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there are many inaccuracies in history especially dealing with slavery and racial injustice. This shows how if history was taught accurately regarding race, it would better the world.

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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American society developed the notion of race early in its formation to justify its new economic system of capitalism, which depended on the institution of forced labor, especially the enslavement of African peoples. To more accurately understand how race and its counterpart, racism, are woven into the very fabric of American society, we must explore the history of how race, white privilege, and anti-blackness came to be.

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Racism and history go hand in hand. the history behind racism is often distorted and now many Americans live thinking that they understand what has happened in the past. but in reality, most americans are living a facade.

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158 Resources for Understanding Systemic Racism in America

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These articles, videos, podcasts and websites from the Smithsonian chronicle the history of anti-black violence and inequality in the United States

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the extent to which Obama talks about the issues in America is very specific. He targets issues that he feels are most important, as any person should. But the real question of the matter is,, did he deliver? or did he let us down. i still am unsure how to go about discussing this because he was left in a very difficult position when he became the president. He had to deal with wars physically and ideologically in and outside of America. Thus making the goal of attaining the promise land very difficult to achieve.

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Former President Barack Obama released his memoir "A Promised Land" Nov. 20, giving readers an inside look into his life. Photo from @barackobama on Instagram.

There is something I must get out of the way before I begin this column - 'Politics and Prose' is not an original name. It is the name of a bookstore in Washington D.C. I have not been there, but I would very much like to go. By all accounts, it appears to be an incredible bookstore, and I am indebted to them for possessing the necessary genius to create such a brilliant name, but I digress.

I am writing this column because it often seems as if our national political discourse is increasingly void of nuance.

The 2020 election, and many of the events that preceded it, demonstrated the increasing desire of more and more Americans to engage with politics. By and large, this is an incredible thing, but it is not without its cons. Many students are already aware of the prevalence of virtue-signaling and performative wokeness, but I believe the issue here goes beyond that. I can only speak from my own personal experience, but it appears that in some circles, critical thinking has been replaced by infographics and thoughtful contemplation has been replaced by a devotion to buzzwords and slogans.

Infographics, buzzwords and slogans are not inherently bad. In fact, they often distill and distribute messages and ideals that can enlighten those who come across them. I want to make this clear: I generally like these three things. However, it should not be controversial to simply suggest that our seemingly increasing reliance on them to understand our shared political reality is concerning.

So that is why I decided to write about books. There is something that happens to you after spending a couple of days or weeks with a book that just can't be mimicked by other mediums. Books also offer their writers a chance to explain themselves and argue their point without being confined to the limits of social media. Infographics and buzzwords might be effective communicators, but they simply cannot capture the necessary complexity that a book offers.

In that same vein, I'll begin this column with Barack Obama's "A Promised Land."

Released Nov. 20, the memoir tells the story of Obama, in his own words, from some of his earliest childhood memories to his first two and a half years as president of the United States. The book has been received remarkably well since its release, and rightfully so; Obama's prose is beautiful and his details are captivating. The former president is also strikingly introspective in his memoir, often inviting the reader to evaluate his ambition and his intentions, his shortcomings and his triumphs.

The memoir has also been praised for its ability to mean many things to many people. For some, it might serve as a commentary on U.S. race relations. Obama doesn't shy away from discussing the topic of his racial otherness or some Americans' aversion to it. For others, "A Promised Land" might read as an insightful look into the inner workings of the executive branch. Many might read it simply for its gossipy bits - who knew the President's trips to his own bathroom were monitored by the Secret Service and referred to as trips to the "secondary hold?"

"A Promised Land" is all of those things and much more, but for me, it read primarily as an exposition on what it means to be American and what America is. The portrait Obama paints of the country, its public servants and its citizens is an inspiring one - one that evinces a patriotism rooted in compassion and tolerance.

This prevailing ethos is best expressed during Obama's speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, a speech that Obama presents as one of the most significant, catalyzing events that catapulted him to national prominence.

"[...] There's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America,' Obama said. "There's not a Black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America."

