President Offers a Personal Take on Race in America
By MARK LANDLER and MICHAEL D. SHEAR
After days of angry protests and mounting public pressure, President
Obama spoke to the nation about the Trayvon Martin verdict in highly
personal terms.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER and MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Published: July 19, 2013
For the next 15 minutes, according to a senior aide, Mr. Obama spoke
without interruption, laying out his message of why the not-guilty
ruling had caused such pain among African-Americans, particularly young
black men accustomed to arousing the kind of suspicion that led to the
shooting death of Mr. Martin in a gated Florida neighborhood.
On Friday, reading an unusually personal, handwritten statement, Mr.
Obama summed up his views with a single line: “Trayvon Martin could have
been me 35 years ago.”
That moment punctuated a turbulent week marked by dozens of phone calls
to the White House from black leaders, angry protests that lit up the
Internet and streets from Baltimore to Los Angeles, and anguished
soul-searching by Mr. Obama. Aides say the president closely monitored
the public reaction and talked repeatedly about the case with friends
and family.
Several people who have had conversations with Mr. Obama’s top aides
said a president who has rarely spoken about America’s racial tensions
from the White House was particularly torn about appearing to force the
hand of Eric H. Holder Jr., the attorney general, when it comes to any
investigations in the case.
The White House’s original plan — for Mr. Obama to address the verdict
in brief interviews on Tuesday with four Spanish-language television
networks — was foiled when none of them asked about it.
Instead, he appeared in the White House briefing room with no advance
warning and little of the orchestration that usually accompanies
presidential speeches. Mr. Obama spoke for 18 minutes, offering his own
reflections and implicitly criticizing gun laws and racial profiling
methods — both of which, critics say, played a role in Mr. Martin’s
death.
Mr. Obama continued to avoid criticizing either the conduct of the trial
or the verdict, in which a jury found a neighborhood watch volunteer in
Sanford, Fla., George Zimmerman, not guilty of all charges in the
killing of Mr. Martin in February 2012.
But in the most expansive remarks he has made about race since becoming
president, Mr. Obama offered three examples of the humiliations borne by
young black men in America: being followed while shopping in a
department store, hearing the click of car doors locking as they cross a
street, or watching as women clutch their purses nervously when they
step onto an elevator. The first two experiences, he said, had happened
to him.
“Those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community
interprets what happened one night in Florida,” Mr. Obama said. “And
it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.”
For black leaders who had beseeched the president to speak out —
inundating White House officials with phone calls — his remarks were
greeted with a mixture of relief and satisfaction.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson said Mr. Obama had no choice but to confront
mounting concern among African-Americans about the Martin case and
recent Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action and voting rights.
“At some point, the volcano erupts,” Mr. Jackson said.
From the moment the verdict was announced on Saturday night, black
activists had called on Mr. Obama to express the anger and frustration
of their community. The pressure only increased after he issued a
carefully worded statement urging respect for the jury’s decision.
“We needed this president to use his bully pulpit,” said the Rev. Al
Sharpton, the civil rights activist and host on MSNBC, who urged Mr.
Obama’s advisers to have him speak out.
The parents of Mr. Martin, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, said they
were “deeply honored and moved” by Mr. Obama’s comments. “President
Obama sees himself in Trayvon and identifies with him,” they said in a
statement on Friday. “This is a beautiful tribute to our boy.”
For some black activists, however, Mr. Obama’s remarks were too little,
too late. Tavis Smiley, a radio host who has long been a critic of the
president, said the president has chosen to “lead from behind” on race
issues.
The president’s advisers selected the White House briefing room as the
location for Mr. Obama’s remarks during the Thursday meeting,
calculating that it would be less formal than a full-dress speech — but
would shield him from the questions he would likely face in a longer
interview about why he had waited days after the verdict to speak.
The advisers said Mr. Obama was anxious to confront the issue of race in
a way that he has not since he ran for president in 2008. In a landmark
speech to defuse the political storm over his Chicago pastor, the Rev.
Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Mr. Obama spoke about what he called “the
complexities of race” in America.
As president, Mr. Obama has only periodically returned to the subject.
And on the few occasions that he has, it has often been in reaction to
an event — a black Harvard professor’s arrest, or Mr. Martin’s death. A
month after Mr. Martin was killed, Mr. Obama said, “If I had a son, he’d
look like Trayvon.”
The president’s remarks on Friday were different: more expansive, more
personal and more reflective of the concerns of fellow blacks. His
comments mirror public opinion among African-Americans, according to
polls.
A telephone poll conducted June 13 to July 5 by Gallup found that blacks
were “significantly less likely now than they were 20 years ago to cite
discrimination as the main reason blacks on average have worse jobs,
income, and housing than whites.” It found that 37 percent of blacks
today blame discrimination. In 1993, 44 percent said the same.
Mr. Obama has also shown more willingness to speak in personal terms. At
Morehouse College in Atlanta in May, he told graduates, “Sometimes I
wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to
keep a black man down.”
His remarks Friday were also reminiscent of the tone in his speeches
during his trip to Africa earlier this month. After standing in the cell
that Nelson Mandela occupied for 18 years, Mr. Obama told a South
African audience, “You’ve shown us how a prisoner can become a
president.”
On Friday, Mr. Obama brought that message home, urging Americans to be
honest with themselves about how far this country has come in
confronting its own racial history.
“Am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can?” he asked. “Am I
judging people, as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin
but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an
appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy.”
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