Racism? Depends Who's Talking About It

By Alan Caruba

Recently I stopped by the home of a friend of some forty years to wish him happy birthday. He is a PhD with a long career in the field of human relations. And he is an African-American. As we sat together discussing our lives and current events, I was surprised to hear his wife declare that the only reason everyone is criticizing President Obama was “racism.”

I suggested that even the Congressional Black Caucus was criticizing the President. She dismissed that. Perhaps it has to do with his handling of the economy? No, it was racism, she said. I had to wonder how many other black Americans felt that way and, frankly, I do not have the answer to that question.

In sharp contrast, the news on Saturday, September 24, was that Herman Cain, a candidate for the Republican nomination, had won a straw vote at CPAC Florida, scoring 37.1% over distant runners-up, Rick Perry at 15.4# and Mitt Romney at 14%. Did I mention that Cain is the only black man running against eight white candidates? Or that Florida elected Allen West to the House from a district that is predominantly white?

So, someone, please tell me where is this racism that my friend’s wife perceived? And has President Obama’s race been a help or hindrance? When he was elected the 44th President of the United States in 2008, Adam Nagourney of The New York Times wrote that his election swept away “the last racial barrier in American politics with ease…” At the time, Nagourney noted that “Initial signs were that Mr. Obama benefited from a large turnout of voters, but particularly among blacks.”

By September 2011, it was a very different story. CNSnews reporting an August Gallup poll of 15,343 Americans noted that “only 41 percent said they approved, giving Obama the lowest monthly approval rating of his presidency.” Moreover, “Obama hit his lowest monthly approval among Hispanics during August and tied his lowest monthly approval among blacks.”

“In June 2009 during his first year in office, Obama had 95 percent approval among blacks, 78 percent approval among Hispanics, and 53 percent approval among whites. Since then, his monthly approval has dropped 11 points among blacks, 30 points among Hispanics, and 20 points among whites.”

ABC News reported similar results. In an interview with Andy Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center that had published similar approval ratings he said “Obama is not being judged through the prism of race by white voters. It’s because ‘Hey, I don’t like what he’s doing.’”

It is perfectly understandable that black Americans would want to support the President, but is there a blind spot regarding why his approval ratings are dropping even among blacks? In an interview on CNN with Piers Morgan, the Oscar-winning actor, Morgan Freeman, was asked if Obama had helped the process of eradicating racism or had he made it worse. “Made it worse,” replied Freeman who blamed the “Tea Partiers”, calling Obama’s present problems “a racist thing.”

If that were true, why in late August did an article in Politico report that “prominent black leaders…have turned up the heat on the nation’s first African-American president”? He is widely seen as indifferent to black concerns, but their concern is also about the black voter turnout in 2012.

The Black Congressional Caucus has been increasingly vocal regarding their unhappiness with President Obama. In remarks at its annual Phoenix Awards dinner on September 24, the President said, “I expect all of you to march with me and press on. Take off your slippers, put on your marching shoes. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, (and) stop crying.” It is hard to imagine a white President saying such things as Obama strove to rally his audience.

For anyone familiar with the history of race and politics in America, the loyalty of black Americans to the Democratic Party is astonishing. During the years of FDR’s New Deal, civil rights for blacks were not on the agenda. Even the years following World War Two when two million blacks served in a segregated military, the Democratic Party—especially in the “solid South”—opposed any civil rights legislation. It took the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 to finally get a bill passed.

For my part, I think Obama has done incalculable harm to any current or future black candidate for the presidency. He had an opportunity to address the nation’s problems of unemployment and debt, and he gave all Americans, black, Hispanic, and white, more unemployment and debt. It’s unfair, but black candidates will likely have to work twice as hard to overcome his legacy.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Black America's Gains and Losses

By Alan Caruba

You know that Barack Obama is in trouble when even the Congressional Black Caucus begins to criticize him.

Maxine Waters (D-CA) recently told a gathering that the CBC is “frustrated” with regard to unemployment, a problem that has hit blacks harder than whites. The only thing holding the CBC back from being more vocal, said Waters, was its fear they will lose the support of the black community.

It says something about Congress and politics in America that the only race-based caucus is the Black Caucus.

Like many Americans, I watched the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s unfold with the feeling that, a century passed the Civil War, it was long overdue.

