I have many differences with President Obama even though I worked hard to get him elected both times. I listened to his speech today and was moved by it in a way like none of the many other stirring speeches he has given. My impression was that it was hard for him. I can only guess at that not being able to share the existential angst.
I live in a totally racist community where racism does not exist. The Tea Baggers run the place and have not even a shred of racism even though the African American community is next to invisible.
Some years ago my stepdaughter married a waterman (an avid Tea Bagger now) and brought her two children here to Mathews County Virginia. Her oldest was in his last year of high school. He, being white, was harassed by local police many times. His big sin as far as I could tell was hanging with African American friends. (Later he even dated an African American girl)
He got through high school and survived soldiering in Iraq. Ah thank goodness there is NO racism in Mathews. None. Ask them.
If that is not what our president took on today I wonder why he was so cool in his comments. Please read on below. I have more to say about this.
The president measured his comments very well. He tried to communicate wht it is like to be black in this country and the history of that and how one had to see Zimmerman's trial and its outcome in that very special context. I wondered if this might have been far too subtle for the haters, conscious or unconscious.
I was raised in one of the most segregated and ghettoized cites in the world, Chicago. I never had contacts with blacks until high school when I traveled on city public transportation to a technical high school (Tilden) next to the Chicago Stockyards. If it were not for the fact that my dad wanted me to go to IIT for an engineering degree I could have gone to an almost lilly white school (maybe totally...I don't remeber) near our South Side location.
The stereo types I was very systematically taught and the warnings about "those people" were the biggest factor in teaching me that my family and neighbors did not know much about the real world. I made many friends and learned tolerance in a very natural way. After that it was impossible to sympathize with racists ever again. It just did not wash. Further more as the Civil rights struggle caught fire (High School started for me in 1951) I became more militant by the year.
So as a white person I had some capacity, limited as it was, to empathize with the president today. As I read some of the comments the racists are making about the president's so-called "racism" I can only clench my teeth to keep from screaming. This country has come a long way as the president said. What he did not say is the way that very fact as also increased the intensity of hate and resentment in so many white people because they seem not to have the capacity to learn or change. They have their guns for protection. The guns will not protect them from themselves. We have a problem that is worsening as things get better. That is what worries me.