This same patriotic current ebbs and flows through much of the book and does appear to sincerely inform much of Obama' worldview. Still, for all of the pride in America the speech elicits, it also foists upon the reader a troubling question: Was the "magical" country Obama described really just a fantasy?

Any American with a modest understanding of our national state of affairs is surely able to see that America is anything but united - what with insurrectionists successfully invading the U.S. Capitol on the orders of former President Donald Trump, feckless Senators challenging the results of an election despite droves of evidence to the contrary and a sizable proportion of Americans willfully refusing to respect public health guidelines despite a death toll of nearly half a million Americans.

However, Obama's memoir is not blind to this sorry, foul state of affairs. In fact, his memoir presages much of the political violence Americans see today. Obama recalls a white woman "grimly unwilling" to shake his hand and people sporting confederate flags outside of his campaign events, telling him to "go home." He recalls the "nativist bile" that Sarah Palin spewed to her audiences, who in turn would shout "terrorist," "kill him" and "off with his head" in reference to Obama.

Obama writes much, much more about the political rot he sees spreading across the country. Though he spends ample time extolling the decency of many Americans, ordinary citizens and public servants alike, and the hard, often heroic work of government officials on both sides of the aisle, one still cannot help but notice in his memoir a creeping, malevolent force gaining traction in America, like a spreading cancer one encounters every fiftieth page or so.

In light of this, it is clear that the America Obama described in 2004, the same America he describes throughout "A Promised Land," is still, as the title suggests, a promise - a promise yet to be fulfilled, but still a promise worth fighting for.

Stuart Carson is a senior writing about political literature. His column 'Politics and Prose' runs every other Monday.

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Politics and Prose: Obama's promised land remains a promise worth fighting for

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There is something I must get out of the way before I begin this column - 'Politics and Prose' is not an original name. It is the name of a bookstore in Washington D.C. I have not been there, but I would very much like to go.

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Obama had his own ideal America in mind for when he became president. Whether or not he accomplished his goals while in tha tposition is another story for another time. But he wanted to deliver a new New Deal, restore the country’s international reputation, and cool a warming planet. I dont think it was ever possible for him to accomplish all of these goals 100%, so he had an idea in mind but went down another path. But that doesnt relally matter because no human is perfect and being the president of the united states is a hard job.

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Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

In his new memoir the former president makes clear he had no intention of being a savior.

In October 2008, a month before the historical election that would make him the first Black president of the United States, Barack Obama grew worried about the messianic expectations his campaign had invited. For voters electrified by his rallies and political homilies of hope and change, Obama had emerged as MLK 2.0, a savior to deliver the country from the bondage of George W. Bush's War on Terrorism abroad, from violations of civil rights in the name of national security at home, from the shame of Gitmo, and from the most devastating financial crisis since the Great Depression. He would deliver a new New Deal, restore the country's international reputation, and cool a warming planet.

In his new memoir, Obama reveals that he viewed expectations of radical hope and change not only as unfair but also as a threat to his own vision of America as "a promised land."

These expectations were not uninvited: in his speeches Obama carefully deployed populist, D.C.-outsider rhetoric and channeled the Black prophetic political tradition. Yet in his new memoir, A Promised Land, which covers his turbulent first two years in office, Obama recalls-at the peak of his election campaign-wanting nothing to do with these hopes. "It was personally disorienting," he writes, "requiring me to constantly take stock to make sure I wasn't buying into the hype." Many of his supporters did buy into the hype-which left Obama thinking, before he even entered the White House, that "it would be impossible to meet the outsized expectations now attached to me."

It was also in October 2008 that Obama first recognized that it was not just political liberals and leftists who were succumbing to populist messianism. In August, John McCain chose the Governor of Alaska and self-proclaimed hockey mom, Sarah Palin, as his running mate. For all her clear weaknesses, Obama saw Palin as an effective populist who also galvanized the masses, but who did so by "enthusiastically gassing them up with nativist bile." Before his defeat of McCain, Obama already sensed in Palin's populism the nativist fringe making its way toward center stage in the Republican Party-a trend that would foretell Trump's future presidency.

