The essence of who and what Obama, Holder and our entire black political class are has nothing to do with what we expect of them. Their essence is not their symbolic value or their self-serving and politically expedient words. Their essence is containd in their actions —in what they DO with the very real power in their hands. Like we do with the 3 card monte man, we should pay attention to their hands, not their words. In five years of this administration, those hands have been plenty busy.
One of the great expectations many had for the Obama administration, as for the Clinton administration 16 years earlier, was the repeal of the blatantly racist 100 to 1 disparity between the penalties for crack vs powdered cocaine. The forty years war on drugs, prosecuted almost exclusively in poor and nonwhite communities, has provided one of the main tactical excuses for deploying and maintaining the intake mechanisms of our current prison state.
The Obama administration failed to take an innovative, aggressive, justice-seeking lead, either in putting forth the initial provisions of what eventually became the so-called Fair Sentencing Act, or negotiating its provisions in Congress before its eventual passage. With the administration doing all it could to avoid public identification with the measure, Congressional advocates were only able or willing to narrow the gap between crack and powdered cocaine possession penalties from 100 to 1 down to 18 to 1, even though the president’s party had a whopping majority in the House and a much thinner margin in the Senate. It wasn’t actually a great victory, but the White House was quick to take credit for it, and signed the measure into law in August of 2010.