Black in Trump's America Our World

In the final week of the Obama presidency, a Louisiana high school

marching band rehearses for the big day. We do not see colour, race,

gender or ethnicity. We see potential. They are one of ten

school bands chosen to play at the inauguration. There has been a lot

of talk of how we need healing and sometimes... You just have to do it.

But as it marks the transition from Obama to Trump, America is having

two very different conversations about race. This is the live but

this is the life we live so it is not a conversation about race it is

just a conversation. And tension over the issues of police killings

and the involvement of white supremacists. Hail victory, hail our

President. And for some, talk of a return to the good old days

signifies nothing good at all. I think that the master has reclaimed

his house. And even though he allowed the slaves to look after the

house while he was on vacation, we are still in the same situation we

have been in. Barack Obama called slavery the original sin of America.

His presidency once held promise of redemption. That has not happened.

Is this country enters the Trump era, the divisions between black and

white America are felt, perhaps, more starkly than they have been in

a generation. If there is anyone out there who

still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible,

tonight is your answer. That was the era of yes, we can.

When black America seemed poised to claim a confident power apparently

long denied. # I'm so reckless when I rocklike von she dressed # I'm so

possess if # My daddy Alabama, my mummy Louisiana... To me it is a

race war. You have black against white, white against black. From the

swamps of Washington to do by you of the South. Beneath the surface of

the post- racial society, fear. Anger. And the deep roots of a

history still unresolved. The final week of the Obama

presidency began with the annual commemoration for a man who gave his

life for the civil rights struggle. America has come a long way since

then. In New Orleans they mark his memory with a show of sartorial

pride. Our self-esteem has grown from us knowing each other. Black

men can see each other in a greater image that has been achieved. In

this respect, the Obamas scandal free tenure at the White House has

had huge symbolic value. So you think about a boy like... How old

are you? You know who the President is? Um, Barack Obama. Do you know

who the president was before him? See? All he has ever known is Obama.

His life, like this, it is normal. It is normal for him to see a black

man at the head of the country. A symbol is a powerful thing. The very

fact of his unlikely presidency has expanded the concept of what is

possible for millions of Americans, black and white. But when it comes

to cold hard statistics, the tree sears that if you are black in

America the odds are still stacked against you. In 2013, the median net

worth of a white American household was over $140,000. The black

households, that figure was $11,000. That is 13 times less. Under Obama

the wealth gap has widened. Travel up the Mississippi from New Orleans

and you come to Baton Rouge, one of the most divided cities in the

United States. For some children of inner-city high schools, the

education they got on the streets can see more important than what is

on offer in the classroom. You can go out there tomorrow, have your

pistol, shoot somebody and you end up in prison for the rest of your

life. Slim reed is a former gang leader turned activist whose mission

now is to stop young black men following his footsteps. It is 2017

and you are still walking around looking and acting exactly like

slaves. And the world is looking at you as animals. Why? Because you

live that lifestyle. Barack Obama often told black Americans they had

to take responsibility for the problems in their own community.

Silky agrees, up to a point. I am trying to bring a message to black

people that have black lives do not matter to black people than it

should not matter to anybody else. That is my message. Like lives have

to matter to black people first before they matter to the rest of

the world. Black lives matter focus on police killing but I need to look

at what we are doing to ourselves and try to resurrect as from the

spiritual depth we are really for I can worry about the two or 300

killings taking place by law enforcement. We are dying by the

thousands and Aaron hands so I am focusing on that and then I stay on

that. We poverty. I have grown up in poverty and I became a gang leader

because I was starving. If I am in this house and do not have anything

to eat I would roll before I style. So when I am finding out that I do

not have the necessities of life, I will go out and get those

necessities, regardless of what the world says. I need to survive, just

like anybody else. There are also inequalities that are systemic and

ingrained. If you were black you are more likely to be arrested, get a

longer jail sentence and more likely to be shot dead by police. Obama

only engaged with this issue late in his presidency and then with limited

results. Like quarterbacks on the team of white supremacy does not

help us. The judge have to abide by the law. As far as black folks on

the whole, politically, when you do the research and you look at the

numbers then if you and I wanted to get married, we could get married.

