In his farewell speech in Chicago Tuesday night, President Obama identified race relations as “a threat to our democracy – one as old as our nation itself.”
Obama is sometimes portrayed as being a dividing influence on race. I’ve heard many conservatives say they think Obama’s gone out of his way to stoke the racial divide. And polls suggest a majority of Americans believe race relations have worsened under his watch.
But by many measures they’ve improved over the last eight years. To take one example, participation in and acceptance of interracial relationships has risen steadily over the last couple of decades, and since Obama became president.
On Tuesday night, Obama’s message was one of racial inclusiveness. “All of us have work to do” to improve race relations, he said. He talked about the importance of anti-discrimination laws but said that laws can do only so much. For real change to occur, he said, “hearts must change.”
Then he said, “If our democracy is to work in this increasingly diverse nation, each one of us must try to heed the advice of one of the great characters in American fiction, Atticus Finch, who said ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.'”
Empathy is one of the most familiar themes of Obama’s presidency. In “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama said that a “sense of empathy is at the heart of my moral code.”
I’ve always had my problems with the way Obama invokes empathy and compassion. Every politician evinces empathy for some groups but not for others. While Obama calls on us to feel empathy for the illegal immigrant yearning for a chance to live freely in a new land, Donald Trump evokes empathy for the factory worker who’s lost his job because his plant has moved overseas. While Obama feels compassion for the young mother with an unwanted pregnancy who wants to abort, Trump may feel empathy for the unborn child she’s carrying who has a right to life. And so on.
But on race, Obama usually gets it right. On Tuesday night, he encouraged “blacks and other minorities” to see that their struggle isn’t so different from that of the middle-aged white man. He may seem to have privileges they don’t but may actually be having a hard time coping in a world that has left them behind economically, culturally and technologically.
He also encouraged white Americans to acknowledge that systemic discrimination against minority groups didn’t disappear with the end of Jim Crow, and that it’s wrong to dismiss the complaints of minorities as mere political correctness or reverse racism. Obama also said that while it’s easy to fall back on stereotypes of immigrants as unwilling to assimilate, the same charge was made against Irish, Italian and Polish immigrants a century or more ago.
Then came Obama’s most important point. He said that for race relations to improve, people need to get out of their silos and get to know people who are different than themselves. “For too many of us, it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods or college campuses or places of worship or our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions.”
This is undoubtedly true. Only by moving outside our bubbles do we meet people whose experiences are different than our own and from whom we can learn many things, and vice versa.
This is something Obama mentioned in a recent interview with The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates. Obama said that the solution to America’s racial conflicts “is for us to act in ways that show mutual regard, propose policies that safeguard against obvious discrimination, extend ourselves in our personal lives and in our political lives in ways that lead us to see the other person as a human worthy of respect.”
Extending ourselves means becoming invested in the lives of people who are different from us. That investment can transform a relationship to the point where love enters the picture When that happens, the outcome is respect.
Daniel Allott is deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner
