Half of all marriages these days end in divorce, but that’s not a hard statistic. It may be higher for first marriages while second marriages seem to work out, or they don’t. There are many who marry only once, and there are those who marry many times, mainly out here in Hollywood. One thinks of Liz Taylor – but then there’s Newt Gingrich too, who isn’t Hollywood in the slightest, other than he’s a narcissist with a giant ego. He seems to be in his third or fourth marriage, as if it matters. Some of us have tried twice, and found the thought of a third marriage a bit absurd. All this makes the divorce statistics meaningless. Americans seem to practice polygamy. It’s just that it’s sequential, not simultaneous. Or they’re monogamous, on and off, for a few years at a time.
This means most of us have a shared experience, with “the talk” – that one evening when the wife says “we need to talk” and it’s all over. Guys tend to just leave. They simply disappear. Women seem to feel a need to provide context, to explain what’s gone wrong and why, and that’s always excruciating. Shame and sadness are no fun at all, but of course this sort of thing is not limited to divorce. If your boss says “we need to talk” your sphincter tightens. You’re going to get fired, or at best demoted, or transferred to Altoona. The “talk” will explain why, for reasons that you will have to admit are pretty much valid. We’ve all been there. Our defensiveness and disbelief – and the tight sphincter – are a learned response to what happens all the time. We need to talk? This isn’t going to be pleasant.
Obama just did that, startling everyone. He walked into an ordinary and pro forma daily White House press briefing, had his press secretary step aside, and told America we need to talk:
President Obama implored Americans on Friday to “do some soul-searching” following the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager in Florida, speaking expansively and introspectively about the nation’s painful history of race and his own place in it.
Directly wading into the polarizing debate over last weekend’s acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin, Obama tried to explain the case through the lens of past discrimination that still weighs heavily on African Americans.
The nation’s first black president, recognizing the disconnect between how whites and blacks were reacting to the Zimmerman verdict, sought to explain why the acquittal had upset so many African Americans.
“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,” Obama said.
He’s coming up on five years in office, and he’s avoided talking about race for those five years – there are always big national and international issues to deal with and there’s no need to stir the pot – but he is our first African-American president and this sort of thing has been bubbling along underneath everything all along, and it was time to talk about it. The man who shot and killed young Trayvon Martin was allowed to walk, which Obama acknowledged was perhaps the proper legal decision, given our current laws, but that’s beside the point. Something else has been going on here, for a long time – something that has been on his mind all his life, and something that probably drove him to seek the presidency in the first place. Back in March 2012, shortly after the Martin kid had been shot dead, he said that if he had a son, he’d look like Trayvon – and then he shut up. The president isn’t supposed to take sides in a matter that will be decided in court. His sympathies were irrelevant. Fine, but now the matter is settled, and he doubled-down on his original comment – “Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me thirty-five years ago.”
America, we need to talk, and he spoke for eighteen minutes, extemporaneously – no teleprompter and two notecards, which he barely glanced at. He didn’t need a script. This was his life, and life of young black men in America. He spoke “in a hushed and at times halting voice, pausing periodically to compose his thoughts” – but this was stuff he knew cold, from experience:
“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,” Obama said. “That includes me.”
He continued, “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.”
If you want to know what’s going on, this is what’s going on:
Obama said he and his wife, Michelle, have talked a lot about ways to “bolster and reinforce our African American boys.” There is more that can be done, he said, to give black children a sense that they are a “full part of this society” and that the country is willing to invest in helping them succeed.
The president called for an examination of stand your ground laws like the one in Florida that allow individuals to use deadly force to defend themselves.
“For those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these ‘stand your ground’ laws, I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk?” Obama said. “And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?”
Race is still an issue in America. We need to talk.
Slate’s John Dickerson frames it this way:
The essential bet of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was that the country was ready for an African-American president. He appealed to that same sense of hope again Friday in the White House briefing room. After a week of emotional reactions to the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial, President Obama made a bet that he could contribute something useful in the aftermath, and that despite all of the partisanship of the last five years and America’s tragic history with the issue of race, there would be some portion of the audience that would actually listen to what he said. If it was a renewal of his original promise, it was also fulfillment of it for many. No other president could give that talk.
