"He Spoke Plain Truth"

President Obama's impromptu remarks yesterday on the Trayvon Martin case: 


 "But I did want to just talk a little bit about context and how people have responded to it and how people are feeling. You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African- American community at least, there's a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it's important to recognize that the African- American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that -- that doesn't go away. There are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. And there are very few African-American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often. And you know, I don't want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it's inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.The African-American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws, everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case. "



After this heartbreakingly honest impromptu speech, the flying monkeys were let loose from the rightwing blogsphere, screeching, honking, and wailing that President Obama is Divisive! Racist! Narcissistic! And other words not fit to print.

But what President Obama spoke is the plain truth.  And damn those who can't handle the truth.  He spoke with sincerity and with a depth of feeling because he has had the awful experience of being a black youth and man in America.  He has had the experience of walking while being black, and he's seen what can happen when a teen, minding his own business, acting without malice, can be profiled, and lose his life.

For those who will come here and go off on how bad the black on black and black on white crime is here in America, save your fingers.  It's not the president's job to control crime in America's cities and towns, it's the job of law enforcement and the mayors of those cities and town.  

The president spoke, to me anyway, of injustices people suffer because of the color of their skin; and to those who will say things are better than they were during Jim Crow when African-Americans were routinely beaten, tortured, and murdered in the south, with impunity, I say that there is still that element in our American consciousness that a black man or woman is not fully "one of us." 

No other president in the history of this country has had to deal with the disgracefully racist birther issue, and no other president in the history of this country looked like President Obama.  

Also, this president urges young men and women--and that means African-American youth--to stay in school, study hard, be responsible young people.  I've read speeches where he emphasizes the importance of doing the right thing and avoiding the wrong.  Some African-American advocacy groups actually FAULT President Obama because he always targets, in particular, the black community to BE responsible.  But the folks who went coo-coo bananas over President Obama's speech don't know that, and they don't care to know this fact, because it would create cognitive dissonance in their determination to demonize this man.

I applaud President Obama for being honest with the American people and for saying what needed to be said and in the way he said it:  from his heart.

As always, the great Charlie Pierce expresses it perfectly:

"But this swill is going to get some traction in more respectable circles because, in making those remarks, and in sounding for one of the very few times like what once was called a Race Man, the president broke what a lot of people assumed was a covenant he'd made with them when they permitted him to be president. 

That covenant was fashioned for him during his speech to the Democratic convention in Boston, wherein he told a divided country everything it really wanted to hear about itself. He was going to be the living demonstration of the progress the nation had made. His job, in addition to being president, was going to be as a redemptive figure. That was the deal by which the country would allow him to be its president. 

 I always thought that speech was overrated. I thought it was dreamy utopian nonsense that did not take into account the well-financed virulence that would be brought to bear on him, and on his policies, and on his entire public career. (I think the fact that he bought it has a lot to do with how stuck in the mud his administration has been, and is, on several important issues.) 

Remember, in his big speech on race during the campaign, he made it a point to mention how his grandmother would tense up when she saw black men on the street. That was the Barack Obama of the 2004 speech. That was the Barack Obama of the redemptive covenant. That was how the country would allow him to speak on race, if he wanted to be its president. 

Today, there was none of that. He didn't even obliquely try to justify sidewalk profiling of the kind that set off the chain of circumstances by which Trayvon Martin was made dead. 

He spoke plain truth, and the reason you know it is so many smart people already are saying how politically unwise it was that he spoke at all. He broke the covenant, once and for all, which ought not to matter, because it was counterfeit all along."


Also, on another note, Dan Riehl is an exquisitely clueless, moronic wingnut not fit to own a box of crayons, let alone an internet platform for spreading his stupidity:

"White victimhood has become the cause du jour for many on the political right and nowhere was it more evident than in a tweet from influential conservative blogger Dan Riehl who tweeted “If you ever had any doubts, Obama is the first Racist in Chief.”

In the delusional white mind of Mr. Riehl no president in our history has ever been as racist as Mr. Obama whose apparent verbal hate crime is that he had the temerity to point out that 35 years ago he was a black teenager. Wow, has any President ever done anything so racist in the history of our nation?

Well, actually yes. Worse even. Much worse.

 Perhaps Mr. Riehl maybe has not heard of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, James Polk or Zachary Taylor. All eight of these men owned black slaves while they were President.

 However, in Riehl’s world maybe there is nothing racist about owning people as chattel property based on the color of their skin. Maybe Mr. Riehl is also oblivious to presidents Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren forcibly removing 15,000 American Indians from their homes in the Trail of Tears.

In addition, Dan Riehl is no doubt unaware that Woodrow Wilson screened the pro Ku Klux Klan movie “Birth of the Nation” at the White House and gave it enthusiastic reviews. Two thumbs up from the then Racist in Chief. Maybe Dan also forgot that FDR signed an executive order to put Japanese Americans in internment camps. I suppose Mr. Riehl has been so isolated from access to historical documents that he also never heard Richard Nixon on tape spewing racist venom. 

 And let us not leave out Dan Riehl’s presidential hero, Ronald Reagan who stereotyped black “welfare queens” to rally aggrieved racist white voters to embrace his campaign. Prior to becoming President, Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, calling them “humiliating” to the South. 

According to Lisa Mcgirr, in the book Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, when Reagan campaigned for governor of California in 1966 he vowed to eliminate the state’s Fair Housing Act proclaiming that “if an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has a right to do so.”