President Obama’s ‘very rare gift’
At President Obama’s first correspondents’ dinner in the spring of 2008, when he still walked on water and was being compared more to Abraham Lincoln than Jimmy Carter, the comedienne Wanda Sykes quipped. “We love having a half black President in the White House. But if you screw up, Mr President, you’re gonna be half white.”
Everyone including Barack Obama roared with laughter, perhaps forgetting for a moment that negotiating the biracial path of being -literally- African American produced the most perilous moments of the president’s election campaign. The whirlwind of negative publicity surrounding Obama’s firebrand pastor Jeremiah Wright almost sunk his election bid. It made him seem too black for many whites.
The language of Wright made white voters feel uncomfortable and Obama ended a friendship to save a presidency. It was the most awkward moment of his campaign. His deft handling of it, in which he honestly addressed the issues plaguing the black community without being disloyal to his roots, proved that Obama had a very rare gift: he could inspire black America without threatening white America.
His words healed the rift in a way which none of the civil rights veterans had managed to. Many of them like Rev Jesse Jackson disliked him for it. Ever since his inauguration Obama has spent much more time sounding half white than half black. He has stayed largely clear of racial issues, in part because he chose to and because events have allowed him to. The death of Trayvon Martin has changed that. It has outraged black America and touched white America.
It is a moment of hurt that cries out for some well chosen words that heal the rift and don’t add fuel to the flames of resentment. By saying today that “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”, Obama, who is frequently accused of being too aloof and cool sounded a personal and compassionate note while calling for a full investigation of the facts and asking America to search its soul.
The response has allowed Obama to rise above the pettiness of the campaign, sound “presidential” and deflect attention from the trench war in the Supreme Court about his healthcare reform program. And yet this story is about much more than that. What I discovered talking to the demonstrators in Sanford Florida at the demonstration last night is that they feel real raw anger about a culture of inequality and injustice that is underpinned by the statistics from incarceration, to education to wealth.
As Obama has pointed out in the past, much of the blame starts at home in black households, where 70 per cent of kids are brought up by their single mothers, where more young men end up in jail than at university. But there is nothing ambiguous about the case of Trayvon Martin and the police’s indifference until yesterday has been shocking.
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