The movement had a leader of remarkable talent, Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr., plus others from the ministry and labor movement. It was a time of turmoil that ended with the assassinations of Dr. King, President John F. Kennedy, and of Bobby Kennedy.

Others died too in the struggle but they have become relegated to being minor historic players. When the dust settled President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. The changes in American life since then have been extraordinary. Afro-Americans were assured their voting rights, equal housing, and other opportunities that had been routinely denied.

Whites accommodated themselves to the changes, having already accepted the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, that "separate but equal" schools, a widespread practice in the southern and border States, were unconstitutional.

While many blacks have achieved middle class status and risen to levels of real achievement, the vast bulk has not. These comments acknowledge individual success stories, but address the larger black community.

As a general observation, blacks in America have chosen to ignore the gains in legally protected civil rights equality.

By most indices the black community has not changed. In U.S. cities they remain ghettoized, as much from choice, as external circumstances. Instead of moving forward, integrating and assimilating into the larger white population; blacks have emotionally remained apart, nurturing a sense of being victims, holding onto an animus for whites.

Social failures are so rampant among blacks that it is appalling to contemplate how many are born into single-parent families, often raised a mother or grandparents because the men are absent. They drop out of school. Unskilled and often illiterate, employment opportunities are limited. Blacks and crime have become synonymous to the point where they fill the nation’s prisons far in excess of whites and Hispanics. Drug use ravages black communities.

To say whites are disappointed is an understatement. It is a source of resentment that is rarely expressed aloud to avoid being deemed a racist or engaging in hate speech.

So how does one explain the phenomenon of the first black President?

Observers attribute it to a large turnout of younger voters, born well after the 1960s, to union members, many of whom were government workers, to 98% of the Afro-American community, and, of course, Democrats in general. Many white voters who wanted to affirm their belief that equality was an American value pulled the lever for Obama.

Barack Obama has exacerbated white disappointment and it is likely that many blacks, too, are experiencing buyer’s lament.

Among whites, there’s a feeling that scores are being settled with incidents like Obama’s condemnation of a white Boston police officer, the appointment of Eric Holder as the first black Attorney General, and of others like Van Jones as Obama's “Green Jobs Czar.” Jones is a self-identified Communist and a radical environmentalist who resigned and is now safe in the bosom of progressive organizations.

The latest affront to a predominantly white population is an executive order, issued on August 18, titled “Establishing a Coordinated Government-wide Initiative to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Workplace.” In other words, whites need not apply.

When whites became aware of Obama’s preacher, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, saying “God damn America”, they had to actively ignore the fact that Obama had spent many years in his church, that Wright had married him and Michelle, and baptized their children. Theirs was no casual relationship, nor were others from any earlier point in his life such as the Communist Party member, Frank Marshall Davis, who advised young Barack that his white grandmother had a right to be scared of blacks because “She understands that black people have a reason to hate.”

It will be a long time before the majority white and Hispanic populations forget or forgive the legacy of Barack Obama.

Obama has wreaked economic havoc on America since taking office and this time people—black, white, Asian and Hispanic—have taken notice.

© Alan Caruba 2011

Flash Mobs: Being Young, Black, and Male in America Today

By Alan Caruba

Those who follow my commentaries know that I rarely discuss race in America. I find it an unhappy topic at best and, from my readings in U.S. history, I feel safe in saying there was never a good time to be Black in America.

Slavery before, during and after the American Revolution was a stain on the nation and, though some were slave owners, the Founding Fathers knew it. To get the new Constitution ratified among the thirteen States, they had to trim their sails to the point where Article One, Section Two refers to “those bound to service” and, for the purpose of taxation of “free persons”, the slaves were counted as “three fifths of all other Persons.” Ugh.

It would, of course, take a Civil War to end slavery, though Lincoln’s preferred solution was to put the slaves on a ship back to Africa. That was not likely because by 1861 when the war began, there were 3,954,000 slaves, the majority of whom lived on plantations where, from Virginia to Texas, they often outnumbered whites by 13 to 1.

My awareness of Blacks was limited in my youth, growing up in an upscale New Jersey suburban community where they were quite scarce. You could count the number of Black students in my high school on one hand. When I was drafted in the Army most of my service in the early 1960s was on a base in the Deep South. It gave me a close up view of segregation. When I was discharged, I became a journalist on a weekly serving a small New Jersey city neighboring Newark. I was there when the city’s first Black mayor was elected.

