SALON

Friday, Mar 23, 2012 4:40 PM UTC

“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”

The president's first remarks about the Trayvon Martin killing were just right – and unfortunately, they had to be VIDEO

By

Topics: Barack Obama, Race, Trayvon Martin, ,

President Obama answers a reporter's question about the death of Trayvon Martin. (Credit: AP/Haraz N. Ghanbari)

Grief and outrage over the Trayvon Martin killing has been reassuringly universal, uniting people of all races. You have to wade deep into the muck of comments sections on right-wing websites to find anyone who expresses anything but horror at an innocent 17-year-old boy in a hoodie being gunned down in cold blood, while out buying Skittles for his little brother.

Something about the grief and outrage is also unique to African-Americans. Most of the rest of us are rightly sickened. If we are parents, we can feel the horror of something cruel and crazy happening to our own kids. Yet if our kids aren’t black, we can imagine that pain, we can empathize with it, but we can’t directly experience it. It feels imperative to acknowledge that singular ache and intolerable injustice even as we empathize.

President Obama acknowledged both the universal and the singular tragedy of Trayvon Martin with his first remarks on the case Friday morning. It took more than a week after the outrageous killing became national news for the president to comment. I understand why he waited; it also makes me sad that he felt that he had to. Our first black president wears painful restraints when it comes to what he can and cannot say about racial issues. The grief he shared Friday morning was all the more affecting for the somber, measured way he expressed it.

Noting that he had to be careful not to “impair” the Justice Department’s investigation into Martin’s killing, Obama spoke directly to the suffering of his parents. “I can only imagine what these parents are going through, and when I think about this boy, I think about my own kids. And I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this, and that everybody pulls together, federal, state and local, to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened.”

He’s right; every parent should be able to understand that. Then he took the risky but necessary step of making the tragedy personal. Recommending we all “do some soul searching to find out why something like this happened,” he added, “But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin.” Here, he paused for a long moment. “You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. And, you know, I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves and that we’re going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.” You could feel his personal grief as he closed out his remarks and stepped away from the cameras.

The Obamas handle our nation’s confusion about race with an uncommon grace. When the president said the Cambridge police acted “stupidly” in arresting Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates on his own property, well, he was right. But the right-wing outrage machine protested his wading into a local law-enforcement controversy, and he was forced to “recalibrate” and invite the arresting officer and Gates to the White House for an awkward “beer summit.” Just this week, after Robert De Niro introduced Michelle Obama by joking, “Now do you really think our country is ready for a white first lady?” Newt Gingrich squealed in faux outrage (which is rich: Gingrich has done more than Obama to disappoint white women who wanted to be first ladies, his two ex-wives), and the first lady’s office issued an apology, as did De Niro.

This racial tragedy, however, required the president’s moral and personal response, and he handled it perfectly. His most important contribution, of course, was putting his Justice Department behind the investigation — one that Sanford, Fla., officials horribly botched. He correctly made that his first priority. But it was important, for all of us, that he said what he did Friday morning. It’s true that our first African-American president must be the president of all of us. But that includes African-Americans, and it’s a sad measure of where we are as a nation, racially, that he must be particularly cautious when he decides whether and how to weigh in on even obvious racial injustice.

Many of us have been sympathetic to the restraints he wears while nevertheless wondering when he would say something about the tragedy. He did so Friday with a palpable sadness, for the family of Trayvon Martin, for himself, and for all of us.

(Update: Just as I published my claim that it’s hard “to find anyone who expresses anything but horror,” I saw that Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera tweeted: “His hoodie killed Trayvon Martin as surely as George Zimmerman,” and warned that if you “look like a gangsta…some armed schmuck will take you at your word.” I am wearing a hoodie, as I do most mornings when I work at home. Rivera keeps doubling down on his idiocy on Twitter. Someone should help him away from his computer.)

Here’s the video:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Joan Walsh

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large and the author of "What's the Matter With White People: Finding Our Way in the Next America." More Joan Walsh.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 659 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Judge tells lesbian couple to separate or lose kids: "unmarried sexual relationships -- including straight ones – can be grounds for losing child custody"
124 points125 points | 26 comments
vote
Developers evict historic women’s shelter to build luxury hotel - The 104-yr-old Anna Louise Inn has ended its 2-year legal battle with a Fortune 500 company & will now move. Many view the victory of the insurance company over a community touchstone as a major blow to the city.
24 points25 points | 2 comments
vote
Anonymous rallies behind Kaitlyn Hunt
27 points28 points | 31 comments
vote
Report: Nearly a quarter of Americans struggle to afford food
13 points14 points | comment
vote
I don’t hate millennials anymore! <--- not my words, but good read on Gen X. IMO
10 points11 points | comment

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations