President Obama BLM Black Lives Matter 2016-2020

Obama On Alton Sterling, Philando Castile And Why Black Lives Matter
2016
“All of us as Americans should be troubled by these shootings because these are not isolated incidents,” President Obama said.

President Obama spoke about the shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, two black men who were shot and killed by police. He said their deaths were a sign of the pervasive racial disparities in our country.

“Last year, African-Americans were shot by police at more than twice the rate of whites,” Obama said.

Obama emphasized that wanting to fix the criminal justice system and supporting police don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

“When people say black lives matter, that doesn’t mean blue lives don’t matter, it just means that all lives matter. ... This isn’t a matter of us comparing the value of lives, this is recognizing there’s a particular burden being placed on a group of our fellow citizens and we should care about that.”

This video includes clips from The White House and images from Facebook / Alton Sterling and Getty Images.

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President Obama Could Have Done More to Remind America That Black Lives Matter
As proud as I am of the president, I also believe he should have insisted on more for black citizens of this country.


by BRITTNEY COOPER
 DEC 12, 2016
On Jan. 20, 2009, a group of black women friends crowded in my apartment to watch the inauguration of Barack H. Obama, our first African-American president. Since Election Day, we had been on a high, daring to believe that a real racial shift had taken place in the country. A multiracial, multigenerational contingent of American voters had come together to elect Obama to the highest office in the land. We marveled, because as African-Americans young and old had confessed to each other in the preceding months, “we never thought we’d see this in our lifetimes.” So entrenched were racialized ideas about who should lead the country that most of us didn’t see Obama coming. And because his rise was so extraordinary, my academic friends and I were quick to remind each other that he wasn’t the literal Second Coming. “He won’t be able to fix everything,” we would insist. But we hoped beyond hope — because Barack had asked us to hope — that he would fix something, that he would make progress on the things that mattered to us, to black people. The nation’s problems are much wider and deeper than any one man could hope to rectify. But this effervescent feeling that a change had come permeated inauguration day. Perhaps, despite centuries of racial suppression, a New America, one in which black children could one day grow up to be the president, was finally possible.

After eight years, it is fair to say that Obama’s legacy in the struggle for racial justice is uneven. Indeed, the celebration of his victory on the left has been outmatched only by consistent obstructionism on the right, but the president’s legacy on matters of race is far less impressive than his signature accomplishments: marriage equality; the Affordable Care Act; the killing of Osama Bin Laden; the auto industry bailout; executive support for undocumented young people; the appointment of two women, including the first Latina, to the Supreme Court; rekindling diplomatic relations with Cuba; reducing the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; and signing the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. There is no signature policy achievement that specifically addresses and ameliorates the concerns of black citizens.

Certainly the president has had a huge price to pay for attempting to address racial concerns. In the early months of his presidency, after Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested for breaking into his own house, Obama told reporters that the police had acted “stupidly.” He also reminded Americans that “there's a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.” Drawing the ire of law enforcement agencies around the country, the president scheduled the infamous “beer summit” between Gates and the officer who arrested him. This moment was an opportunity for him to present a policy agenda concerned with criminal justice reform, but what we got was a national cocktail hour that did little to quell simmering tensions between black communities and law enforcement. The president then sidestepped overt mention of racial politics for the rest of his first term.


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Then, in February 2012, Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman, an overzealous neighborhood watchman. As protesters demanded that Zimmerman be arrested and tried, the president spoke out, saying, “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” And he affirmed the right of Martin’s parents “to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves.” Despite being in the middle of a re-election bid, Obama felt the need to publicly connect to Trayvon’s story.


After Zimmerman was acquitted, Obama again gave unplanned remarks, saying, “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.” He went on to translate the frustrations of African-Americans with the criminal justice system: “I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away. 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."

By linking himself intimately to Martin, Obama sought to compel identification from black Americans and empathy from white Americans. In her new book of the same title, Rutgers University political scientist Melanye Price characterizes Obama as a “race whisperer": “one who is seamlessly and agilely able to employ racial language and tropes by using personal experiences or common historical themes to engage and mobilize diverse constituencies.” She goes on to argue that “skillfully changing one’s style and rhetoric for particular audiences without being seen as a panderer is the singular talent of the race whisperer.” Obama’s connection to the pain that black people experienced in the wake of the Zimmerman trial felt authentic, but the inability (or unwillingness) of his office to do anything substantive made clear, particularly to Millennial black people, that much of his position was symbolic. His occupancy of the Oval Office had little material effect on making black people safer from extralegal violence from vigilantes and police.


People carry posters of Trayvon Martin and President Obama with Martin Luther King Jr. as they commemorate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and King’s "I Have a Dream" speech.
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The political limitations of our first black president brought into sharp relief the need for a new movement for racial justice. Faint cries of that movement began after Martin’s murder with the Million Hoodies Movement. They became louder and clearer after Zimmerman’s acquittal when Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi took to social media to declare that #BlackLivesMatter. And these cries reached a fever pitch in the summer of 2014, when residents of Ferguson, Missouri, engaged in a days-long standoff with police, facing down tanks and tear gas, in outrage over the killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown. As the unrest grew and a Ferguson grand jury declined to prosecute Brown’s killer, Obama urged protesters to remain calm, because “we are a nation built on the rule of law.” The empathy and connection that characterized Obama’s response to Trayvon was absent when the police became the killers, and every time Obama refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the protestors’ racial justice concerns, the Black Lives Matter movement grew in intensity. Eventually, he expressed regret for the lag time in his office’s response, but the issue wasn’t just about the immediacy of the response but rather about the quality of solutions. Somehow, Obama’s presidency began to mark not the zenith of American racial possibility but a new racial nadir.

