With five Dallas police officers dead and seven more wounded after a
night of chaos and carnage, Americans woke up yesterday to a twisted new
landmark in its race crisis
His volte
face said it all: the black President whose milestone administration, it
was hoped, would finally exorcise America’s race demons, yesterday
tripped over himself in successive statements, first berating police for
racism and then, just hours later, praising them to the skies.
With
five Dallas police officers dead and seven more wounded after a night
of chaos and carnage, Americans woke up yesterday to a twisted new
landmark in its race crisis — the deadliest day for U.S. law enforcement
since the September 11 attacks.
‘This
is not America. We shouldn’t be seeing this today or any other day,’
sighed a CNN breakfast presenter, providing one of the first of many
pointless platitudes during the day.
The
problem is that it most certainly is America. And for all the country’s
traditional optimism and endless boasting about being the world’s most
successful melting pot, it is home to the sort of stark racial divisions
that Europeans would find shocking.
Add
to those divisions a constitutionally-enshrined free-for-all gun
culture and unaccountable, backwards-looking police forces, and you have
a racial volcano waiting to erupt
When
Barack Obama was elected President in 2008, many were tempted to think
that if his time in the White House achieved nothing else, it would
bring blacks, whites and Hispanics far closer together. For the fact is
that all sections of society voted for him (together with an impressive
45 per cent of white voters).
But
the President and his admirers have had to watch helplessly as America’s
tensions — focused on a simmering undeclared war between some
African-Americans and the police — have got markedly worse.
In
the past two years, outrage about police killings of black Americans
has become a nationwide and even international issue in a way that
hasn’t been the case since the race riots of the Sixties and the gun
battles between National Guardsmen and militant black rights groups such
as the Black Panthers.
The
touchpaper was lit in August 2014 by the killing of the black
18-year-old Michael Brown by a white officer, Darren Wilson, in
Ferguson, Missouri. Like many parts of the U.S., Ferguson had an
appalling record of hostility and mistrust between a largely black, poor
population and an almost entirely white police force.
The shooting — defended by police who said that Michael Brown had tried to take the officer’s gun — sparked days of rioting.
Protesters
made it clear that the unrest was about far more than the teenager’s
death, citing such injustices as the local police being three times more
likely to stop black motorists than whites and nearly twice as likely
to search them.
Demonstrations spread across the country and even more heinous examples of police brutality towards black men swiftly followed.
Barack Obama having the worse time in Office and a nation more riven than ever
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