Photo Credit: White House
Barack Obama, the United States’ first black president, rarely talks about race or racism. Moreover, he is weak on policy prescriptions or targeted assistance for communities of color (and black folks in particular)–even though they are a key demographic in his electoral coalition.
Obama’s election may not have been the Mount Everest of black politics and the Black Freedom Struggle. But, President Obama did to go to Morehouse College, one of the country’s leading historically black institutions of higher learning, where he delivered the commencement speech on Sunday.
There he offered up a very conservative brand of life advice for the graduating class, suggestions that pivot on “personal responsibility” and not “excuse-making” for the lived realities of day-to-day and structural discrimination.
As reported by The Washington Post:
Obama said that too many young black men make “bad choices.”
“Growing up, I made quite a few myself,” Obama said. “Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency to make excuses for me not doing the right thing.”
But, the president implored, “we’ve got no time for excuses.”
“In today’s hyper-connected, hyper-competitive world, with millions of young people from China and India and Brazil, many of whom started with a whole lot less than all of you did, all of them entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything you haven’t earned,” he said. “Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination.”
“Moreover,” Obama continued, “you have to remember that whatever you’ve gone through, it pales in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured – and if they overcame them, you can overcome them, too.”
Republicans and the Tea Party Right should be very pleased by President Obama’s suggestions to the Morehouse graduating class. We know they will not be. Why? Because the White Right, as they have been since his election in 2008, cannot evolve past their herrenvolk bigotry and white supremacist habits. They are drugs in the American body politic to which conservatives are uniquely addicted.
President Obama uttered six little words at Morehouse on Sunday, words that will be twisted, lied about, spun, and processed by a pathologically reactionary conservative White Racial Frame. At Morehouse, Obama committed the ultimate move of poor taste in “post racial” colorblind America: he said, “as a black man like you.”
Ultimately, President Obama dared to remind the public that he too is a black man in America.
It would seem that to Drudge and The Weekly Standard this is poor taste, a point of controversy, and worth particular emphasis on their respective websites. To point. Drudge has as its lede following Obama’s Morehouse address “I am a Black Man” under the President’s photo. The Weekly Standard chose to place in bold for emphasis what they see as an impolitic and provocative phrase–“as a black man like you”–in their quoting of Obama’s speech at Morehouse.
The President apparently did not learn from the public whipping he suffered by the Right-wing media when he committed a similar misstep in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin shooting.
Let the complaints and predictable howls begin. The Tea Party GOP and their echo chamber will cry that “if a white president said ‘as a white man like you'” that there would be charges of racism. The most dim bloviators on the Right will assert that “historically black colleges” are bastions of “hate” that discriminate against white people.
Never mind the fact that historically black colleges actually offer scholarships and special funding for white students because of a belief in the merits of racial diversity.
This article originally appeared on : AlterNet