Last Friday, President Obama made an extraordinary, unannounced, unscripted, un-teleprompted speech about the Trayvon Martin murder and race in America.
As Rev. Jesse Jackson said to me after Candidate Obama’s Philadelphia speech in 2008, “It was a teachable moment and he taught.”
Days earlier, the President had said Trayvon Martin could have been the son he never had.
Last Friday, the President said Trayvon Martin could have been a teenage Barack Obama hearing the car doors’ locks click as he crossed the street and women clutch their handbags closer as he walked by.
It was a speech only an African-American could have made. No matter how much white people struggle with the vestiges of a racist history and for most of us, even those of us of mixed heritage who were raised white, if we didn’t grow up as Black people we will never understand the pain, anger, and even fear of every African-American.
Yes, the President said it is getting better and it is. As he said every generation makes it a little better.
But the truth is, racial disparities doggedly persist and racism is so deeply imbedded in the fabric of our culture. We have a very long way to go to dig it out.
Our nation’s deeply imbedded racism is still taught at home and in way too many schools. Our nation’s racism is: a policy issue, an employment issue, an institutional issue, a systemic issue, but perhaps most importantly it is a cultural, political, social, and individual issue.
And when one of our political parties and its adherents continue to pound a racist point of view and connect African-Americans to crime, drugs, sloth, and cheats; we as a nation cannot hope to get beyond the racial chasm.
Finally, until white men begin to give up the privilege and superiority they still maintain over women and People of Color, all the talking, conversing, and dialoging in the world will not extricate the cancer of racism from the Soul of America.
Photo credit: Overpass Light Brigade
www.overpasslightbrigade.org
www.facebook.com/overpasslightbrigade