Yeah, they went there.
“The killings of Michael Brown and Treyvon Martin clearly shows that we don’t live in a post-racial society as many expected when you were elected,” Ramos says.
Obama chuckled, “Well, I didn’t expect that. You probably didn’t either.”
“But many people expected you to do more on race relations, dealing with white privilege. Do you get angry with this? Is it your responsibility?”
Then President Obama claimed Americans experience more equality now than before he took office, and also that Eric Holder was awesome. When Ramos pressed on saying, “but there’s not really been a lot of improvement,” Obama retorted, “The folks who say there’s not a lot of improvement, I don’t think were living in the 50’s and remembering what it was like to be black or Hispanic and interacting with the police then.”
Take a look:
Flashback to November 2, 2008. The Washington Post had this to say:
This will be true although — to an astonishing and admirable degree — Americans have relegated the politics of race to the back burner in the long presidential campaign now in its final hours.Barack Obama has succeeded brilliantly in casting his candidacy — indeed, his whole life — as post-racial. Even before the votes have been cast, he has written a glorious coda for the civil rights struggle that provided this nation with many of the finest, and also most horrible, moments of its past 150 years. If the results confirm that race was not a decisive factor in the balloting, generations of campaigners for racial justice and equality will have seen their work vindicated.
And who can forget this speech in 2008 where then Senator Obama declared, “we are one America. There’s not black America, or Asian America, or Latino America, there’s the United States of America.”
My, what a difference a few years of divisive rhetoric and policy makes. From a man once hailed as the post-racial savior America had been waiting for to, “I didn’t expect that and you probably didn’t either.”
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