The new book makes plain that Obama viewed expectations of radical hope and change not only as unfair but also as a threat to his own vision of America as "a promised land." His early premonitions about a savior syndrome mobilizing both left and right play out from beginning to end in this memoir. But how exactly does Obama envision the promised land? Despite the title, these seven hundred pages never say: the words "promised land" appear only once in the book as an epigraph, in an African American spiritual. The omission is striking; such vagueness can only be considered intentional.

The ghost of the 1990s haunt this new book and help to explain how Obama's administration came to be seen by so many as both a great disappointment and a grave mistake-one we must avoid making again today.

The only place where readers might be able to tease out any substance is in the book's very brief preface. There Obama tells us that despite the dark political forces that have arisen in recent years, he has yet to give up on "the direction of the America we've been promised"-on the idea of "liv[ing] up to the meaning our creed." By this Obama apparently means the country's founding documents that proclaim all people equal before the law. In stoic language, Obama envisions a slow but steady march toward the fulfillment of founding values.

What is less clear in the book is that behind this faint residue of a political ideal lurks the influence of post-Cold War liberalism. The ghost of the 1990s haunt this new book and help to explain how Obama's administration came to be seen by so many as both a great disappointment and a grave mistake-one we must avoid making again today.

* * *

Whatever a promised land might be for Obama, it is clear that it has no space for today's ideological currents on either the left or the right. Concerning the former, Obama condemns as "revolutionaries" those who criticized the Affordable Care Act for leaving private insurance intact and who panned Obama's anodyne handling of the financial crisis-failing to nationalize banks, prosecute bank executives, or reset the standards for "economic normalcy." More radical change, Obama remarks, "would have required a violence to the social order," which violated his vision of the American promise. Somebody with "a more revolutionary soul," Obama writes, believes that such actions would have been worth it. But he "was a reformer, conservative in temperament if not in vision" and thus unwilling to put at risk "the well-being of millions of people." He refuses to be their savior.

Obama envisions a slow but steady march toward the fulfillment of founding values. What is less clear in the book is that behind this faint residue of a political ideal lurks the influence of post-Cold War liberalism.

As for the right, Obama blames his failure to establish a new New Deal on a conservative backlash. The reason he could not rally the nation as Franklin Roosevelt had done, he contends, is that a reactionary message "demonized" not simply Obama's policies but his very character and identity. The reactionary fringe that Obama observed during Palin's campaign rallies had coalesced into the Tea Party and eventually moved toward the center of GOP politics. Ironically, just as Obama criticized left revolutionaries for their desire to overturn the social order, nativists denounced the "socialism" of Obama's Affordable Care and Recovery Acts for having "disrupted" the "natural order." As they awaited a savior to restore it, Senate leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner would hold down the fort.

Obama freely admits that in both instances his presidency played a defining role in awakening both the revolutionary and reactionary forces that prevented the cooperation necessary to make the kind of liberal progress he had envisioned. But why did these forces arise so strongly under his watch? Obama's own answer seems to be that both political extremes had renounced the liberal vision of post-ideological consensus and cooperation in the name of freedom and equality. The revolutionary left turned its back on these ideals, finding them inseparable from imperialism, economic exploitation, and structural racism. The reactionary right, meanwhile, denies that they should extend to religions, races, and identities they deem not to be true members of the body politic.

But here is where Obama's vision of an ideologically neutral promised land needs to be historicized. It was common in the run up to his 2008 campaign for pundits and scholars to suggest that Obama's policies and speeches were undergirded by a civil religious tradition that could be traced back to the nation's founding document, to Puritan notions of America being a "City on a Hill" and "A Promised Land," and to the black prophetic tradition most famously expressed by Martin Luther King, Jr. No one argued this view with more conviction than Philip Gorski, a Yale sociologist who praised Obama for reviving a tradition of American "civil religion" that drew inspiration both from the Bible and the Western heritage of civil republicanism. Obama's civil religion, Gorksi contended, allowed a way for the country to move beyond the political impasses that had divided it since the 1960s. The Harvard intellectual historian James Kloppenberg presented a similar perspective using different language. He argued that as a student at Harvard Law School, Obama imbibed the political liberalism of John Rawls. As such, he sought to implement a pragmatic version of Rawls's notion of an overlapping consensus-the idea that despite the country's cultural, religious, and political diversity, there are values that citizens share in common when it comes to the political and economic advancement of the country.

