Last night, Andre Showell, a reporter from BET, asked President Obama this question:
As the entire nation tries to climb out of this deep recession, in communities of color, the circumstances are far worse. The black unemployment rate, as you know, is in the double digits. And in New York City, for example, the black unemployment rate for men is near 50 percent.
My question to you tonight is given this unique and desperate circumstance, what specific policies can you point to that will target these communities and what's the timetable for us to see tangible results?
Obama turned to his stock answer on questions like these, which is that his policies help everyone. His response was predictable: Even before he was a candidate, Obama's approach to race was to cast problems that affect the black community in particular or discrete ways as American problems. It's a shrewd way of neutralizing the kind of racial resentment that has been ginned up in the past to oppose a more robust social safety net.
I don't mean to single out Showell, but I don't know what is gained from asking these kinds of questions. At best the question is so vague and general as to solicit a vague and general answer, at worst it looks like the reporter is getting on a pedestal and reminding Obama that he's black. Framed in this manner, the question is unlikely to get a substantive policy answer for the reason I described above. It would be more effective to ask questions about specific policies that would affect the black community -- criminal-justice reform, better regulation of predatory lending and credit cards, or the mortgage cram-down bill that seems destined for defeat because of anemic support from the administration. Asking specific questions about any one of these policies would have yielded a more substantive answer about what the administration is doing to help communities of color than the one we got last night.
-- A. Serwer
