Playing racial games

"After New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton chose a  black man to replace another  black man as his deputy, a reporter asked Mayor de Blasio if the replacement “had to be a person of color.”

“No,” the mayor claimed.

That’s not a little white lie. This is a case where whites need not apply.

Across the land, racially charged disputes are grabbing headlines. Broad swaths of life, including school admissions, crime statistics, income and poverty levels, hiring and firing, are seen increasingly through the prism of skin color and ethnicity.

Race riots, that urban staple of the ’60s and ’70s, are making a comeback. They rattled the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Mo., after a white police ­officer shot a black teenager. More ­violence is expected if, as seems likely, the officer is not indicted.

Desperate to hold onto power, some Democratic candidates spent election season trying to scare black voters to polls. They claimed shootings like the one in Ferguson and the 2012 Trayvon Martin case in Florida would become common if Republicans prevailed. At the bottom of the barrel was the scurrilous comment by Harlem’s Rep. Charlie Rangel that some in the GOP “believe that slavery isn’t over.”

So it goes six years after America elected the first black president. That history-making moment was supposed to usher in an era of peace in the melting pot.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, a strong plurality of people believe race relations actually are growing worse under President Obama. In a time of stark political polarization, that agreement stands out as a rare piece of common ground among whites, black and Latinos.

Thanks to last week’s election rout, the debate is settled over whether Obama is a failed president. From the lackluster economy to global troubles, his obvious shortcomings are legion.

Yet race relations were one area where it seemed safe to assume he would leave a positive legacy. "

Many have noticed that Obama is quick to pounce on white-on-black issues ... always opening his mouth and stating his racial opinion before all of the facts are in.  It has happened too many times,  and a successful president would not take sides prematurely, or at all, as Obama does.

Link:  http://nypost.com/2014/11/09/playing-racial-games/