Institutional Racism and the Democratic Obama Administration

Between 2009 and 2012, not much change in the level of institutional racism and, economic racism within the United States or in U.S. foreign policy was produced by the Democratic Obama Administration. And in October 2012, the official unemployment rate for African-American workers in the United States still exceeded 14 percent.

One reason might be because the Democratic Obama Administration, itself, apparently may have been staffed and operated in an institutionally racist way since 2009. As Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter noted in his 2010 book The Promise: President Obama, Year One:

“…High-ranking African-Americans on the White House staff like [Patrick] Gaspard, Mona Sutphen [deputy White House chief of staff], Melody Barnes (chair of the Domestic Policy Council), didn’t seem to have influence commensurate with their positions. And the National Security Council staff of 240 was almost entirely white…The car companies and AIG and other recipients of bailout billions weren’t being pressured…to hire more African-American executives and move beyond tokenism on their boards…With a black man as president the pressure was off. The number of high-ranking African-Americans in corporate America were actually shrinking…Almost no Blacks held senior management positions in hedge funds or venture capital firms…Obama…hardly ignored fund-raising…In the second half of his first year he hosted 2 or 3 fund-raisers a month, held mostly on the road…”

  So don’t be surprised if neither the level of institutional and economic racism in the United States, the militarism of the U.S. government’s bi-partisan foreign policy nor the official jobless rate for African-American workers changes too much during the second term of a re-elected Democratic Obama Administration (or during the first term of a newly-elected right-wing, neo-conservative Republican Romney Administration, if the 2012 Democratic presidential candidate loses the election, despite being backed by most of the Big Media conglomerates) between 2013 and 2017.