It was the time of the Civil Rights movement, filled with marches and tumult. I met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1967 Newark erupted in rioting, the result of poverty, and of sense of being powerless and disenfranchised. The Italians who had run the city gave way to Black politicians and, five decades later, they still are in charge, but the social problems remain.

If anyone would have told me that America would elect a Black President, I would have said that was impossible. I was wrong and so were the many Blacks who rejoiced in the election of Barack Obama, confident that he would take the lead, representing them, paying particular attention to their issues. Obama proved to be more concerned with Islam.

I got to thinking about that when several commentators, referring to how he would be remembered, said that Obama would no longer be remembered as the first Black President, but rather as the first Downgrade President. When he addressed the nation on August 8, his cool detachment seemed alarmingly at odds with the tumult on Wall Street and around the world that had been triggered by Standard & Poor’s decision.

How do Blacks perceive Obama, I wondered.

A friend, Milton, a retired Black corporate executive, attorney, business owner who edits and writes for BlackQuillandInk.com, a website for Black conservatives, responded to my question noting that Black support for Obama’s candidacy was about 98%, but has slipped since to around 86%.

It was his view that the Blacks “have been poisoned to dislike non-Blacks” and to see themselves “as victims.” I understand the victim part, but was surprised by his observation regarding the animosity, if only because White America has gone to fairly extraordinary lengths to redress the ills of the past.

As America’s most famous minority, Blacks are now outnumbered by Hispanics and are being by-passed by virtually all other minority in America in terms of achievement and upward mobility. The chains may have been removed, but, as the syndicated columnist. Walter E. Williams, noted in July 2010, “The pathology seen among a large segment of the Black population is not likely to change because it is not seen for what it is. It has little to do with slavery, poverty and racial discrimination.”

“Today’s black illegitimacy rate is about 70%,” said Williams. “When I was a youngster, during the 1940s, illegitimacy was around 15%...Today, only 35% of black children are raised in two-parent households.”

And it gets worse. In an August 2010 Washington Post article by columnist George Will, he wrote that “By the early 2000s, more than a third of all young black non-college men were under the supervision of the corrections system. More than 60% of black high school dropouts born since the mid-1960s go to prison. Mass incarceration blights the prospects of black women.”

In recent weeks, from the Wisconsin State Fair to Philadelphia, from Milwaukee to Los Angeles, reports of flash mobs of young Blacks attacking whites are stirring racial fears. The most dangerous factor in Black cities and neighborhoods are the hordes of young males, raised by one parent, dropouts from school, no skills, no jobs, no prospects, and lots of angry energy that is too often diverted into crime and violence.

Barack Obama’s economic policies have failed the nation, but they have been especially adverse on Blacks. Black unemployment and foreclosures, for example, have skyrocketed under Obama and remain disproportionately high as compared to other communities. In short, Obama has done nothing for Blacks in America either on the macro and micro level to improve their opportunities or attitudes.

He has nothing in common with them; a half-white Columbia University graduate and Harvard educated lawyer, former instructor at the University of Chicago, married to a Princeton and Harvard graduate, herself an attorney. They have two girls that go to private school and their inner circle of friends, Black and white, are dedicated Marxists.

The editor of BlackQuillandInk.com says. “The Black community refuses to admit how wrong they were in voting for Obama.”

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Politics 2010 in Black and White

By Alan Caruba

In 2008, Barack Obama would not have been elected to the presidency if white voters had not reached a point since the days of the 1960s Civil Rights movement to think a black man could and should have a shot at the job.

If race played a role in the election, it was usually Obama that made reference to it, lightly touching on the subject to acknowledge and diminish it.

The only Americans permitted to discuss black/white relations these days are its media-designated spokespersons like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. When the NAACP spoke up recently, it was to condemn Tea Party members as racists.

Rather than advance the condition of blacks in America, Obama has done almost nothing. Indeed, one of his administration’s first acts was to defund charter schools in Washington, D.C. where, like most major urban centers, the schools that young blacks attend are universally dismal.

It is, of course, impossible to look at the handsome, young black President without seeing a handsome, young black President. Understandably, he has the support of the vast majority of America’s black population; approximately 9.9 million according to the last census. They are a minority among minorities. There are now more Hispanics than blacks.

