I love ya brother, but your Thursday ed op piece titled 'Obama is the wrong person to lead discussion about race', is as wrong as you could ever be.
What was beautiful about what happened Friday is that the President didn’t have say anything at all. He wasn’t campaigning for anything, nor does he need to. He has already given the obligatory remarks about the verdict of the George Zimmerman trial – statements that by conventional wisdom, is rather expected of a typical President in these kinds of situations.
But, as I’m sure you know by now, Mr. Obama isn’t your typical President.
If you weren’t sure or convinced of that before, after this day, it should be clearer.
Many Progressives have had collective heartburn over this Democratic President. They have been frustrated over his policy decisions and driven to the point of insanity by his unrelenting style of always having to seek compromises with his enemies. There were high hopes that Obama would reverse decades of policies that have had the effect of further elevating the uber-rich, the greedy and the military-intelligence-main-stream-media-corporate industrial complex at the expense of the rest of the 99% of us who have seen our quality of life and our freedoms drift away.
Some have argued that Mr. Obama has continued those policies and in some cases, enhanced them.
This diary is not intended to debate those policies. But first a station break.
Fore note: Let me say that this version of my diary is not the original one. I was typing it in DK and in the process of using another open browser to Google stuff, I inadvertently hit a button that caused me to lose what I wrote because I had not yet saved the draft.
Needless to say, I was very highly upset about this. I’m not the best of writers by any stretch of the imagination, but even for me, the flow of words and thoughts were the best I’ve ever done so far.
All gone. Poof. So if this version doesn’t seem to flow, it is because of that reason and I apologize in advance.
There has always been, well, this elephant in the room. It’s been a challenge to discuss such things here on Daily Kos.
Well, decidedly difficult. That is because the very topic is viewed as inconsequential or it’s viewed as being used as an inadequate excuse as to why the President doesn’t do the things that many think he should do. After all, he is the President and can do what he wants to do.
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as all of that and that is partially why I thought that you, Mr. Robinson missed the mark with your piece.
Badly.
More over the swig.
Eugene (I can call you that, right?), I wish to comment on these remarks specifically:
The record indicates that honest talk from Obama about race is seen by many people as threatening. A classic example came just months into his first term, when a white police officer in Cambridge, Mass., had an unpleasant encounter with Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who is black, and ended up arresting the famous scholar on his own front porch.
Speaking off the cuff at a news conference, Obama said the officer had “acted stupidly.” The remark seemed innocuous to me, a mere statement of fact. It might have been the departure point for a nuanced examination of what happens when race intersects class. Instead, Obama unintentionally provoked such outrage and counter-outrage that he invited the two men to the White House for a photo-op “beer summit” as a way of chilling everyone out.
Similarly, Obama’s factual statement that “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon” drew shrieks of accusation that the president was unfairly taking sides in a criminal case. His statement following Saturday’s verdict was anodyne and forgettable. Perhaps that’s for the best.
The designation “first black (fill in the blank)” always brings with it unfair burdens, and one of Obama’s — he bears many — is that almost anything he says about race will be seen by some as favoring the interests of black Americans over white Americans.
At this point in his presidency, Obama could ignore this absurd reality and say whatever he wants. He must be sorely tempted. But the unfortunate fact is that if his aim is to promote dialogue about race, speaking his mind is demonstrably counterproductive.
Now Eugene, you are a thoughtful kind of guy, but I think you might be wishing that you could hit the backspace key on your computer for this piece. I think you certainly would have if you had only waited 24 hours.
I was busy working when word was coming through that Obama was making remarks about the case and race in general.
I was like…. blah, so now he wants to say something. Given the comments he made last week, I’d come not to expect much more.
Little did I know that Obama was having his 'trumpet of conscience' moment.
I’ve watched enough of the speech now to realize just how defining it was and will be for his presidency.
It’s not that your commentary is invalid, but it’s incomplete because what you fail to consider is that the President’s past ventures into the discussion of race was based on him being surrounded by advisors who cocoon him in the Washington beltway lexicon, thus his remarks about the subject would often come off as a twitter bite that was without the proper depth and context required for such a complex and emotionally charged subject.
The problem is not that the President can’t speak off the cuff without coming off as detached and aloof at times either (although that is exactly what has been happening as President). Mr. Obama is one of the best pols out here today who can speak extemporaneously.
No, the problem is that he has allowed his Presidency to restrain the true person that he is and the person that he showed when he ran for President in the first place.
