A Presidential perspective…

These are some columns that I think offer a gambit of perspectives on the importance of President Obama’s heartfelt, emotional, and historic comments regarding  his own life experiences – with Travon Martin’s unjustified death.

***

Standing by myself I noticed, on the periphery of the party, a man looking as awkward and out-of-place as I felt. I approached him and introduced myself. He was an Illinois state senator who was running for the U.S. Senate. He was African American, one of a few black people in attendance.We spoke at length about his campaign. He was charismatic in a quiet, solemn way. I told him I wanted to pitch a profile of him to a national magazine. (The magazine later rejected my proposal.)The following year I watched as he gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, and then won his Senate seat that fall. On Tuesday, Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States.

But it’s her kicker that really stands out in light of Obama’s comment today that “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.”

“What I will always remember,” Rosman wrote in 2008, “is as I was leaving that party … I was approached by another guest, an established author. He asked about the man I had been talking to. Sheepishly he told me he didn’t know that Obama was a guest at the party, and had asked him to fetch him a drink. In less than six years, Obama has gone from being mistaken for a waiter among the New York media elite, to the president-elect. What a country.”

Indeed.

And yet even as that country elected and then reelected its first black president, the easy assumptions about who black men are have yet to vanish.

***

When @BarackObama Was Mistaken for a Waiter at a Tina Brown Book Party http://t.co/6cPZQtTdbT “In 6yrs…to president-elect. What a country”

— The Lovely Plains (@DaRiverZkind) July 19, 2013

***

Obama’s unscripted comments were some of the most remarkable and admirable few minutes of his presidency. He spoke carefully, but with great passion and clarity. He spoke explicitly as a black man, but also as an American president. He said the “unsayable” so wisely and subtly that he made it accessible, and to me, indisputably clear and correct.

But today, talking about Martin, Obama embodied the kind of grace that is well-restrained passion. You knew how smart Obama was listening to him, as is often the case, but also how wise.

***

@BarackObama said the “unsayable” so wisely & subtly that he made it accessible & to me, indisputably clear & correct http://t.co/Q4d1tuz9O0

— The Lovely Plains (@DaRiverZkind) July 20, 2013

***

In “The Souls of Black Folk,” W. E. B. Du Bois described this phenomenon thusly:

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

Surely, much has changed in America since Du Bois wrote those lines more than a century ago — namely, bias tends to be expressed structurally rather than on an individual level — but the “two-ness” remains. The reality of being marked, denied and diminished for being America’s darker sons persists, even for a man who rose to become one of America’s brightest lights.

And while words are not actions or solutions, giving voice to a people’s pain from The People’s house has power.

On Friday the president reached past one man and one boy and one case in one small Florida town, across centuries of slavery and oppression and discrimination and self-destructive behavior, and sought to place this charged case in a cultural context.

***

Barack & Trayvon http://t.co/kGlq45VA1z W/ @BarackObama‘s statements, the president dispensed with the pedantic & made the tragedy personal.

— The Lovely Plains (@DaRiverZkind) July 20, 2013

***

“Obama was still a chubby adolescent, just returned from Indonesia and enrolled at the prestigious Punahou School, when he suffered the first such experience. He was one of the kids who played tennis after school, sometimes entering tournaments. One day he and some friends were looking at the draw sheets that had just been posted for a tournament when the tennis pro barked out that Barry shouldn’t touch the board, because his color might rub off.

“He singled him out, and the implication was absolutely clear,” classmate Kristen Caldwell later recalled. “Barry’s hands weren’t grubby, the message was that his darker skin would somehow soil the draw. Those of us standing there were agape, horrified, disbelieving. Barry handled it beautifully, with just the right amount of cold burn without becoming disrespectful. ‘What do you mean by that?’ he asked firmly.”
A few years later, in front of Obama, an assistant basketball coach spoke disparagingly about some players from a different school during a pickup game, using the most volatile racial epithet. When challenged, he said it did not apply to Barry, who was different”

***

With his words about the Travon Martin case @BarackObama addressed a nation with a new voice http://t.co/d0Tv9nqHa7 via @davidmaraniss

— The Lovely Plains (@DaRiverZkind) July 21, 2013

***

Something in President Barack Obama’s voice caught Gregory C. Ellison’s ear. It was fleeting, subtle, and easy to miss — unless you’re a black man, too.

‘‘In between his personal reflections on what it feels like to be an African-American man, and the history of pain and his strategic plan, there was what I call a very pregnant pause,’’ says Ellison, a theology professor in Atlanta. ‘If I ever have an opportunity to talk to PresidentObama, I would ask him what was he searching in his soul during that pregnant pause?’’

Obama was wrapped in presidential authority Friday as he talked to a nation rubbed emotionally raw in the week since the man who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was acquitted in a Florida courtroom. Then, in a move hardly anyone saw coming, Obama unwrapped himself, and put his own young, black face on Martin’s dead, young, black body.

This first black president, the guy accused by some of running from his blackness, of trying to address black folks’ needs on the down low, suddenly lifted the veil off his black male identity and showed it to the world. It was something no American president before him could have done.

He had to do it, Obama said, because ‘‘Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago.’’

***

“Something in @BarackObama‘s voice caught Ellison’s ear…fleeting subtle & easy 2 miss —unless you’re a black man 2″ http://t.co/JvA0URb8Fc

— The Lovely Plains (@DaRiverZkind) July 21, 2013

***

I’ve read a lot- and heard a lot of thoughts & commentary- regarding the significance of what our President said….please share yours.