Tagged: Ta-Nehesi Coates

“When talking morality in the black community, Obama has always been very clear. Obama has argued that black kids, specifically, have a mentality which reflects shame in educational achievement. (‘I don’t know who taught them that reading and writing and conjugating your verbs was something white.’) He believes that black men, specifically, tend to be more apt to abandon ‘their responsibilities’ and act ‘like boys instead of men.’ He believes that black parents need to learn to ‘put away the X-Box’ and get kids to bed at a reasonable hour. Obama’s policy message to African Americans does not enjoy this level of targeted specificity. Instead he endorses the sort of broad policies which most progressives support — criminal-justice reform, ‘investment in infrastructure,’ improved healthcare coverage, ‘jobs in low-income communities’….I endorse all of these initiatives and ideas — but not because they are targeted policy. They are not. And you will hear no policy targeted toward black people coming out of the Obama White House, or probably any White House in the near future. That is because the standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy. It is not hard to see why that might be the case. Asserting the moral faults of black people tend to gain votes. Asserting the moral faults of their government, not so much.”

There’s no need to talk about the morality of racist white people or anyone supporting global white supremacy (racism), so I would have named the article “Color-Blind Policy in a Color-Conscious Society.” In 2010, Tim Wise wrote a book, Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity, which addressed these same issues and predicted that if Obama used this approach and ignored institutionalized and systemic racism, blatant white racism would rise and race relations in America would only worsen. Five years later, that’s exactly what’s happening. Smdh. Obama and the white majority cannot continue to ignore the elephant in the room for too much longer…

Source: Ta-Nehesi Coates. “Color-Blind Policy, Color-Conscious Morality.” The Atlantic. May 13, 2015. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/color-blind-policy-color-conscious-morality/393227/.