Now that I have the full context of what happened today, all in all I found it as thing of beauty, because Mr. Obama elected to use the power of his presidency – knowing all of the obvious risks and typical reactions from his enemies to raise the collective conscience of the American people and challenge all of us to finally have a serious discussion about race.
He didn’t give the media an advance notice, so no media outfit – so tuned to telling us what they want us to believe he said, could spin it. Without mentioning the media, Mr. Obama drove a point home to them. By the time he finished, the White House press corp were bungling all over themselves with bewilderment and amazement. Even NBC’s David Gregory managed to sound human that day.
No Eugene, the President wasn’t speaking for African Americans. He was speaking about how African Americans, specifically black men feel, for the President – like you Eugene, is uniquely qualified in doing so. The President expressed our pain. The same pain that you have felt. The pain that your son has felt and will feel as his grows in this society (hopefully far less than you).
The President wasn’t favoring African Americans because he spoke up.
That’s because Mr. Robinson, the President IS an African American. It is because the President has had the same experiences as you as late as just before he became a United States Senator (and I would argue as President, given the birther movement and Congressional inaction on everything, but that's for another time). If he walked out in the streets today without the Secret Security with a hoodie on and no one recognized him, he would look like Trayvon Martin.
This was a teachable moment. This was a personal moment. This was a reflection of conscious that no other President, no matter how sincere, could have done any better.
He had 2 note cards but spoke without a break for 17 minutes about his respect for and thoughts to a set of parents who had lost a beloved son, for not only could he have been Trayvon Martin’s parent, he could have been a Trayvon Martin. He has been followed shopping while black. He had been viewed as suspicious walking while black. He acknowledged the black on black crime in urban cities and high incarceration rates of African American men and turned this into a teaching moment by explaining something from the chair of the Presidency that all black people already knew:
”Now, this isn't to say that the African American community is naïve about the fact that African American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system; that they’re disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence. It’s not to make excuses for that fact -- although black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context. They understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.
…And so the fact that sometimes that’s unacknowledged adds to the frustration. And the fact that a lot of African American boys are painted with a broad brush and the excuse is given, well, there are these statistics out there that show that African American boys are more violent -- using that as an excuse to then see sons treated differently causes pain.”
This is why Mr. Robinson, what President Obama says about race trumps what you or I could ever say about it: because he IS the President and believe it or not, the Office still has its EF Hutton moments. Or in this case, its 'American President' ones.
And lastly Mr. Robinson, realizing that he could not bring the country so down on this weary subject, he builds us up back up by saying that our children have the capacity to make this country a better union because they are BETTER than us. They are more open, they don’t have the burden of baggage or the anchor of guilt and they have more ways to communicate that resonates far better across all races than you or I ever had.
I don’t hold it against you Eugene for you are entitled to make a mistake every once in a while.
But don’t make a habit out of it!
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. III
Update: Wow. I have never made the Community Spotlight before. I am humbled and I thank you. Also thanks for the Rec list shoutout.
I wanted to write more, but after editing this thing 25 times last night, I was pooped and I went to bed. I wanted to remark on Dr. King's quote that I added to this diary above from his 1968 book of lectures entitled Trumpet of Conscience. Of all of the quotes from Dr. King, this one resonates with me the most because in it embodies the simple solution for improving race relations and strengthening our dialogue on race, as well as many other issues we have difficulty discussing.
We cannot be silent because silence kills. It certainly did during the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights era. It still does in urban communities where gang violence has a hold of communities.
We cannot be silent, because when we are silent, we allow the extremists to control the discussion. We allow the extremists to manipulate the discussion. We allow the extremists to continue to be grossly inappropriate to the point that we allow ourselves to be numb to their extremism. It's time for those days to be over, because this is our country too and these folk don't speak for the rest of us. They don't represent us in Congress. They don't speak for us on talk radio.
You cannot be silent any longer. You cannot tolerate coded language any longer. It is unacceptable and you have to willing to push back on that.
That means YOU. All of YOU.
This is the only way to build the bonds of trust and provide a stronger, more cohesive and diverse political foundation to finally take on all of the political issues of climate change, NSA overreach, threats to Social Security and Medicare, the Keystone pipeline, getting our troops out of Afghanistan faster, closing Guantanamo bay -- of the things that Progressives view as vitally important matters.
But you can't build a bridge with key girders missing. We can't build a better union until we deal with the obvious and then build on clean, fertile soil.