How often does a noted pundit admit being wrong? Here's his first paragraph:
Sometimes it’s good to be proved wrong. Last week, I wrote a column doubting that President Obama could speak powerfully and effectively about the racial issues raised by the Trayvon Martin case. Well, the president did just that.
There is more in
Obama's race challenge - and ours, which is why I think you should read it.
He quotes a lot from the President's remarks, which he describes as having
amounted to the most important speech about race our first African American president has delivered in office.
His reluctance to have the president speak was because
I simply feared that whatever he said would be misconstrued — deliberately, by some — in a way that robbed his words of their intended meaning.
but when the President began to talk about himselr
It was disarming to hear the most powerful man in the world speak of powerlessness.
Please keep reading.
After running through a good section of the President's words, including his personal experiences of people reacting to his Blackness, Robinson offers this:
I’m not sure I know an African American man who hasn’t had these experiences. What’s new is the idea that the president of the United States knows what it feels like to be eyed warily, to be presumed guilty of malicious intent. That gets your attention.
Elsewhere in the
Post today former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson criticized the President for not offering specific programs in his remarks. I think Gerson misses the point - had he done so, Obama would have very much undercut the power of his simple and informal presentation, speaking from his inner core, from his own experience of how a black male is treated in so much of our society.
Robinson does not criticize, but does note where the words imply our need to go as a society:
This is the crucial, daunting challenge. Millions of at-risk boys and men need education, mentoring, employment. If this won’t come through “some grand, new federal program,” then how? And when?
Yes, Gerson is correct, there are policies needed. But they can only be framed from what flows from the conversations we have yet to have, those about which the President reminded us. After all, we have still too many in this country whose reaction to Obama's words were to call him the racist, who either do not understand or else even worse willing affirm the disparate and denigrating and demeaning way so many of our African American males are regarded and treated.
Yes, the words we heard will require more. They will require our willingness first to recognize and then to accept the reality of which the President tried to make us aware. Then they will require of us much more, a change of attitude, a change of society.
Which is why Robinson's final paragraph is so much on target:
Putting Friday’s words into action could be Obama’s greatest legacy. I eagerly await his next speech on the unfinished business of race.
Robinson is now convinced that this President is the right person to address this.
We as a nation must address it before it is too late.
Read the column. See how Robinson explores and uses the President's words.
Then all of us together can begin to try to move this nation to a place to which we long ago should already have traveled, beyond the use of race to divide us.
Peace.