output of this function because it was never an input to begin with, in the same way that two wrongs don’t make a right. It’s important to understand what brought us to this point, but until we shift our focus from that to what we need to do to escape this grim reality, we will go nowhere.
Of the three choices, President Obama’s politics align most closely with FDR. Both of them are students of Keynesian economic theory. FDR had his WPA, PWA, and SSI, while President Obama has cash for clunkers, the stimulus bill, and Obamacare. Both believe in a strong central government working actively in the lives of everyday citizens. Fundamentally, both believe in redistribution of wealth, though neither ever explicitly stated as much. Time will tell how similar their outcomes will be.

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