“Part of what’s been difficult though, during my presidency, is untangling the degree to which some…”
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Part of what’s been difficult though, during my presidency, is untangling the degree to which some of these issues are because of race and some of these issues being reflective of just a coarsening of the political culture and a sharpening of the political divides. Because I do remember watching Bill Clinton get impeached and Hillary Clinton being accused of killing Vince Foster. And if you ask them, I’m sure they would say, ‘No, actually what you’re experiencing is not because you’re black, it’s because you’re a Democrat.’ And right around the beginning of Bill Clinton’s presidency and what corresponds with the rise of right-wing media, a lot of the old boundaries and rules of civility just broke down.
Now, one way to think about this is that issues of race and issues of political philosophy have always been entangled, and it’s hard to draw them out. Right? So, when I think about the Tea Party or conservatives who’ve opposed my agenda, I have no doubt that there are those who oppose my agenda because they have a coherent and sincere view about the role of the federal government relative to the state governments; they believe that an overreaching federal power that is taxing, regulating, redistributing is contrary to the vision of freedom that the founders intended; and they can believe those things independent of race.
Having said that, a rudimentary knowledge of American history tells you that the relationship between the federal government and the states was very much mixed up with attitudes towards slavery, attitudes towards Jim Crow, attitudes towards anti-poverty programs and who benefitted and who didn’t. And so I’m careful not to attribute any particular resistance, slight, opposition to race. But what I do believe is that if somebody didn’t have a problem with their daddy being employed by the federal government, and didn’t have a problem with the Tennessee Valley Authority electrifying certain communities, and didn’t have a problem with the interstate highway system being built, and didn’t have a problem with the G.I. Bill, and didn’t have a problem with the FHA subsidizing the suburbanization of America—and that all helped you build wealth and create a middle class, and then suddenly as soon as African Americans or Latinos are interested in availing themselves of those same mechanisms as ladders into the middle class you now have a violent opposition to them, then I think you at least have to ask yourself the question of how consistent you are and what’s different, what’s changed.
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– Barack Obama, quoted in Ta-Nehisi Coates Talks to Barack Obama About Race and the Media – The Atlantic
(via dendroica)
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