Why should we trust you? Clinton’s big problem with young black Americans

by External Media Posts · 10/22/2016

In the 1990s, Democrats helped shift the national conversation away from systemic racism. If the country’s first black president could not disrupt the racial status quo, what can we expect Hillary Clinton to accomplish?

You always know an election is near in the US when Democrats and Republicans start to discuss the plight of black Americans.

Most of the time, little is said about the high levels of poverty in black communities. Ditto with unemployment. Before the eruption of the Black Lives Matter movement, almost nothing was ever said about police violence. Until recently these issues were simply facts of life, so omnipresent that racial inequality passes for the norm for both Republicans and Democrats.

Two years ago, Republican leader Paul Ryan described the higher rates of black unemployment as attributable to a “tailspin of culture”. On the other side of the political spectrum, both Barack Obama and Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, have respectively blamed an absence of “role models” and “parenting” for violence in black neighborhoods. In effect, both parties have long been saying that what is needed is personal transformation – not the reform of ways that wealth and resources are distributed in our country.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor October 21, 2016

Read the full article here The Guardian