Why Did Obama Say So Little About Ferguson?
We hoped he would bring racial understanding. But with two years left, there’s nothing Obama can say about race that doesn’t lead to more rancor.
By Jamelle Bouie
8/26/2014
Last week, the Rev. Al Sharpton called on leaders in both political parties to speak on the shooting of Michael Brown. “Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton,” he said, “don’t get laryngitis on this issue.”
I don’t have much to say about Bush, but as much as Clinton deserves criticism for her silence— even as she relies on black voters for her presidential hopes— there’s one more name to add to Sharpton’s list.
Barack Obama.
In fairness, the president hasn’t been silent on Brown. He’s given two statements: one after the shooting and initial demonstrations, and another after an especially violent night when police used tear gas and rubber bullets against protesters. But both were lackluster. In the first, Obama gave a short comment on the death of Brown, ignoring the civil unrest in Ferguson. “I know the events of the past few days have prompted strong passions, but as details unfold, I urge everyone in Ferguson, Missouri, and across the country, to remember this young man through reflection and understanding,” said Obama.
A week later the president gave a fuller statement on the situation, announcing a federal civil rights investigation of the Ferguson Police Department and giving an almost obligatory “both sides” condemnation of the violence. “While I understand the passions and the anger that arise over the death of Michael Brown, giving into that anger by looting or carrying guns, and even attacking the police, only serves to raise tensions and stir chaos. It undermines rather than advancing justice,” he said.
Obama ended with a brief plug for My Brother’s Keeper, a White House-led program to improve outcomes for young, at-risk men of color. The program, he said, would work with the Justice Department in “local communities to inculcate more trust, more confidence in the criminal justice system.” It’s a worthy aim, but it’s not relevant to Ferguson, where Michael Brown had parental guidance and a loving family, and where police mistrust came from egregious police misconduct.
It’s worth a comparison to Obama’s 2012 remarks on Trayvon Martin. “[M]y main message is to the parents of Trayvon. If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and that we’re going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”
Nowhere in his comments on Michael Brown’s death do we see the same resolve, or even the same empathy. Likewise, there’s nothing that echoes the broad perspective of his 2013 remarks on the George Zimmerman verdict, where he gave a personal account of racial discrimination and tried to voice the concerns of the black community. “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,” he said. “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 Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates once wrote that Obama is the “first president who could credibly teach a black-studies class. He is fully versed in the works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X.” From the new, nationwide conversation on police militarization to the disturbing pictures of tear-gassed protesters and civil disarray, Ferguson is probably the most important racial event of the Obama administration. In which case, why didn’t Obama—elected on the promise of greater racial understanding—address it with the wisdom we know he has? Why the cautious words?
One answer is that the White House is keenly aware of the president’s poor standing with large parts of the public. “[T]he White House,” writes Vox’s Ezra Klein, “no longer believes Obama can bridge divides. They believe—with good reason—that he widens them. They learned this early in his presidency, when Obama said that the police had ‘acted stupidly’ when they arrested Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates on the porch of his own home. The backlash was fierce. To defuse it, Obama ended up inviting both Gates and the arresting officer for a ‘beer summit’ at the White House.”
This is an important anecdote. Not just because it shows how Obama’s interventions can be divisive, but also because it shows the fault lines for those fissures. The Gates incident marked the beginning of Obama’s free fall with white voters. “In interviews conducted Wednesday and Thursday night,” noted the Pew Research Center at the time, “53% of white non-Hispanics approved of Obama’s overall job performance, compared with 46% of those interviewed Friday through Sunday,” after Obama’s comments blew up. “Disapproval among whites edged up from 36% on the first two nights to 42% Friday through Sunday. And the share of whites who say they like the kind of person Obama is slipped from 75% to 69% over the same period.”
A subsequent survey confirmed the results: Whites disapproved of President Obama’s handling of the Gates incident, with greater disapproval among whites who heard a lot about Obama’s comments. By contrast, neither blacks nor Hispanics changed their views of the president following his intervention.
Polling is highly contingent, and we should be careful about drawing conclusions. Still, I think this shows something profound. By siding with the black Gates against the white police officer, Obama gave greater salience to his race. Put another way, Obama entered office as a president who was black, but ended that summer as a black president. Here’s Coates again, “The irony of Barack Obama is this: he has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear … and yet his indelible blackness irradiates everything he touches.”
