President Barack Obama on Friday made a rare dissertation on race and class in America, telling a New York town hall the struggle in helping the poor is a political one.
Responding to an African-American studies professor at Binghamton University who asked him about the status of education and civil rights in the United States, Obama replied that some Americans become skittish about helping the poor because of anxiety about their own status. The situation, he said, is better than it has been in the past and will inevitably improve, but needs work.
“The biggest challenge we have is not that we don’t know what policies work, it’s getting our politics right,” Obama said. “Because part of what’s happened over the last several decades is, because times have been tough, because wages and incomes for everybody have not been going up, everybody is pretty anxious about what is happening in their life and what might happen for their kids, so they get worried that if we’re helping people in poverty, that must be hurting me somehow, that’s taking something away from me.”
Obama continued: “There’s a tendency to suggest somehow that government is taking something from you and giving it to somebody else and that your problems will be solved if we just ignore them, or don’t help them,” Obama said. “And that I think is something that we have to constantly struggle against, whether we’re black or white or whatever color we are.”
Obama is to appear next week at the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's March on Washington.
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