It is, however, Obama’s policies, not his skin color, that have created resistance. In a recent statement, Earl G. Graves Sr., chairman and publisher of Black Enterprise, said, “The distress is real and legitimate. First, people of all races and economic backgrounds are continuing to suffer as the result of an economy that continues to struggle.”

Graves, however, gave Obama a pass with the now familiar assertion that Obama “inherited this mess”, but the fact is that Obama sought the presidency and all presidents inherit whatever issues preceded their term in office or occur on their watch. It is the manner in which they address those issues by which we judge their competency.

Graves lamented that, despite Obama’s election as the nation’s first black president, “there are still people who just cannot get past the issue of race. They still can’t bring themselves to respect a black man, even if he is the President of the United States, regardless of his policies and actions.”

To which I say “hogwash.”

The forthcoming midterm elections are all about the Obama administration policies; the profligate borrowing and spending, the bailouts, the takeover of the nation’s healthcare sector, the shutdown of offshore oil drilling, the insults to foreign allies, and the timidity toward foreign enemies.

Having lived in the south at a time when segregation was the norm, I can attest to how far white America has come in rejecting those restrictions, but I would argue that their hopes for America’s black community have fallen well short of expectations.

White Americans are hugely disappointed. Much had to be ignored when some of them voted for Obama. At one point in the campaign he had to disavow Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the twenty years he attended a church devoted to black liberation theology; a church where Rev. Wright could stand in the pulpit and say, “God damn America.”

Much within America’s black community remains dysfunctional. A recent Wall Street Journal commentary about the NAACP, noted that “Blacks are 13% of the population but comprise 38% of prison or jail inmates in the U.S., and black-on-black violent crime is the norm. Blacks commit 52% of all murders and make up 49% of all murder victims—90% of them are killed by other blacks.”

In cities, many of which that have had black mayors, the schools are among the worst. More than 70% of black children are born to single women and, as The Wall Street Journal commentary noted “are more likely to live in poverty, perform poorly in school, to commit crimes and abuse drugs.” This is a failure of the progress many white Americans had wished for.

Obama is no flag-waving black American. He has noticeably been unwilling to salute during the playing of the national anthem. He is demonstrably a socialist in a capitalist nation.

When he selected Van Jones, a black member of the Communist Party, to be his “green jobs czar”, Jones resigned when his communist affiliation was revealed. When Obama lived with his grandparents in Hawaii, a teenage mentor was Frank Marshall Davis, a black newspaper journalist and poet who was widely known in the 1950s to be a communist. His memoirs speak of his affinity with Marxist students and faculty members.

He was elected despite this. It has taken less than two years in office for the backlash to occur.

It may be unfair, but whites hold black politicians to a higher standard of behavior simply because they have risen to positions of power, often as the result of heavily black constituencies.

Charles Rangel (D-NY) is facing ethics charges along with Maxine Waters (D-CA). It was revealed that Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) steered college scholarships to members of her own family. In 2006 Rep. William Jefferson was found to have $90,000 in bribe money in his home freezer and subsequently went to jail. In 1994, Rep. Mel Reynolds was found guilty of having had sex with an underage 16-year-old campaign worker.

When it comes to the Department of Justice, issues of voting rights are front and center. The double standards of DOJ under the leadership of a black Attorney General, Eric Holder, are a cause for concern in the white community.

While on a recent campaign stop in Rhode Island Obama repeated his mantra that the nation’s economic problems are all due to Republicans despite the obvious fact that Democrats have been in control of Congress since 2006. Prior to the 1994 midterm elections, Democrats had controlled Congress for forty years.

At one point Obama said, “We can’t have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class families up in front. We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.”

The ill-conceived and unfortunate back-of-the-bus remark comes from the early days of the Civil Rights struggle for equality when, throughout the South, blacks were required to sit in the back of the bus. Applying it to Republicans was especially offensive. In a recent radio interview he told Hispanic listeners that they must “punish our enemies.”

Like an old time Southern Democrat politician Obama has played the race and ethnicity card reflecting his party’s dependency, not just on blacks, but a hoped-for Hispanic support as well. The rest of his base has shrunk to unions and the nation’s youth.

