Race remains, two terms of a black president notwithstanding, the starkest division in American society. The raw pain, anger and volatility of communities across the US, like an open wound that is being repeatedly, agonisingly probed. And tensions are rising: a recent Pew poll found a 20 percentage point decline in the numbers of whites who felt that race relations had improved since Barack Obama took office. Among blacks the decline was sharper – down 25 percentage points to 34 per cent. Three quarters of African Americans thought they were treated less fairly by the police than members of the white community.
African Americans account for 24 per cent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 per cent of the US population. They are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.
For the 11th time in his presidency, Barack Obama yesterday sought to comfort a city after a mass killing. This time, in Dallas, like Orlando a matter of weeks ago, the community again torn by violence motivated by prejudice. And once again also amplified in scope by the easy availability of high-powered weapons. This time it was the police, however, who had fallen foul of the explosive cocktail of racial tension and guns when on Thursday black army veteran Micah Johnson killed five officers in retribution for police killings of black people.
The fuse that lit the fire and complicated Obama's task – he has already described the Dallas killings as a "hate crime" – was the shootings last week of two black men by police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and outside St Paul, Minnesota, seen by the world on social media.
In an inflammatory attempt to throw the blame for all the killings on the black community and specifically on the campaign against police violence, Black Lives Matter, former mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani has patronisingly lectured that community. "What we've got to hear from the black community," he said in a Sunday morning TV talk-show, "is how and what they are doing among themselves about the crime problem in the black community... We wonder, do black lives matter, or only the very few black lives that are killed by white policemen?"
Obama had already responded to the charge effectively: “When people say ‘black lives matter,’ that doesn’t mean blue lives don’t matter; it just means all lives matter, but right now the big concern is the fact that the data shows black folks are more vulnerable to these kinds of incidents.”
But, along with the frustration he has repeatedly expressed at his inability to get the Republican-dominated Congress to enact some – any – gun control, the rise, particularly since 2014, in fatal incidents involving police and young black men is a cruel legacy that will haunt Obama.