Recently, historian Taylor Branch said<\/a>, \u201cEverybody says partisan gridlock is poisoning America, but nobody asks how much of it, underneath, is driven by race and racial resentment?\u201d Speaking on CBS\u2019 Face the Nation<\/i>, Branch was joined by NAACP president Ben Jealous who said, \u201cYou know, when I was a journalist in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 90s, my old publisher used to say, \u2018The only problem with the New South is that it continues to occupy the same space and time as the Old South.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n People in the know are not convinced that racism is dead in America, nor that the gridlock that Republicans have created in Congress emanates from different degrees of racial preference, if not prejudice.<\/p>\n The general consensus at the time of the 50th<\/sup> anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King\u2019s \u201cI have a dream\u201d speech was that the United States has made significant advancement in race relations over the past half-century, but that much still remained to be done.<\/p>\n However, at least one poll reports that race relations are declining. The NBC-Wall Street Journal reports<\/a>:<\/p>\n Only 52 percent of whites and 38 percent of blacks have a favorable opinion of race relations in the country, according to the poll, which\u00a0has tracked race relations since 1994 and was\u00a0conducted in mid-July by Hart Research Associations and Public Opinion Strategies.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a sharp drop from the beginning of Obama\u2019s first term, when 79 percent of whites and 63 percent of blacks held a favorable view of American race relations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n President Obama weighed in on Branch\u2019s assertion that partisan gridlock is driven in part by race and racial resentment. In an interview with Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff of PBS\u2019s NewsHour<\/a>, the President said, \u201cThe gridlock is connected to longstanding political views that [the government] helping those Americans who lack opportunities is bad for the economy.\u201d He added that he doesn’t take it personally.<\/p>\n “There’s a line that’s drawn between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor. And you know, that, I think, has been fairly explicit in\u00a0politics in this country for some time.”<\/p>\n The President\u2019s answer is not surprising; it would be somewhat unseemly and certainly unproductive for the President to say that he agreed that our partisan gridlock is driven by race. We have at least advanced to a point where it is no longer an effective first strategy for African-Americans to describe themselves as a victims. The President was smart enough to not do that. But the reality remains that race is a big portion of the obstinance that Republicans have about giving due diligence to President Obama\u2019s proposals.<\/p>\n