The midterm elections are expected to make a dramatic change in Congress and, when the dust settles, it will not be because America is led by a black president, but because America is led by an incompetent president, a socialist whose policies will have been soundly rejected.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

America's Bad Karma

By Alan Caruba

When times turn ugly and people begin to worry about the future they begin to look for some group on which to pin the blame.

Fears manifest themselves as prejudices and this accounts, I think, of the recent flare up over Shirley Sherrod, the Department of Agriculture employee who was misidentified as a racist, treated shabbily by the White House and, astonishingly, by the NAACP as well before being swiftly exonerated.

Political pundits are saying that the one thing the first black President least wants to deal with are any charges of racism in his administration and that is entirely understandable. What is not understandable is the pass the Department of Justice gave some New Black Panthers who were clearly trying to intimidate voters at a polling place in Philadelphia.

Racism in America goes way back in our history. After visiting America around the same time, 1831-32, as Alexis de Tocqueville, the French economist, Michel Chevalier, noted that “An American of the North or South, whether rich or poor, ignorant or learned, avoids contact with blacks as if they carried the plague. Free or slave, well dressed or badly, the black, or man of color, is always a pariah.”

When a group of twenty-three Jews of Dutch ancestry arrived in New Amsterdam in September of 1654, its Governor Peter Stuyvesant did not want them to put down roots in what would later become New York, but the officers of the Dutch West India Company thought otherwise and overruled him.

If America was a hell on Earth for blacks taken into slavery, for Jews America was literally the closest thing to paradise they could imagine. It wasn’t that prejudice didn’t exist. It was that America provided opportunity and upward mobility in ways the Old World did not. To an extraordinary extent, they prospered and they gave back to America with their talents, their intellect, and their wealth.

Jews are closely identified with Hollywood, but some ugly things have been occurring there of late. There was the latest anti-Semitic outburst attributed to actor Mel Gibson whose previous 2005 arrest for DUI revealed a deeply felt hatred of Jews.

This was followed by a July 25 report on NewsBusters.org concerning an interview by director, Oliver Stone, with the London Sunday Times in which he railed against the “powerful lobby” of Jews in America. Stone’s upcoming Showtime documentary series, the “Secret History of America”, reportedly puts Hitler and Communist dictator Joseph Stalin “in context.”

How one concludes that either of these two monsters can be justified or excused of their crimes against humanity in any fashion defies the imagination and is deeply offensive. Stone, like so many Hollywood liberals is particularly fond of dictators of every description. Nothing good can come of his re-writing history to suggest that the mastermind of the Nazi Holocaust was simply a tool of German, British, and American “industrialists.”

Stone who has associated himself with Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s dictator, Hugo Chavez, has apparently never met a despot with whom he could not break bread.

Hitler used anti-Semitism to stir the passions of Germans that were experiencing economic troubles in the 1930s. It’s a textbook tactic of all dictators in all times. Let’s not repeat it here or fail to protest it. Celebrities like Gibson and Stone should be shunned.

These and other incidents must especially be guarded against and condemned in times when the search for a scapegoat is too often the easy answer as opposed to understanding the actual dynamics of the nation’s economic troubles.

Bigotry is quintessentially un-America.

In 1790 President George Washington wrote to the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, saying, “The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy; a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

We shall never be wholly free of the bigots among us, nor of any feelings we may have in our own hearts, but we can never permit ourselves or others to indulge in bigotry without considering the often terrible lessons of history.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Being a Politician While Black

By Alan Caruba

Privately I have been telling friends that Barack Obama has made it nearly impossible for any black American politician to become president for at least the next two generations, maybe more. He has sealed their fate.

Then I read Walter E. Williams’ column, “Can Black Americans Afford Obama?” He wrote, “I am all too fearful that a future black presidential candidate will find himself carrying the heavy baggage of a failed black president.” Williams is a distinguished black economist and a syndicated columnist who sometimes sits in for Rush Limbaugh.

Thank you, Walter, for saying what I have been thinking for a very long time. Just how much irony is there that both Carter and Obama are so liberal that they estranged voters so swiftly and so deeply while in office they have become the standard for failure against which others will be measured.

Political failure is neither white, nor black. It’s just failure.

Having forced “Obamacare” on America, the President is so tone deaf he thinks, despite having signed it into law, that he must go out and “sell” it again. Somewhere close to two-third of all Americans want it repealed!

