tailgater wrote:Race relations got worse.
Even if I give you the hopeless "it can't be done, woe is me" argument, it shouldn't get worse.
Lead by example.
Demand more, not less from people.
Expect responsibility.
Stop rewarding complacency.
So... there's a couple problems with your statements.
Why do you think race relations got worse?
I think this is a very real question which has to be properly answered, because a lot of people on the trump side of conservative blame obama for race relations being worse....
Oddly, this is the same group which started throwing a fit almost the instant obama was elected.
So there's a fun slight of hand there.... black man gets elected president... then a group starts claiming reverse racism about every thing he does.... that same group then points to their own howling complaints as evidence that race relations are worse.... as a coup-de-grace... that same group then organizes white nationalist parades for the new incoming president.
Anyway.... I don't honestly think race relations are truly worse.
I think there is a lot more visibility to the problems which existed, and that creates a perception that its worse.
An easy example would be the ubiquity of cell phones. Those now allow black people to post evidence whenever they feel like they are being mistreated by police. That ubiquity of cell phones essentially allowed the existence of a black lives matter movement. That's not because police started treating black people bad in the year 2010... it's because suddenly they could show people outside of their community what they saw. Relations between black people and cops didn't get worse. They just became visible.
I think a lot of what we see with race relations now has to do with visibility and communication. Previously, racist dudes had to put on hoods and masks and have secret meetings to not let people know they were the racist dude. Now they just give themselves an anonymous username on a cigar forum, or 4chan, or 8chan, or discord... They can organize, they can reinforce each other's beliefs. And on the other side, the very far left liberals can do the same thing... they come up with new things they consider micro-aggressions, and reinforce in their own mind how bad that is. Then, they post that sh#t to facebook, and everyone reads about how racist people are, and the racists then just claim they aren't racist but the PC crowd keeps moving the bar and makes it just darn impossible for them to not say anything nice about the darkies. We see people's racist thoughts because after they've tossed the dumb racist ideas back and forth with their fellow anonymous racists on cigarbid, or 8chan, the idea seems suddenly normal and ok to them. So they post their racist meme to facebook or twitter, and are suddenly surprised when half their friends tell them it's racist. They get defensive, and use any number of defensive techniques to claim they aren't racist, they have a black friend, or whatever... but we all see it. It's visible.
I dunno. Maybe that can be considered worse. Maybe the people who are marginal racists are becoming full-blown racists due to their constant reinforcing of racist ideas in these siloed internet forums. But even if that's the case, it isn't due to obama.
A quick sanity check could easily show that all this insane racist crap started popping up the instant Obama became president. Not before he proved himself one way or another.... so he didn't make race relations worse... if anything, the election of a black president drove some people so crazy they showed the world how racist they were.
Meh... I'm rambling now.