At last week’s press conference on Ferguson, Obama was weary. He was tired. Part of that, I imagine, was the circumstance: yet again, an unarmed black teenager, killed on the basis of suspicion. But part of it also, I’m certain, was self-awareness.
With two years left in his presidency, Obama is thoroughly racialized. There’s nothing he can say on race that won’t lead to rancor, fractured on racial lines. And so, he avoids the subject.
For many supporters, it’s frustrating. But there’s a silver lining. The same president who doesn’t want to talk about race has taken genuine action to combat racism. Under Obama, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department is more active than it’s been in a generation, fighting voter suppression and tackling lending discrimination. And most notably, it’s led by an attorney general who—unlike his boss—is eager to take the stage with blunt talk on race.
Is Hillary Clinton Better at Talking About Racial Injustice Than Obama?
It may take the next white president to talk to white Americans about race.
By Jamelle Bouie
8/29/2014
After almost three weeks of silence, Hillary Clinton has finally spoken on the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Toward the end of her paid remarks at a tech conference in San Francisco, Clinton shifted gears to address the shooting and its related issues. “I applaud President Obama for sending the attorney general to Ferguson, and demanding a thorough and speedy investigation,” she said. “That’s both thorough and necessary to find out what happened, to see that justice is done, and to help this community begin healing itself.” On criminal justice reform, she echoed President Obama’s comments from last week’s press conference. “We cannot ignore the inequities that persist in our justice system,” she said, “inequities that undermine our deepest values of fairness and equality.” Clinton also condemned the draconian police response to peaceful protesters. “Nobody wants to see our streets look like a war zone,” she said. “Not in America, we are better than that.”
From there, Clinton addressed racial prejudice and inequality. But unlike Obama— whose comments were limited to banalities and “both sides” posturing— she had something smart to say.
“Imagine what we would feel and what we would do if white drivers were three times as likely to be searched by police during a traffic stop as black drivers, instead of the other way around,” she said, “if white offenders received prison sentences 10 percent longer than black offenders for the same crimes, if a third of all white men—just look at this room and take one third—went to prison during their lifetime. Imagine that. That is the reality in the lives of so many of our fellow Americans and so many of the communities in which they live.”
The few times President Obama has made serious comments on race, he’s been candid, personal, and conciliatory. He’s either tried to universalize his experience—as he did in his 2008 Philadelphia speech—or contextualize the particular experiences of black Americans, as he did in his 2013 remarks on the George Zimmerman verdict. Put simply, being black lets Obama empathize with black Americans in a way unique to his presidency. At the same time, it acts as a limit on what he can say. Or, as I noted on Tuesday, Obama can’t address racial issues without polarizing the public along racial lines. He tiptoed around Ferguson, but given the rancor caused by his comments on Henry Louis Gates’ arrest or Trayvon Martin’s killing, it was the smart path to take.
Clinton’s statement is neither candid, personal, or especially conciliatory. Instead, it’s a little blunt, and in a good way. She asks for understanding and doesn’t give her listeners a rhetorical escape. “Imagine that,” she says, pushing her audience to conjure a world where white men were targets for law enforcement, and where their lives were routinely derailed for trivial offenses.
There’s also the optics of the audience. When most white politicians talk on race or racial subjects, they go to a black audience. Hence Ken Mehlman’s 2005 apology to the NAACP for the GOP’s “Southern Strategy,” or more recently Reince Preibus’ comments on Republican outreach at this year’s convention of the National Association of Black Journalists.
I’m sure there were black people in the audience in San Francisco, but this was Silicon Valley. Clinton was talking to white people. And she was asking them, as white people, to show empathy and concern for the conditions of their black fellow citizens. I wouldn’t say this is unprecedented, but it is rare. Especially since there’s no attempt to deflect or blame black Americans for their own problems. Clinton doesn’t mention “black-on-black crime” or give a brief respectability lecture. She simply says, Look at how we treat them, and imagine if it were you.
In 2012, political scientist Daniel Gillion found that in his first two years in office President Obama spoke less on race than any Democratic president since 1961. And judging from his relative silence since then, I expect that when Obama leaves office, he will have said less on racial questions than most recent presidents, period.
For Americans who wanted Obama’s voice on race, this is disappointing. At the same time, there’s a decent chance we’ll get Hillary Clinton’s voice on race, and while the modern presidency brings political limits on what any president can say, that might be the better alternative.
In the same way that only a hardline anti-communist could go to China and only an arch-conservative could raise taxes, it might be that it takes a white person in the White House to have real candor with white people on race.
