In an interview with BET News that aired on Monday night, President Barack Obama defended his record to African Americans and rejected the notion that blacks were not behind him.
“There have been a handful of African American leaders who have been critical,” Obama said, the Washington Post reports. “They were critical when I was running for president. There’s always going to be someone who is critical of the president of the United States. That’s my job.”
A new Washington Post-ABC news poll revealed that 58 percent of African Americans have “strongly favorable” views toward Obama, down from 83 percent five months ago.
With unemployment among the African American community hovering a high 16.7 percent compared with a national jobless rate of 9.1 percent, Obama declined to say in the interview, government programs would be designed specifically targeting the black community.
“That’s not how America works. America works when all of us are pulling together and everybody is focused on making sure that every single person has opportunity,” Obama said. “And so when we put forward a program like, for example, the health-care bill, our focus is people who don’t have health care. Now it turns out that the majority of folks who don’t have health care are also working families, and are disproportionately African American and Latino, but that doesn’t mean that it’s only for them.”
