The sniper attack in Dallas, Texas, leading to the death of five policemen, has widened a racial wound in the United States that was being picked at for the past few years. With his choice of targets and venue, the sniper, Micah Johnson, changed around the message of a Black Lives Matter march on Thursday in the city, one among many across the country called to peacefully protest the shocking killing of two black men in police action earlier in the week in Louisiana and Minnesota. America has been simmering these past few years over the deaths of blacks at the hands of police personnel. These deaths are disproportionately high in number compared to the percentage of African Americans in the population, and many of them — the 2014 encounter in Ferguson, Missouri, for example — are seen to suggest an institutionalised tolerance of racism. Each such incident has threatened to incrementally widen the gulf between the police and black citizens, and President Barack Obama has strived to play a mediating role between police and community leaders to bridge the gulf and to make progress on reforms in policing and the justice delivery system. Johnson, a former U.S. Army reserve, was black, and from all evidence deliberately targeted white police officers. His attack has the potential to widen the racial gulf further, and change the focus of the debate from the need for institutional reform to open blame-calling.
Mr. Obama, who was on a tour of Europe when the police deaths happened, said from Warsaw that he would travel to Dallas as soon as possible. But before that he has wisely drawn a line separating Johnson’s action from his black identity, and the assassin’s agenda from the protesters’ grief. “By definition, if you shoot people who pose no threat to you — strangers — you have a troubled mind,” he said. Indeed, reports suggest that Johnson was battling his own demons ever since he returned from Afghanistan — but the particulars of Johnson, a “demented individual” as Mr. Obama called him, may become incidental to the viciously polarising political wars that are framing the American presidential election. Mr. Obama’s racial and ethnic identity has been constantly attacked by Republicans, and the far right in America has kept an unswerving focus on his outreach to black community leaders as well as his struggle to put checks on the easy availability of guns in the country. The irresponsible politics of some Republicans was in evidence after Dallas, too. How Mr. Obama negotiates this ugly aftermath in the days ahead could come to define his term in the White House.
