So much for that post-racial America Obama promised the country in 2008.
Via WaPo:
The killing of nine black worshipers at a church in South Carolina has compelled President Obama to look back with anger, then melancholy and finally some distance at the two most intractable issues he has faced as president: guns and race.
In the White House briefing room, at a fundraiser at the home of a movie star, before a roomful of the country’s mayors and in a garage in Pasadena, Calif., Obama has reflected not only on the Charleston shootings but also on the missed opportunities and unfinished business of his presidency.
“Increasingly, I’ve spent my time thinking about how do I try to break out of these old patterns that our politics have fallen into,” Obama said in Pasadena, where he recorded a podcast interview that was released Monday. He wondered how to have a normal conversation that’s “not this battle in a steel cage between one side and another.” […]
For Obama, the failure on gun control was now a symptom of the country’s larger political disease, one that he had hoped to cure but has paradoxically grown worse on his watch. “The problem is that there’s a big gap between who we are as people and how our politics expresses itself,” he said. “You get a negative feedback loop . . . then the public withdraws, and you get even worse political gridlock and polarization.”
If Obama sought to curb gun violence through direct legislative action in Washington, he has chosen a more indirect route on race. His own political ascendancy showed how the United States had changed and seemed to offer the promise of a post-racial nation.
Few anticipated that his presence in the White House would become a flashpoint for racial anxiety as well. “If you are a white man in America, this country is changing dramatically. You have always been in charge,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity be candid. “So there is something to white men feeling like something has been taken away from them.”
That awareness has bred a sense of caution, one heightened during the first months of Obama’s presidency when he criticized a white police officer who confronted Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who is black.