President Obama: The More Effective Evil?

For some time now, Black Agenda Report has been calling the Obama administration not the lesser of two but the more effective evil, able to enact measures that white Democrats or Republicans could not without massive public opposition.

Is President Obama the black face of white supremacy?
So what has the impact of Barack Obama's presidency--America's first black presidency--been on the African American community, who has always possessed an "instinctive distrust of power" as Glen Ford says, and humanity at large?  What happens when that power has a black face? Is the Obama administration simply the continuation of the Bush administration?  Is President Obama the white establishment's perfect weapon to pacify the black community, normally the most progressive constituency?  Is Obama's "Race to the Top" Bush's "No Child Left Behind" on steroids?What impact has Obama's presidency had on the legacy of African American's resisting and opposing the United States' imperial wars?  What impact have Barack Obama's policies had on the African continent?  Was the election of Barack Obama the death of black politics?  All of these questions and more are answered in the documentary below.

"The more we have black people reaching the higher ranks of the presidency, the business world, politics, entertainment, even...it  makes it appear to people on the outside looking in that we're co-signing onto this or that we actually are doing much better than we are.  You wouldn't know that there are 2.3 million people in prison--we make up almost half of them--that we're being murdered in the streets...and you can just go through the list of all the social problems that exist.  But it makes it look as though we're doing much better than we are even though things are just as bad, if not worse since Martin Luther King died.  It makes it look as if we're co-signing onto these things being done."--  Ben Woods, Students Against Mass Incarceration

Millions of Americans suffered a loss of wealth during the recession and the sluggish "recovery" that followed. But the last half-decade has proved far worse for black and Hispanic families than for white families, starkly widening the already large gulf in wealth between non-Hispanic white Americans and most minority groups, according to a new study from the Urban Institute. “It was already dismal,” Darrick Hamilton, a professor at the New School in New York, said of the wealth gap between black and white households. “It got even worse.”