Obama thought the road to the promised land had already arrived in the 1990s-its quirks just needed to be worked out at home and abroad.

Both of these perspectives root Obama's promised land, to use the words of Kloppenberg, in the "long unfinished project" of American democracy, spanning from the seventeenth century through the civil rights movement up until the present. But by the end of Obama's first term, Gorski proved frustrated with Obama's failure to live up to the prophetic elements of the civil religion tradition, while Kloppenberg criticized those who believed Obama's desire for a bipartisan overlapping consensus amounted to a "vulgar pragmatism" embraced by politicans desiring merely "expedient compromise." Perhaps part of the problem is where they located the crux of Obama's political thought within intellectual history.

An alternative way of understanding the idea of Obama's promised land is to place it in the context of the 1990s. Obama's time at Harvard Law School coincided with the end of the Cold War. After graduating in 1991, his career rapidly advanced at a time of nearly unparalleled liberal optimism. This was the decade of post-Cold War liberal triumphalism that heralded the end of history, in political scientist Francis Fukuyama's famous phrase. Social scientists and politicians proclaimed a "Third Way" liberalism that would move beyond the ideological divisions of yesteryear, putting the United States on the path to realizing its promises of liberty and equality on both the domestic and international stages. Obama's dream of consensus politics emerged precisely at this moment of political reconfiguration.

In The Audacity of Hope (2006), for instance, Obama praises the presidency of Bill Clinton for its singular contribution of transcending the ideological deadlock of what "had come to be meant by the labels of 'conservative' and 'liberal'," which Obama deemed as "categories inadequate to address the problems we faced." Clinton's Third Way, as Obama defined it, demonstrated that free markets and fiscal responsibility could promote social justice. Obama's own vision of a post-racial America took root in this post-ideological context. What prevented Clinton from achieving more, Obama argues, was the anti-liberal demagogy of Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist. A Promised Land essentially retells this story of the Clinton years, but this time Obama directs the narrative at his own presidency-in a context in which the ideological stakes have grown immensely.

It was also in the 1990s that Obama attended Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, pastored by Jeremiah Wright. Through this experience Obama became steeped in the Black Church tradition. Wright embraced James Cones's black liberation theology, which prioritized the Black predicament: God had a preferential option for those who suffer the most. Though Obama famously denounced Wright's diatribes that damned American hypocrisy-a move he deemed necessary to win the Democratic nomination-his sermons proved so influential that Obama channeled them in his electrifying speeches, most notably his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. The very title of The Audacity of Hope was a borrowing from Wright.

Obama transposed the radical key of the prophetic political tradition into the more muted liberal register of moderate aims and normative consensus.

It is clear, then, that Obama thought the road to the promised land had already arrived in the nineties-its quirks just needed to be worked out at home and abroad. The emerging liberal international order would realize that dream around the world; Obama aimed to put the country back on this promising path, which George W. Bush's presidency had derailed. As the country's first Black president, Obama viewed his own life as demonstration of the end of the ideological age. Contrary to Wright and others who believed that radical structural change was necessary to overcome racism and economic exploitation, Obama thought the post-ideological eschaton had already arrived. What many would come to lament as his administration's bait and switch-both a betrayal of his promises and a paving of the road for Trump-was in reality there from the beginning, as Obama transposed the radical key of the prophetic political tradition into the more muted liberal register of moderate aims and normative consensus.

* * *

The most self-reflective moment in Obama's memoir involves him questioning whether he should have implemented a radical economic plan in his handling of the financial crisis. "To this day," he observes, "I survey reports of America's escalating inequality, its reduced upward mobility. . . I wonder whether I should have been bolder in those early months, willing to exact more economic pain in the short term in pursuit of permanently altered and more just economic order." He wonders, but he ultimately answers in the negative. Harsher alternatives, he says-letting the banking system collapse, prosecuting banking executives-would have made things worse.

