Barack Obama�s Journey to Charleston
Margaret Carlson
Barack Obama hadnt dug so deep, found so much, and been so moving on the tender subject of race since his historic speech to explain his relationship to his controversial former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, during his first presidential campaign in 2007. On Friday, the president reminded us both how much and how little American society has evolved in the intervening years.
Obama came to Charlestons Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church to eulogize his friend, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who was gunned down along with eight others ranging in age from 7 to 87 as he led Bible study one night last week. The killer was a punk kid who sat for an hour beside the people he would kill for worshiping while black. He was a white supremacist who inhaled hate propaganda and blamed blacks for everything that was wrong in his life.
Dylann Roof, the alleged killer, the president said, thought he would incite fear and recrimination. He could have never anticipated the way the families of the fallen would respond when they saw him in court, in the midst of unspeakable grief, with words of forgiveness. Nor could Roof imagine how Charleston, the state and the country would react with revulsion but also with generosity and a thoughtful introspection we so rarely see in public life.
For most of his time in office, Obama has been careful not to speak too eloquently, show too much empathy, or worse, anger, lest he be perceived as tilting toward one group over another instead of being the president of the United States. Bill Clinton could afford to be the first black president. The first black president could afford no such thing.
But the massacre in Charleston has freed Obama. He spoke of grace, and didnt gloss over the political truth.
For too long, we were blind to the pain that the Confederate flag stirred in many of our citizens, he said. But that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation.
The symbols removal from the South
Carolina Capitol would be an acknowledgment that the cause for which they fought, the cause of slavery, was wrong.
Much hasnt changed in the eight years since he spoke in Philadelphias Constitution
Center about Wright, who was everything
Obama wasnt: angry, outspoken, and frightening to the people the one-term senator needed to win the White House. He couldnt embrace his former pastor nor could he throw him under the bus. He did neither.
Wright, Obama said then, embodied
the complexities of race in this country that weve never really worked through -- a part
of our union that we have yet to perfect. And
if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into
our respective corners, we will never be able to come together.
That speech allowed candidate Obama to change the subject and go on to win the
presidency. That achieved, however, he
sometimes seemed to ignore his own advice and did simply retreat.
A study by Daniel Gillion of the University of Pennsylvania found that Obama talked less about race in his first two years of office than any Democratic president since John F. Kennedy. Like many Americans, perhaps Obama wanted to think that with his election, we had indeed overcome. The worst was over. Liberals could move on to other issues -- gay marriage, amnesty for the children of undocumented immigrants, properly labeled bathrooms for Caitlyn Jenner.
Even as reality kept interfering -- in the form of the repeated killings of unarmed blacks by police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, and the shooting of a 12-year-old with a toy gun in Cleveland -- Obama spoke with a modulation that didnt fit the enormity of what was happening.
But not on Friday.
Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty or attend dilapidated schools or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career, he said. Perhaps it causes us to examine what we are doing to cause some of our children to hate.
Its easy to understand why Obama so often pulled back in the past. When he said that if he had a son he would look like Trayvon Martin, the teenager slain by a Florida neighborhood watchman, he was criticized for playing the race card and dividing the country.
The bloodbath in Charleston gave him no choice. Even before investigators found white supremacist pornography on Roofs laptop, we knew that his words as he opened fire spoke to the hateful propaganda he inhaled. You rape our women, he shouted, and youre taking over our country.
George Wallace couldnt have said it more clearly. The former governor of Alabama, upset by desegregation and civil rights legislation, put up the Confederate flag to thumb his nose at a federal government trying to give former slaves rights that would recognize their humanity and restore their full and equal status as citizens.
By the time of Obamas eulogy, the real
purpose behind those flags was so apparent
that even the most weak-kneed politicians
were scurrying to remove them. What a difference a massacre makes.
Just as the first instinct of apologists for racism is to excuse the police for making an honest mistake, it took excerpts from Roofs manifesto to convince many that he wasnt just a mentally unstable loner -- or even, some suggested, a hater of Christians -- but was intent on starting a race war.
That didnt stop the Wall Street Journal editorial page from arguing this week that institutional racism no longer exists. It took a full-bore investigation after the death of Michael Brown for the Justice Department to document that the Ferguson courts, prosecutors and police department were awash in institutional racism: blacks singled out for traffic stops, booked, arraigned, and given fines that grew exponentially.
And it turns out that rough rides from the police werent a fluke in Baltimore. Freddie Gray would be alive if he hadnt been arrested when police mistakenly thought he was hiding a knife, threw him in the paddy wagon and drove around as he was hurled wall-to-metal-wall until his spinal cord snapped.
In the waning days of his presidency, Obamas reluctance to talk about these matters is waning, too. Hes gained the wisdom to know that which he cannot do (fix Washington, for example, though House Speaker John Boehner did fly
down to Charleston on Air Force One). But
that has liberated the president to do other
things, even if by executive order, making life a little bit better for those whove not reaped the promised rewards of his tenure: to protect black citizens from their putative protectors, to acknowledge and try to correct the racism that still is very much with us.
At the end of his eulogy, Obama broke into the first verse of Amazing Grace, singing a capella until the congregation joined in. He called out the names of the slain, hugged the young daughters of Reverend Pinckney, and left the room to comfort all nine families.
Out of this terrible tragedy, God visited grace upon us for he has allowed us to see where weve been blind, he said. If we can find that grace anything is possible. If we can tap that grace anything can change.
The president has every reason to keep reminding us how far weve come, but Friday he showed us how far we still need to go.
Bloomberg