One June evening in 2015, Dylann Roof walked into Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and killed nine parishioners who had gathered for Bible study. This mass murder by avowed white supremacist Roof marked an attempt to take the nation back to the old mid-20th-century grammar of racial terror, violating the supposed safety of black sacred space. In the aftermath of Charleston, it was not clear what having a black president could really mean, if it didn't mean, at the very least, that we were past all this.

Drawing on his talents as a race whisperer, Obama gave a eulogy for the Honorable Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, the pastor of Mother Bethel and a South Carolina state senator, that stood in the best traditions of black preaching. He closed by asking the crowd to join him in “Amazing Grace,” a choice of hymn that resonated deeply with the African-American Christian experience. He also used his time in the pulpit to affirm the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse, saying it “would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s history; a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds.”


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As moving as it was, Obama’s eulogy struck me as deeply ironic, for I knew that he had learned to find the right affective register to comfort this grieving crowd and a grieving nation because of his 20 years as a member of Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright’s congregation in Chicago. After video surfaced of Wright’s comments that God should damn America for its continued investment in racism and international policies that harm people of color, Obama distanced himself by calling Wright’s comments “wrong” and “divisive.” The black church has long been the central institution for vetting black political figures. But Obama’s willingness to publicly disavow his pastor signaled to black and white folks alike that he was a brand-new kind of Negro (to riff on Alain Locke’s classic Harlem Renaissance tome.) Price, the Race Whisperer author, argues that Jeremiah Wright became Obama’s Sister Souljah moment, allowing him to distance himself from Wright’s overt racial rhetoric, in much the same way that Bill Clinton had done when he condemned racial remarks by Souljah in 1992, to reassure conservative voters that he didn’t support radical articulations of blackness. Obama could have simply said he and Wright disagreed; instead, he called one of this nation’s most important black preachers and theologians wrong and divisive, sullying a lifetime of public service. The president grew up largely in a white context and did not establish cultural ties to African-American communities until well into adulthood, and his membership at the church Wright pastored was critical to cementing his connections to black communities. But consistently, the president has drawn upon the intellectual and cultural legacies bequeathed to him by these communities, without ever being forced to advocate politically for black people in any substantive manner.

Black women were the largest voting demographic in 2012, and 96 voted for Obama. Yet in 2014, when he introduced his signature racial justice plan, My Brother’s Keeper (MBK), it focused solely on men and boys of color. After more than 1,500 black women, including me, signed an open letter and wrote op-eds, the administration began to shift. And in September 2015, the president gave what I consider to be the most important race speech of his career. At the annual Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Foundation banquet, the president focused explicitly on the plight of black women and advocated for policies that would improve our lives: higher wages, access to affordable child care, protecting Planned Parenthood, and addressing skyrocketing incarceration rates for black women. He also fully acknowledged that black women’s work had expanded opportunity “not just for African-Americans, but for all women, for all of us — black and white, Latino and Asian, LGBT and straight, for our First Americans and our newest Americans.” No other sitting president has ever given a speech using the particular position of black women as a way to think broadly about the American narrative or about the possibilities of democracy.

A two-time voter for Obama, I felt betrayed by his My Brother’s Keeper program, and I am grateful that he demonstrated a willingness to be pushed. His CBC speech reminded me of all that is both wonderful and exasperating about having had the pleasure of the Obamas in the White House. It is clear that he understands the issues that matter to black communities. And it is clear that he has been obstructed at every turn by white men on the right who have offered temper tantrums instead of leadership. But it is also clear that the president could have done more.


After the death of Michael Brown, protesters carry a sign with a picture of President Obama reading, "Please Come Now."
I know that for many black folks, my demand is a kind of betrayal. But I see it as a kind of faith in the right of black people to experience all that American democracy has to offer. In many ways, I think Obama would be OK with this criticism. In Michael Eric Dyson’s book, The Black Presidency, Obama told him that while he knows there are some black folks “who identify with me even if they disagree with my policies … my hope would be that when you wash out those aspects of it, that people are judging me on what I do as opposed to who I am.” As proud as I am of Obama and his family, I will not equivocate in saying that he could have said more, pushed for more, and insisted on more, for those who have been his most loyal champions. As he prepares to cede the White House to his antithesis, I hope it is clear to him that the thing Audre Lorde said is true: “Your silence will not protect you.” His attempts to not be too black did not keep a significant portion of the American electorate from seeing him as too black anyway.

But it is perhaps fitting that Obama occupied the White House with his wife, his two daughters, and his mother-in-law. Anytime I see their family portrait, I am reminded of black women — the ones who live with Obama, the ones who elected him twice, the ones who tried to stave off the impending travesty of the 2016 elections through their vote, the ones he celebrated in his CBC speech by saying, “They didn’t give up, they didn’t let up. They were too fierce for that. Black women have always understood the words of Pauli Murray — that ‘Hope is a song in a weary throat.’” And so, too, has this president, with all his flaws and all his beauty, been to us — an insistent song of hope and American possibility in throats collectively weary from the incessant demand for freedom.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that the Charleston shooting happened at Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church. It happened at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which is known as Mother Emanuel.