First African American President And Race Related Brutality

There is racism in the world. It rears its head in many ways and is most likely to be invisible to people who are consistently on the side that benefits the most from it. It cannot be eradicated with a single measure and it cannot be ignored because it has the tendency to pop up in multiple places at once. This essay seeks to consider how pockets of racism have come to light more clearly with a black president in the white house.

Illusions of Problem Solving

Barack Obama was born to a white mother and a black Kenyan father on American soil. While his election was hailed by many as a sign of how far the country had come since slavery, his own campaign should prove the lie in those words. Conservatives found ways to claim that he had been born in Kenya, that Hawaii was not a state when he was born or even that he was secretly an Al Qaeda agent being put into the white house for maximum destruction. When all of this failed to derail his bid for presidency they began to preemptively warn that he shouldn’t ‘pull the race card’ because he had been elected president which meant America was no longer racist.

The reality

The election of one man to a position of power does not negate the fact that centuries of racist policy making have marginalized communities that are predominantly non-white. The prison industry in America is a clear example of this. There are elementary schools that feed into poorly performing high schools which students are all but expected to drop out of and eventually end up in jail. There have also been clear cases of bias against minorities in altercations with the police. White assailants are given several opportunities to surrender whereas black or middle eastern ones are shot then questioned.

The future

There are ways that people can eventually learn to conquer racism. It is not a matter of becoming powerful enough to oppress someone else, it is much more useful to realize the interconnectivity of all of humanity. By harming one person we harm our society and by extension our world and that holds true no mater what color our skin is.

People have died because of the long held beliefs about ethnicity that are still repeated albeit behind closed doors. Hopefully this will become a bad memory to future generations.