The election of Barack Obama in 2008 as the 44th president of our imperfect union was a moral event of historic proportions that brought tears of relief to some eyes.
At last, something had been done to counter the charge made long ago by Samuel Johnson that, in the land of the free, all were not equal. Some of our founders’ cries for freedom had come from the owners of slaves.
None of Obama’s own forebears had been slaves. His mother’s forebears were white, and his father’s were Kenyan. But that didn’t matter. In any time other than the one he lived in, Obama’s prospects as a black man living in this country would have been limited, to say the least.
But with his election, a giant step forward had been taken. From 2010 onward, there was a continuous movement of nonwhites and women into the ranks of officeholders in both parties, some at high levels indeed. Intermarriage increased, and society opened up on a number of levels.
Still, the problem of black men and the police remained under Obama’s presidency. At the low end of the scale, black people continued to be stopped far more often while driving. At the high end, confrontations often turned violent. As cellphones began to preserve what in earlier times would have gone unrecorded, protests ramped up.
In 1991, Rodney King had been stopped for drunk driving only to be savagely beaten by four members of the police in Los Angeles. The officers’ subsequent acquittal sparked six days of rioting, killing 63 people and injuring more than 2,000.
In 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot dead in Florida by a self-appointed neighborhood watchman named George Zimmerman, who was patrolling the area after a series of robberies. In 2014, Eric Garner died in a chokehold in Staten Island, New York, while being arrested on the trivial charge of illegally selling loose cigarettes.
Also in 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, a white policeman shot and killed Michael Brown, who had just committed the strong-arm robbery of a store. Though unarmed, the 6-foot-5 and 289-pound Brown, as Obama’s Justice Department concluded, had been in the act of seizing the officer’s gun from him the first time he was shot in the hand. Brown then ran away, only to turn round on the officer and charge at him one last time before the fatal shots were fired.
“Six years into the age of Obama, relations are arguably worse in communities across the nation,” Anita Kumar wrote in December 2014. “America’s long-standing divide not only remains, but has deepened.”
Then, Trump came along, widely denounced as a white urban redneck, and people expected the worst.
The death of George Floyd, which made Garner’s already appalling treatment seem mild by comparison, was expected to follow the usual pattern: riots, division, and then nothing. But the riots flared up, and the plot changed. The looting stopped, and the protests continued. They got larger and whiter. Police joined them. Conservatives joined the Left in denouncing police abusers.
Trump did very little directly on this front, aside from criminal justice reforms that barely touched on police conduct directly. And he nearly drove the Left insane for completely separate reasons. Yet, where eight years of Obama had changed very little in this regard, the nation was ready for something different three and a half years into Trump’s presidency.
Sometimes, things change very slowly, and then very fast. Perhaps this was the straw that broke the back of a very old camel. But under Trump, of all people, the country is finally doing what both of the Bushes, Obama, and President Bill Clinton had wished to do and failed.
Fate works in strange ways, but we should be happy this moment came.