The comparison to Carter is accurate. The 1979 Iranian revolution and Carter’s inability to secure the release of U.S. diplomats held hostage sealed his fate. Fast forward to Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who literally mocked the latest UN sanctions that took the U.S. sixteen months to fashion and secure.

The Iranians continue to use Obama as a doormat and he continues to think that diplomacy will achieve anything with these fanatical Islamists.

White people have long been accustomed to keeping their opinions to themselves about blacks and for very good reason; the history in America for blacks was one of slavery and the subsequent Jim Crow laws, the KKK, school segregation and violations of their humanity until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

Following the Civil War, the 15th Amendment to the Constitution stated that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude. It was passed on February 3, 1870. It took nearly one hundred years before blacks had any real chance of enjoying the American dream.

Forgotten in this history, however, is that a lot of white people also fought very hard to correct the wrongs that had become institutionalized in American society. Barack Obama would not be president if a lot of white people hadn’t voted for him. I think they saw an opportunity to say to the world, see, we’ve changed.

Williams wrote “Early indications suggest that the Barack Obama presidency might turn out to be similar to the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter. That’s bad news for the nation but, especially bad news for black Americans.”

It is, indeed. It’s especially bad news for black Americans running for public office. I am not talking about those from heavily black districts, but those who must compete for white votes. One, Alan West, is a black candidate for Congress in South Florida. He is an articulate and outspoken conservative. He transcends color. He’s about real leadership, real ideas, and real change.

Any member of a minority will tell you that they cringe when “one of theirs” screws up because, in the end, it makes them all look bad. Barack Obama is not doing black Americans any favors these days.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Jesse Wept

By Alan Caruba

As Barack Obama gave his speech to acknowledge winning the presidency, Jesse Jackson was among the throng in Chicago’s Grant Park and appeared to be weeping. I assume most people thought they were tears of joy that a black man had been elected, but this is America and black candidates have been elected to high office for many years now.

I have another theory though. I was wondering if Jesse wasn’t weeping because he knew that Obama’s election put an end to his ability to blackmail corporations to support his Operation PUSH while claiming that blacks in America needed special treatment and extra help to get ahead and succeed.

This suspicion was confirmed as I talked to an assistant to a high ranking Wall Street financial consultant. She is black and an immigrant from Haiti who came to America believing that “hard work” was all it would take to achieve the American dream. She was disdainful of American blacks “who used the excuse of racism.” As far as she was concerned, her skin color had been neither an obstacle nor a limitation.

I recall the Civil Rights movement and reported on it when I was a young journalist. At one point I met Dr. Martin Luther King. I recall that the movement was driven by hope that, for blacks, the American dream could and would be achieved. Then, within a week after the 1965 Voting Rights Act was signed by President Johnson, riots broke out in the Watts area of Los Angeles. Why, asked white America.

Why did blacks cheer when O.J. Simpson was found not guilty of murdering his former wife and her friend when virtually everyone knew or believed he was guilty? And why was no one, black or white, surprised when he was found guilty of the latest charges against him?

This writer is not arguing that blacks in America did not suffer centuries of slavery and, following the Civil War, another century of segregation before their full rights as citizens were written into laws like the Voting Rights Act. What Jesse Jackson knows is that Americans, particularly white Americans, have now made it manifestly clear that being black is no longer an excuse for failure and a host of other social ills that beset the black community.

Blacks have not lacked these years since the Civil Rights movement for role models. Now they have Barack Obama, the ultimate role model, the President-elect of the United States of America.

No doubt Jesse Jackson, a former candidate for President, a civil rights leader, and a decidedly flawed role model, was weeping from the emotion that seeing Barack Obama would have naturally evoked. No doubt American blacks have cause for joy today.

They have, however, an enormous task ahead of them. They are too often poor, drop out from school too much, have crime rates that are too high, give birth to too many single parent babies, and have been too dependent on government welfare programs.

Socially, they are still at the bottom of the barrel long after other racial groups such Asians have risen to the top. Hispanics who also came in search of the American dream now out-number them.

Lastly, there is something blacks have to fear. It is the backlash that is sure to come when President Obama does not make good on his promises. He is, after all, a politician no matter the color of his skin.

Worse for blacks will be an economy in free-fall where jobs disappear, investment dries up, and other troubles are laid at the feet of The One who says he intends to change America and the world. When that happens, they will have cause to think something has gone terribly wrong.