Even those people who didn’t vote for Barack Obama in 2008 had hoped some things about race relations might change for the better.
The national media, who championed his election, crowed that he would be the first post-racial president, that his mere presence in office would tamp down racial strife in the country, that his soaring leadership would overcome any differences.
Some of us who didn’t believe one man could change all that overnight held a more realistic, hopeful view — that President Obama could use his election as the first black president to be a father or big brother to young black men across the country who lived for gun violence, who clung to gangs to get the love they never found at home and who killed each other in numbers that grew each year.
If a message to stop warring brother against brother became an overarching theme, if he touched on it everywhere he went, if he spun a companion message of the possibility of hope and change and a better life, then after four or eight years, if things had changed for young black men, then policy issues on which we had disagreements with him would at least be tempered.
Sad to say, of course, that Obama did not follow that line of thinking. While he has broached the subject occasionally during more than five and a half years in office, he has not made these young men a priority. So black-on-black gun crime, black unemployment and black gang involvement remain unacceptably high.