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,