The gays accomplished something, you see what I am saying? I can not

always just pressure it because at the end of the day we did not ask

for anything. We did not want to put that burden on the black man in the

White House. We did not want to give him that burden. If you do not ask

for anything you get nothing so you cannot be disappointment --

disappointed. So you say that the black community gave Barack Obama a

free pass? Exactly. He is one of us. It is over 60 years since the

Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public education was

unconstitutional. Ten years later the Civil Rights act outlawed

discrimination based on race. But today in cities across America it is

all too obvious that they factored segregation is still very much in

effect. -- de facto segregation. If you look at a map of bat on Rouge

you will see that this route here, Florida Street, is a stark dividing

line. Everything to the north is overwhelmingly black, everything to

the south is mostly white. Now I spent time in divided cities. Places

like Baghdad in Beirut, places where they have recently had a war. There

has not been a war here since the 1860s when the North is thought the

credit that is the over the issue of slavery. But last summer it felt

like war was not far away. The killing of a black man, the latest

in a string of fatal police shootings caught on camera. They are

shooting right now and there is an officer down. Two days later at a

black lives matter protest a man opened fire on police killing five.

Not long after that, more officers were shot dead in Baton Rouge. This

is a race war, to me. You have black against white, one against black.

There would not be so many black people against white people, I

think, if was not so the police brutality. That was pushing that

situation with some of the people. Nefertiti is part of a growing

movement of radical black activists. During the black lives matter

protests she says she too found herself on the receiving end of some

heavy-handed treatment from the police. Going on a protest down town

to City Hall and police officers approached me, they'd dislocated my

shoulder and fractured my finger. More recently and I am recovering

from that, but all was basically because I am part of a new Black

Panther party and they assumed that the chapter out there protesting at

the time, that I was a part of that chapter, but I was not. It is

perhaps ironic that relations between the police and the black

community reached their lowest point in a generation during the final

years of the Obama presidency. The killings by police and a lack of

prosecutions of officers involved has entrenched a sense here of a

force that does not serve and protect one that operate with

impunity. Everybody is an age, OK? We are waiting on a decision from

the Department of Justice. People want justice and they want

transparency. So that is the main thing that folks want. Transparency

and justice. Recently we have had a shooting with ours and sterling

about two blocks down the street. We had police killings on the highway

and we had a flood. So our community is broken. We are trying to get back

together. The Baton Rouge police department is

acutely aware of the need to rebuild trust. To that end, Sergeant Riley

Harbour is dispatched of a weekend to do a spot of gardening at an

inner City School just round the corner from where he grew up. This

is what passes for community outreach. The citizens here have a

right to be upset with all the different things that have happened,

both from the civilian side and from law enforcement. We've had losses on

both, tragic all the way round, but we still have to come together

because we've still got to live. Baton Rouge is braced for more

trouble as it awaits the outcome of a federal investigation into the

shooting of Alton Sterling. Nefertiti says the tensions between

the black community and the police have brought an old enemy out into

the open. Last year, about seven months ago, the Klansmen, the Ku

Klux Klan Aryan nation put flyers out recruiting members and this was

particularly right after all than sterling was killed, they had it on

the news that they were putting notes on people's doors, going

through the neighbourhood. Nefertiti and Silky Slim rang the number on a

leaflet, it went through to a pre-recorded message which had

clearly been updated in the past few days.

Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail our victory!

Not long after the election, a group of white nationalists gathered to

discuss the new political landscape. The final speaker was Richard

Spencer who coined the term Albright, a movement associated with

Donald Trump's former campaign CEO Steve Bannon, who wasn't present but

who is now one of the most powerful men in the White House. America was

until this past generation a white country designed for ourselves and

our posterity. This then is the context in which

Donald Trump has taken office. America's new president has

disavowed support from over racists but still in Baton Rouge the

tranquil surroundings of university leg near the college campus belies a

sense of unease. Tina Lange and meet Lewis Morris are here for a photo

shoot. They're expecting their first child in March. They want to

remember this special time. But they fear their unborn daughter's future

may not necessarily be brighter than their own. We don't know how it will

be for African-Americans now to four years down the line, six years down

the line. Even when Obama was in office you seen officers were

killing young black males and really weren't getting penalised for it.