The new book makes clear that perhaps the most important commitment, for Obama, was the "preservation of normalcy."

We have no way of knowing whether he is right: we cannot run historical experiments. But we can certainly see the political commitments that led him to draw this conclusion. And this new memoir makes clear that perhaps the most important commitment, for Obama, was the "preservation of normalcy." It may not have been popular, he says, but it did steer the country away from disaster.

Those who see Trump's administration as four long years of disaster will not agree, of course, nor will those who point out all the ways "normalcy" over the last several decades has only worked for the wealthy. And as many have pointed out, Joe Biden's promise of a return to normalcy-already being realized by his heavy reliance on former Obama staffers-can all too easily pave the way for another Trump, if not Trump himself, in 2024. To keep that from happening we must harness the forces that Obama unleashed but reneged on-leading us not to the dead end of 1990s liberal consensus, but to a broad-based coalition representing the interests of the working-class majority of the country. It is for them to make good on the meaning of the promised land.

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the false promise of obama's 'promised land'

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The False Promise of Obama's 'Promised Land'

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Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins In his new memoir the former president makes clear he had no intention of being a savior. In October 2008, a month before the historical election that would make him the first Black president of the United States, Barack Obama grew worried about the messianic expectations his campaign had invited.

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Racism in America can be viewed through many lenses. One of the factors that can show how or if America is racist is through observing the quality of like for Americans across ethnic groups. Graduation rates, poverty rates, and employment rate all show the difference in life between the different races in America.

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His choice of words was categorical. When Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, responded to Joe Biden's speech to Congress last week, he said: "America is not a racist country."

But racial disparities exist in the US healthcare system, its criminal justice system, its educational system and its economic system. Those gaps are wide. They are persistent. And, in some cases, racial disparities have grown over time rather than narrowed.

Dataset after dataset, from non-partisan thinktanks to government sources, consistently show these racial disparities. And, unless one believes inherent, biological differences exist between racial groups in the US that would explain their differing success in the country (a belief that would, by the way, be racist), the only possible explanation for all this is structural racism.

These differences exist from the moment that a child is born in the US. One in every seven Black babies has a low birth weight compared with one in every 15 white babies, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data from 2019.

And the gaps remain. Black, Hispanic and Native American children are more likely to live in poverty than their white, Asian, Hawaiian or Pacific Islander counterparts, as census data from 2020 reveals.

By the time that graduation rolls around, just 74% of Native American or Alaska Native children will complete their public high school education, compared with 79% of Black children and 89% of white children. These statistics come from the US Department of Education, 2017-2018.

In adulthood too, racial discrimination affects just about every aspect of a person's life. The 2018 American Community Survey (conducted by the Census Bureau) reveals that people of color are most likely to work in low-paid frontline jobs.

And tragically, though not surprisingly, these are the jobs that often have the greatest exposure to the risks of Covid-19. Black people in the US are almost 1.9 times more likely to die from the disease than their white counterparts. For Hispanic or Latino people, the risk is 2.3 times higher, and for Native Americans it's 2.4 times higher than white people.

Crucially, these statistics can not be treated in isolation. Health is affected by poverty. Poverty affects educational outcomes. Education affects economic security and so it goes on.

Research has shown that Black babies are more likely to be born at a low birth weight because of the physical demands of the low-paid work that many of their mothers are doing. That low-paid work can make it harder to get health insurance too. While just 5% of white people in the US don't have health insurance, that share doubles for Black people (10%) and doubles again for Hispanic people (20%), according to the census. And of course, a lack of access to healthcare puts an individual at greater risk of dying from Covid-19.

To say that the US is not a racist country is to make a statement that exists outside of reality. It is a fantasy to which many people, especially white Americans, would like to cling.

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Tim Scott says 'America is not a racist country' - the data says otherwise | Mona Chalabi

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His choice of words was categorical. When Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, responded to Joe Biden's speech to Congress last week, he said: "America is not a racist country." But racial disparities exist in the US healthcare system, its criminal justice system, its educational system and its economic system.

