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“Touching On White Privilege”: President Obama’s Moment Of Introspection Evokes A Conservative Tsunami Of Bile

Today, Barack Obama did something he has only done a few times in the years he has been on the national stage: He talked about race. In an extemporaneous statement to White House reporters, Obama discussed the reaction to the trial of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin. He spent the first third of his remarks talking about where African Americans were coming from, in an implicit plea for empathy from white Americans. He didn’t accuse anyone of ill will, but he did in effect say, “Here’s how black people are feeling and why,” in an attempt to explain the sources of people’s disappointment and pain. After that, he talked about what government might do to make these kinds of tragedies less likely—training for police officers, and perhaps a rethinking of “stand your ground” laws if they make conflicts more likely. He ended on a hopeful note, saying, “as difficult and challenging as this whole episode has been for a lot of people, I don’t want us to lose sight that things are getting better. Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race.”

We’d challenge conservatives to pick out a single sentence in Obama’s statement that they could say was unfair to white people, or encouraged anything other than greater mutual understanding. But all too predictably, some conservatives showed once again that empathy is something they are either utterly incapable of or simply find politically inconvenient. There is no anti-Obama rage like the rage he provokes on the right when he brings up race. It doesn’t matter what he says. No matter how humane, how encompassing, how careful—should Obama ever so gently suggest that race is something with which we as a country still struggle, a tsunami of bile is inevitably directed his way. If you weren’t on Facebook or Twitter to see it today, count yourself lucky that your faith in your fellow Americans wasn’t brought down a notch or two by all the ugliness. If you had read that reaction without actually seeing what Obama said, you would have thought he marched into the press room in fatigues and a beret, shouting “Black power! Black power!” and talking about hunting down whitey.

We suspect that the part of his talk that irked conservatives the most was this: “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 reason that this particular plea for empathy and understanding can generate such an angry reaction is that it touches on white privilege. It’s easy to say, “Well I’m no racist,” but it’s harder to acknowledge that if you don’t get followed when you walk into a store, if you don’t have people lock their doors when you walk by, if you don’t see women clutch their purses when you enter an elevator, if you aren’t subjected to frequent “stop and frisks” by the police because they say you made a “furtive movement,” and if you don’t worry every time your son goes out at night that the wrong person will consider him a criminal and initiate a series of events that leads to his death, then you’re the beneficiary of a society still infused with racism. To be told, even by implication, that you benefit from an unequal system? That’s just intolerable.

By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 19, 2013

July 21, 2013 - Posted by raemd95 | Conservatives, Racism | African Americans, Florida, Race and Ethnicity, Republicans, Stand Your Ground Laws, Stop and Frisk, Trayvon Martin, White Americans