Now that it's Trump, you never know. It'll be hard for us to get those

opportunities and have that freedom to get the best education and to get

the best jobs, you know what I'm saying? Just because of our race and

the perspective that others have on us. That's what I'm afraid of for my

child. Here in the south the shadow of the

plantations, the memory of Jim Crow, of America's original sin still loom

large. It takes more than eight years to dismantle a social system

that's been in place before the country was even established, before

the country talked about creating some people equal and allowing some

to have the pursuit of life and liberty and happiness, they had

individuals that were even considered human, they were treated

as chattel. The situation you're talking about is normative for

America so to see something other than that is to see something

radically different from actually what America is and how it came into

being, which is deeply, deeply antiblack. Barack Obama's legacy is

a subject of fierce disagreement but radically different is not an

assessment often applied to his record in office. For some the

election of Donald Trump looks less like a sudden change of direction

than a resumption of the status quo. I look at it like Master has

reclaimed his house, I'm at Master's place, I know my place, I'm in the

field, I don't try to get up to the house, know what I'm saying? You're

talking about slavery here. Of course. That's the dynamic you're

talking about. It's the oppression. You're saying it never really went

away? Know, even though master allows the slaves to look after the

house when he was on vacation we are still in the same fight that we've

been in for the last 245 years. In all seriousness, there is a huge

legacy of slavery but you can't say things haven't changed since the

1860s, since the nineteen sixties? Definitely. There's no forced free

labour here with the slaves, right? And what America has been successful

in doing is creating these slums and ghettos, putting you in these areas

and then making the police still oversee you like we're still on the

Plantation. So what goes on in the white community don't happen in the

black community, so when the police come here they say get up against

the car, I've got rights, shut the hell up, it's a different treatment.

It's still like the overseers overseeing the plantation, we just

don't have to go to work. Next up, from Louisiana, it's the

high school marching band. Inauguration. After the speech in

the oath of office there's a moment in the spotlight for the high school

marching band Louisiana. Then the parade moves on. And so America

begins a new chapter in its long book on race, weaving in the history

of slavery, on segregation with that of Martin Luther King and of the

Obama era. From my experience, I think the

American dream is still alive for anyone who wants to reach for it.

There are African-Americans in all areas of life that are quite, quite

successful. I think that the road may be a little narrower and a

little more Stoney at times, but I think the American dream is still

achievable for everyone if you work hard and live right and play by the

rolls then success happens. Jailer, 11 years old, has known no other

president but Obama. For her and her friend, President Trump was at first

a frightening prospect. We was all thinking about, like, what if he

sends us back to Africa? That was your first thought, that you might

not be allowed to be an American any more? Yes. That sounds like a scary

thought? Yeah. At first we were all, like, we went through withdrawal and

we were saying it's going to happen, but we talked about it one day at

school and we was, like, it can happen unless everybody says yes to

it. Jaylen is ambitious. After Harvard Law School she wants to

become America's first black female present, but... I think he is going

to try and make everything harder for blacks to get in, everything

harder for Hispanics to get in, everything harder for anybody of

colour to try to do all be something. Jaylen has one of those

teachers you remember for the rest of your life, someone who helps you

make sense of a bewildered ring world. I think that people were sick

of talking about race. White people or black people or everyone? I would

say from my experience mostly white people. It's overwhelming, I can

understand that from the perspective where you've never had to deal with

it, you don't understand why we keep bringing it up over and over again.

And I think that especially with the heightened sense of awareness of

police shootings and police brutality and the injustices being

so blatantly put in your face because of social media, white

people started to have a backlash and they started to think that no

one is representing me, everyone is talking about black people and not

talking about me, so how can I make it somewhat about me?

And so the age of Donald Trump began And so the age of Donald Trump began

as all presidencies usually do with a promise of concealer retreat.

To rebuild our country and restore its promise for all of our people.

But Donald Trump's opponents fear quite the opposite. There are those

who fear that the new president is a man with a vindictive streak who may

use the power of his office to lash out at those who opposed him. I'd

like to punch him in the face, I'll tell you. Many liberals...

Especially white liberals see Trump as an extra ten shall threat. To the

founding principles of America. -- existential threat to the founding

principles of America. But from the black perspective things look a lift

little different. It doesn't scare me, I don't have an issue with Trump

or whatever he does because everyone gets in there and does the same

things. When black America contemplates the

prospect of a hostile perhaps even oppressive state it shrugs and asks,

what else is new? Well, while some of us

were shivering on Thursday, for others, for example

across the North of Scotland,