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Because of the past that America has, I think that it is impossible to say that America is not racist. Even though, as the article states, that most Americans probably aren't racist or consciously racist, that doesn't nullify what goes on in the political system. And just because there was a black president, that doesn't cancel and racial discrimination that goes on in the country.

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Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. He said on Fox News last week that "our systems are not racist." Credit... Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

Last Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina added himself to the long list of Republicans who have denied the existence of systemic racism in this country. Graham said on "Fox News Sunday" that "our systems are not racist. America's not a racist country."

Graham argued that the country can't be racist because both Barack Obama and Kamala Harris had been elected and somehow, their overcoming racial hurdles proves the absence of racial hurdles. His view seems to be that the exceptions somehow negated the rule.

In the rebuttal to President Biden's address to a joint session of Congress, the other senator from South Carolina, Tim Scott, the lone Black Republican in the Senate, parroted Graham and became an apologist for these denials of racism, saying too that the country wasn't racist. He argued that people are "making money and gaining power by pretending we haven't made any progress at all, by doubling down on the divisions we've worked so hard to heal."

Scott's argument seems to leave open the possibility that America may have been a racist country but that it has matured out of it, that it has graduated into egalitarianism.

I personally don't make much of Scott's ability to reason. This is the same man who said in March that "woke supremacy," whatever that is, "is as bad as white supremacy." There is no world in which recent efforts at enlightenment can be equated to enslavement, lynching and mass incarceration. None.

It seems to me that the disingenuousness on the question of racism is largely a question of language. The question turns on another question: "What, to you, is America?" Is America the people who now inhabit the land, divorced from its systems and its history? Or, is the meaning of America inclusive of those systems and history?

When people say that America is a racist country, they don't necessarily mean that all or even most Americans are consciously racist. However, it is important to remember that nearly half the country just voted for a full-on racist in Donald Trump, and they did so by either denying his racism, becoming apologists for it, or applauding it. What do you call a country thus composed?

Historically, however, there is no question that the country was founded by racists and white supremacists, and that much of the early wealth of this country was built on the backs of enslaved Africans, and much of the early expansion came at the expense of the massacre of the land's Indigenous people and broken treaties with them.

Eight of the first 10 presidents personally enslaved Africans. In 1856, the chief justice of the United States wrote in the infamous ruling on the Dred Scott case that Black people "had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

The country went on to fight a Civil War over whether some states could maintain slavery as they wished. Even some of the people arguing for, and fighting for, an end to slavery had expressed their white supremacist beliefs.

Abraham Lincoln said during his famous debates against Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 that among white people and Black ones "there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man."

Some will concede the historical point and insist on the progress point, arguing that was then and this is now, that racism simply doesn't exist now as it did then. I would agree. American racism has evolved and become less blunt, but it has not become less effective. The knife has simply been sharpened. Now systems do the work that once required the overt actions of masses of individual racists.

So, what does it mean for a system to be racist? Does the appellation depend on the system in question being openly, explicitly racist from top to bottom, or simply that there is some degree of measurable bias embedded in those systems? I assert the latter.

America is not the same country it was, but neither is it the country it purports to be. On some level this is a tension between American idealism and American realism, between an aspiration and a current condition.

And the precise way we phrase the statement makes all the difference: America's systems - like its criminal justice, education and medical systems - have a pro-white/anti-Black bias, and an extraordinary portion of America denies or defends those biases.

As Mark Twain once put it: "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. 'Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."

Being imprecise or undecided with our language on this subject contributes to the murkiness - and to the myth that the question of whether America is racist is difficult to answer and therefore the subject of genuine debate among honest intellectuals.

Saying that America is racist is not a radical statement. If that requires a longer explanation or definition, so be it. The fact, in the end, is not altered.
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Last Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina added himself to the long list of Republicans who have denied the existence of systemic racism in this country. Graham said on "Fox News Sunday" that "our systems are not racist. America's not a racist country."