Obama and the "Race Question"

President Obama has recently fallen into the race trap, when he remarked on the arrest of a black professor for verbally abusing the police after they asked for his ID, that there was a "long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately".

Ooops, from a man who has had a favoured background, including being a fully trained lawyer, this was dumb.

It's an indisputable fact that in the US (like most other countries), crime rates amongst Black and Latino communities is many times higher than amongst other ethnic groups in that country. It's also a fact that larger proportions of the males of both these groups have criminal records, therefore "disproportionately', can just mean 'correctly targeted' ....... A stupid mistake by the President, and one that could haunt him in years to come.

The story is running big time in the US, as it has forced Obama to have to call everyone in 'for a beer' to try and calm things down. The President has his critics, many of them very vocal, such as the strange outbursts from James DManning (ironically a convicted burglar), so to raise the spectre of racial politics coming from the White House (Black house?) is to risk confirming the predictions of his opponents.