Second to that is the leadership and elite of the country, that accepts this victimhood narrative out of misinformation, political correctness, and political expedience. There's no better way to get 90% of a population to vote for you than to convince them that the other side is the mortal enemy that hates them for the color of their skin and wants to keep them down.
Oh, that same president was strongly anti-abortion except in extreme circumstances. His example of such a case when abortion was warranted? Mixed-race babies.
He also reset the fundamental strategy one of your political parties for the last few decades to appealing to racists with "the southern strategy". Which Trump, with his flirting with white supremacist groups continues to this day.
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-r...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1058326...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
Why shouldn't a victim acknowledge the reality of being targeted? What other groups do you expect to follow this bizarre recommendation?
Thus is a nice historical overview that ties a lot of this stuff together:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/is-ameri...
History sucks. It landed my grandparents in America, having fled Cuba, with the clothes on their backs. They had built lives for themselves and had it all pulled from under them. Somehow, the Cuban-American community has done phenomenally well for itself. Definitely not by blaming the past for their lot and demanding nebulous reparations.
It's also not the root of the Cuban-American community's success. The earliest waves of migrants were almost all from the middle and upper class. They did correspondingly well in their new home. Wealth is not really a number in your bank account, it's the knowledge and virtues that guide of the process of producing value.
If you took everyone in America's money away and started over, the resulting classes would look a lot like today's. Culture is almost everything.
The police -- and I do believe that the vast majority are well intentioned -- too often think that aggressive tactics are the answer, because the way to reduce crime must be to catch more criminals, right? So, when a police officer is assigned to a rough area with lots of crime, he tends to treat the citizens like criminals instead of victims. Maybe not everyone is treated this way -- but young, poor, black men certainly are in many cases, especially when they're involved in petty criminal activity like selling bootleg CDs that leads to tense interactions with police.
It's a really tough problem, and I don't have a good idea about what could be done to solve it -- but local governments are failing these communities, and we should demand something better from our leadership.