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Yes, racism has increased under Obama, and it will take Trump to the White House

Saturday September 24 2016

Am I alone in having this feeling that we are witnessing unprecedented police shootings of African Americans in the United States? Feelings, of course, do not need empirical evidence to be credible, but I suspect that if one did a scientific study in this area, this feeling would be borne out.

This is true: There is hardly a week that passes by these days without news that another black man in the US has been shot down by police in circumstances suggesting a lynching pure and simple. It has happened so often in the past year or so that one is compelled to think there is a pattern to it.

Certainly those Americans who have taken to the streets to protest, to burn, to loot and to kill policemen must be seeing a large picture of systemic, racially motivated brutality.

And they must also be sensing a political force behind this apparently irrational police activity.

For God’s sake, all this is happening on the watch of the first black American president, whose election eight years ago defined such a momentous occasion that even the most daring optimists had feared to imagine it.

That election helped cast America in a Jeffersonian light as that humane, shining city on the hill of romantic lore. Anyone who read Irving Wallace’s novel, The Man, will know where I’m coming from. Barack Obama not only shattered the mother of all glass ceilings, he abridged world history and redefined human geography.

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But did he just steal a march on the citadel of white supremacy while the guardians slept, and now, awakening with red-faced shame, they are determined to exorcise their guilt? It is possible they have found their exorcist in Donald Trump, with his “Make America Great Again” slogan, which to me sounds like reclaiming lost white glory.

Trump has never impressed anyone with his brainpower, but even he can outdo himself. Such as when he suggested, in so many ways, that the election of Obama to the White House had exacerbated racial tensions in the US.

This is Trumpspeak for “If Obama had not been elected president, fewer white people would feel antipathy toward black people.” Or, maybe, “With a black man in the White House, his people have become too uppity and don’t accept their station anymore.”

From there to saying that Obama and (Hillary) Clinton invented Islamic State is a very short route to travel for the fertile imagination of this buffoon. But it is important to understand that the fact that he has been uttering these outrages for so long and yet they have not been fatal to his campaign, suggests that they resonate with a huge chunk of the American population.

Trump has created a niche for himself and his bigotry, and I do not think he gives a hoot about what own his party thinks of him. Already many heavyweights have disowned him, and we are told George Bush Senior intends to vote for Hillary, but this will not daunt Trump; he has a huge number of fellow loonies he can count on to take him to the Oval Office.

Racial card

One thing is clear, and that is he is using the racial card; he is a racist, period, and he knows there is a very strong constituency out there that will vote with him. Those Republicans who pride themselves on their pedigree as the party of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, will just have to eat humble pie as they have to listen to more inanities from an unreconstructed racist.

For the time being, I’m still mulling what the police chief in Charlotte wanted to say last Thursday at a press conference when he was asked to be more transparent about the circumstances in which another black man was shot to death.

In his discomfiture, the chief, Kerr Putney, could not say there was proof that the victim, Lamont Scott, had brandished a gun as the police had claimed.

The deceased man’s family claimed he was only carrying a book. In such cases, would you not want to be as transparent as possible so there isn’t a shadow of a doubt?

Chief Putney saw the opportunity to wax Shakespearean: “Transparency is in the eye of the beholder,” he quipped. And the chief is an African American. Just goes to show.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]

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