How President Obama governs on civil rights

theGRIO REPORT - Over the last few months, Obama’s administration, with little fanfare, has enacted a series of unabashedly liberal policies that the Rev. Al Sharpton and other civil rights leaders have long urged.

perrybaconjr

Jan 20, 2014

“Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency sometimes to make excuses for me not doing the right thing,” Obama told the Morehouse graduates about his youth. “But one of the things that all of you have learned over the last four years is there’s no longer any room for excuses.”

The graduates applauded the speech. Some of them were in tears. It received positive news coverage at first.

Then, it turned. Coates and other African-American writers, such as the Washington Post’s Vanessa Williams, highlighted some concerns with the speech.

Privately some civil rights leaders expressed a similar thought to what Coates wrote: enough already. Blacks, despite historically high unemployment under the president, had strongly backed Obama in two straight elections.

And, as one civil rights leader who meets occasionally with Obama told me, Obama wasn’t just lecturing African-Americans; he was doing so at the graduation at Morehouse, full of students who were graduating and parents who supported them. The fact of the graduation ceremony was evidence they had already learned the lesson of hard work.

The criticism went beyond the speech. It allowed even some of his supporters to acknowledge that while they generally like Obama, his rhetoric in particular was occasionally disappointing to them.

“I didn’t appreciate it when the president went forward to say look, I’m the president of all America,” said one Obama ally, referring to how the president occasionally emphasizes he is not ‘president of Black America.’ “Who doesn’t know that? I felt that was a little patronizing. I haven’t appreciated that. To me, he was playing to the obvious. But I understand the impetus behind it.”

The timing of the speech also made it impossible to ignore the obvious: Obama wasn’t giving this speech and others like it for political reasons. He had had already been reelected. He actually believed he should say these things.

Obama’s emphasis on the personal efforts of blacks “is wrong factually, it’s also wrong in terms of the lines of authority between political figures and their constituencies,” says Jelani Cobb, associate professor of history and director of the Institute for African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut. “Political figures are held accountable by their constituencies, political figures don’t hold their constituencies accountable.”

That set up the discussion in the Roosevelt Room with Coates. In Obama’s first term, the administration had largely shut out black critics like Tavis Smiley and Jesse Jackson, Sr., who it believed were taking shots at Obama just to raise their profiles or because of personal grievances.

But administration officials acknowledge people like Coates, Cobb, and former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, who has also criticized Obama, are making principled objections. So Obama addressed Coates directly, while White House officials made sure Cobb was invited to attend a speech Obama delivered on inequality in December.

Coates was not swayed by the president’s words that day. When Obama gave a speech at the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington in August that included a few lines about blacks taking more responsibility, Coates wrote that some of the language Obama used was “heart-breaking” to him.

“I need to speak for them”

The Gates controversy in 2009 surprised the White House, according to administration officials. Obama spoke too bluntly, they said, but the controversy and the resulting media firestorm was overkill. As one longtime White House aide noted, it was odd that the police arrested Gates in his own home.

The lesson, administration officials say, was not that Obama should not talk about race, but that he should speak about it in a thoughtful way that served a broader purpose.

Over the last five years, in the midst of the rise of the Tea Party, many Democrats, particularly African-Americans, have forcefully argued the movement’s energy is directed at Obama largely because of his race. Republicans strongly disagree and say the party’s anti-Obama movement is a result of his liberal policies, not skin color.

The president has generally avoided this debate.