Wake Up, Obama is Not A Miracle Worker

In his article entitled The Price of a Black President, Fredrick C. Harris wrote:

...those who had seen in President Obama’s election the culmination of four centuries of black hopes and aspirations and the realization of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a “beloved community,” the last four years must be reckoned a disappointment. Whether it ends in 2013 or 2017, the Obama presidency has already marked the decline, rather than the pinnacle, of a political vision centered on challenging racial inequality. The tragedy is that black elites — from intellectuals and civil rights leaders to politicians and clergy members — have acquiesced to this decline, seeing it as the necessary price for the pride and satisfaction of having a black family in the White House.

...But the triumph of “post-racial” Democratic politics has not been a triumph for African-Americans in the aggregate. It has failed to arrest the growing chasm of income and wealth inequality; to improve prospects for social and economic mobility; to halt the re-segregation of public schools and narrow the black-white achievement gap; and to prevent the Supreme Court from eroding the last vestiges of affirmative action. The once unimaginable successes of black diplomats like Colin L. Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Susan E. Rice and of black chief executives like Ursula M. Burns, Kenneth I. Chenault and Roger W. Ferguson Jr. cannot distract us from facts like these: 28 percent of African-Americans, and 37 percent of black children, are poor (compared with 10 percent of whites and 13 percent of white children); 13 percent of blacks are unemployed (compared with 7 percent of whites); more than 900,000 black men are in prison; blacks experienced a sharper drop in income since 2007 than any other racial group; black household wealth, which had been disproportionately concentrated in housing, has hit its lowest level in decades; blacks accounted, in 2009, for 44 percent of new H.I.V. infections.

Mr. Obama cannot, of course, be blamed for any of these facts. It’s no secret that Republican obstruction has limited his options at every turn. But it’s disturbing that so few black elites have aggressively advocated for those whom the legal scholar Derrick A. Bell called the “faces at the bottom of the well.”

Further in his article, Mr. Harris slams black politicians, intellectuals and civil rights leaders for their "uncritical adulation" of the President. He argues that many black leaders have become "cheerleaders for the President or self-serving pundits."

Many of us hoped that President Obama's election represented the dawning of a new era of racial progress. Instead, his election appears to be an anomaly, a temporary convergence of interests. As reported on Yahoo News, racial attitutes have not improved since the election of President Obama. Yahoo reports that:

Racial prejudice has increased slightly since 2008 whether those feelings were measured using questions that explicitly asked respondents about racist attitudes, or through an experimental test that measured implicit views toward race without asking questions about that topic directly.

In all, 51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey. When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election. In both tests, the share of Americans expressing pro-black attitudes fell.

Obama's four years in the White House cannot reverse hundreds of years of slavery, Jim Crow and institutionalized racism. It is completely unrealistic to expect President Obama to magically eliminate wealth inequality, high black unemployment, education disparities, mass incarceration and health care disparities. Obama is not a miracle worker.

Instead of tearing each other down, we should unite and re-elect President Obama. One thing is certain. If Romney is elected, he will do absolutely nothing to address our issues. After Obama is re-elected, we can have a serious discussion about holding him and black leaders accountable.