A week after a Florida jury acquitted a white-Hispanic in the killing of an unarmed black teenager, triggering nationwide protests, President Barack Obama has gently waded into the sensitive issue of race, urging all Americans to “do some soul-searching”.
Striking a personal note on the controversial killing of Trayvon Martin, the first African-American president remarked: “When Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me — 35 years ago.”
While taking care to avoid any direct comment on the jury acquittal of George Zimmerman, Obama went into some length as to why the ruling has convulsed the African-American community.
“When you think about why, in the African American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognise that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away,” he commented.
Making a surprise appearance at the White House briefing room on Friday, Obama went on to say: “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.”
“There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me — at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often,” he said, in comments that were the first of their kind from him as US President.
Obama said he wouldn’t want to exaggerate, but those sets of experiences informed how the African-American community interpreted what happened in Florida. “It’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear. The African American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws — everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case,” he said, while dwelling on the black community’s sense of hurt.
At the same time, Obama cautioned civil rights activists and black leaders to see that their protests do not turn violent. In remarks that were made on the eve of Saturday’s planned Trayvon rallies in over 100 cities, he said any violence on this matter would end up dishonouring what happened to Martin and his family.
He also delved into the disproportionate involvement of young African-Americans in the criminal justice system —both as victims and perpetrators of violence. The community, he noted, tended to interpret this in a historical context, attributing some of the violence in poor black neighbourhoods to “a very violent past in this country”, and tracing the poverty and dysfunction within the community to “a very difficult history”.
On the verdict itself, Obama took the stand that the jury has spoken and that’s how the American system works. leaving the intricacies in the case to legal analysts to tackle, he said: “The judge conducted the trial in a professional manner. The prosecution and the defense made their arguments. The juries were properly instructed that in a case such as this reasonable doubt was relevant, and they rendered a verdict. And once the jury has spoken, that’s how our system works.”
As for the review undertaken by Attorney General Eric Holder in response to demands to institute a federal case of racial profiling against Zimmerman, Obama sought to lower expectations, noting: “Traditionally, these are issues of State and local Government, the criminal code. And law enforcement is traditionally done at the State and local levels, not at the federal levels.”
Even so, he made the case for reviewing some of the State and local laws, notably Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law. It was this law, permitting reasonable use of force in self-defence in case of an altercation, that came to the rescue of Zimmerman during the trial.