Obama spoke as a president, an African-American, and as a former law professor. The task he set for himself, according to sources close to him, was to be a bridge builder: explaining the hurt and anguish so many African-Americans feel in the wake of the verdict to those who don’t understand it or who might misunderstand it.
Dickerson notes Obama did that in several ways, but mainly by providing “context” for us:
The president used the word four times. It’s one of Obama’s favorite themes, along with balance. He was sounding both themes in a statement that was at once informal but carefully constructed. The former teacher of law said that the jury verdict should be honored; he took pains not to appear to be interfering with the jury’s judgment. But the first African-American president also knew he wanted to speak to the unresolved wound with authority.
President Obama the African American returned to the themes of his first book, Dreams from My Father, talking at length about what it was like to be a black man in America. “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.” (He too had smoked pot and made mischief as a kid.) He said he knew what it was like to have people lock their car door when you came near or what it was like to be followed by security in a department store. He spoke as a witness for African-Americans, describing the “sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.”
Yeah, there are protesters in the streets, for good reason, as the law professor in him explained:
President Obama the University of Chicago Law School lecturer turned questions inside out. Would the “stand your ground” law in Florida have allowed Trayvon Martin to stand his ground in the encounter? He spoke in the carefully calibrated language of the classroom, saying “if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.”
Will that change minds? Hell, Obama’s remarks already worked on the famous mellow and suave conservative David Brooks:
They were strikingly personal. I thought they were Obama at his best, the Obama we saw in 2008, 2007, someone who is sympathetic to all sides. And he was sympathetic to the police, he’s sympathetic to — he gave the context especially for African-American experience and how many African-Americans are responding to this case. He gave the legal context. And so it was a broad tour d’horizon, you could say, of the whole situation, arriving at, I thought, a pretty moderate and responsible and mature position, which was the legal system did its work, it has to be respected, this really isn’t a federal case in most cases. And so he arrived at a, I think, a pretty responsible position at the end of the day, at the same time giving voice to a whole range of conflicting feelings, conflicting thoughts, conflicting ideas, and I think giving all Americans a sense of what other people are feeling, why they’re reacting the way they are. I thought it was a deeply unifying statement.
In fact, that led Brooks to an odd place:
And I have to say, the point on the Stand Your Ground law was actually clarifying for me. I had some sympathy for the laws because as, you know, as Americans, we should be independent, we should be able to defend ourselves, be strong. But the argument he made about, you know, do we really want all sorts of people, do we really want what happened here, people walking around with guns feeling free to shoot off without legal protections, without the normal legal process – now, that’s a compelling argument, which he put very well.
Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog has some fun with that:
Yes, Brooks actually said he’d never quite thought about the possibility of extending Stand Your Ground to “all sorts of people.” Yes, even those sorts. When you put it that way, Stand Your Ground is kinda scary, huh, David?
Nice work, Professor Obama.
Actually it was pretty good work. In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik notes that Obama was simply following in the footsteps of that other lawyer from Illinois who became president, who long ago made the same argument:
Abraham Lincoln discussed this romanticization of violence in 1838, in one of his earliest public speeches, “Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois.” What, Lincoln asked, threatened the well-being of American democracy? Only one thing: vigilante violence, “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts.” He detailed the epidemic of violence and then located its cause in the need for what we would now call identity politics. Constitutional institutions might be equitable, but they were not lacking in (and it’s striking that Lincoln used exactly this word) “authenticity” – the dry, rational legal system that the revolution had insured could never satisfy Americans’ need for an emotional connection with the past and with each other.
Lincoln’s own call, in response, was for an ever more radical rationalism: “Reason, cold calculating unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense.”
Gopnik notes that later Lincoln did the same thing – he cast the Civil War as the defense of the arid, legal principle that the Union was indissoluble. It was a boring but logical and legal argument, based on the constitution. This was not a matter of honor or pride or culture. Lincoln didn’t have much use for the dueling, honor-driven culture of the South, or the Wild West. He liked to think things through, logically. No wonder Lincoln is Obama’s hero.
Adam Cohen also points out the interesting contrasts between English and American self-defense laws:
Nearly 250 years ago, William Blackstone included in his classic Commentaries on the Laws of England a well-established rule: “To excuse homicide by the plea of self-defense, it must appear that the slayer had no other possible means of escaping from his assailant.” Sir Blackstone understood why people should be required to retreat before using deadly force: “the right to defend,” he warned, “may be mistaken as the right to kill.” …
In contrast, in 1921, in Brown v. United States, the Supreme Court rejected the obligation to retreat. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the author of the decision, later explained: “a man is not born to run away.”
Holmes, our most epigrammatic Supreme Court Justice, got at something profound about the “stand your ground” doctrine. It is not the product of elaborate empirical research or deep philosophical debate. It is, fundamentally, based on a notion of honor: that a man (and presumably a woman, though they seem to invoke it a lot less) should not be required to run away. That honor-based rationale is particularly American. Maybe because of our Wild West origins – the no-duty-to-retreat doctrine is sometimes called the “Texas rule” – or maybe because we are the world’s only superpower, we are a nation that is uncomfortable with retreat. We live in a culture in which avoiding conflict is considered cowardly, or, at best, humorous.
What did Brooks say? As Americans, we should be independent, we should be able to defend ourselves, be strong? He just discovered how foolish he sounds, and an NPR contributor, Frank James, explains what’s really going on here:
The president did something no other holder of his office has ever had the life experience to do: He used the bully pulpit to, as an African-American, explain black America to white America…
To a degree, it was reminiscent of the widely hailed Philadelphia speech Obama made during the 2008 presidential campaign to explain American racial realities during the controversy over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
For that moment, Obama’s bridge went two ways as he explained whites to blacks and blacks to whites. That speech found Obama standing between two races as the son of a black African father and white American mother and translating for each side.
Not so with Friday’s remarks: They were one way. The president focused on why so many African-Americans have reacted as if they were gut-punched from the time they first learned of the circumstances surrounding the shooting until the verdict. He made no attempt to explain whites to blacks.
To whites who have insisted the case wasn’t about race, the president explained why so many blacks disagree.
It was “the talk” that had been a long time coming:
It’s potent stuff to blame the violence in black neighborhoods on the violence and poverty tens of millions of blacks have been subjected to over the course of American history. It was Obama telling many white Americans to stop blaming the victim.
The “talk” will explain why, for reasons that you will have to admit are pretty much valid. Logic is a fine thing, and it can be devastating.
Dickerson, however, notes that Obama was cool about it:
The moment was carefully orchestrated, which is also signature Obama. The Friday afternoon surprise appearance put this weekend’s marches in context, but it also downplayed the pomp of the moment. This was not a Presidential Speech on Race. The president was not trying to lecture anyone. He was trying to explain, maybe even nudge. Everything – his words, the forum, his manner – were designed to take the air out of the supercharged moment. For a president whose leadership and powers are constantly questioned, he was doing what he had come to office promising to do: help one part of America relate to another part of America.
It was odd. A Fox News radio host called Obama the Race-Baiter in Chief following these measured comments about Trayvon Martin, but later in the afternoon, Fox News’ Chris Wallace said that, no, Obama wasn’t stoking racial tensions with his comments. This generation’s Joe McCarthy, Ted Cruz, said Obama is going after your guns with these stand your ground remarks – but he’s running for president and needs to lock up the Republican base. Also see Fox Tried Seven Times to Get the Brother of Zimmerman to Criticize Obama (It Didn’t Work) – which was quite odd.
Something is up, and Obama closed with this:
And let me just leave you with a final thought, that as difficult and challenging as this whole episode has been for a lot of people, I don’t want us to lose sight that things are getting better. Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race. It doesn’t mean that we’re in a post-racial society. It doesn’t mean that racism is eliminated. But you know, when I talk to Malia and Sasha and I listen to their friends and I see them interact, they’re better than we are. They’re better than we were on these issues. And that’s true in every community that I’ve visited all across the country.
And so, you know, we have to be vigilant and we have to work on these issues, and those of us in authority should be doing everything we can to encourage the better angels of our nature as opposed to using these episodes to heighten divisions. But we should also have confidence that kids these days I think have more sense than we did back then, and certainly more than our parents did or our grandparents did, and that along this long, difficult journey, you know, we’re becoming a more perfect union – not a perfect union, but a more perfect union.
There he goes, quoting Lincoln again – but it seems to be working. It was just time for “the talk” after all these years of discrete silence, and it’s a funny thing – there was really not that much shame and sadness involved. It was just time to clear the air. That’s not always a bad thing. Maybe the marriage will last.
Just Above Sunset 