Mixed Race Studies

Jolted by Deaths, Obama Found His Voice on Race

The New York Times
2017-01-15

Michael D. Shear, White House Correspondent

Yamiche Alcindor, National Reporter

Tensions across the country prompted the president to abandon his early reticence on race again and again.

WASHINGTON — Only weeks after 70 million Americans chose a black man for president, shattering a racial barrier that had stood for the entirety of the nation’s 232-year history, no one in the White House, especially the man in the Oval Office, wanted to talk about race.

President Obama had made a pragmatic calculation in January 2009, as the financial crisis drove communities across the United States toward economic collapse. Whatever he did for African-Americans, whose neighborhoods were suffering more than others, he would not describe as efforts to specifically help Black America.

Mr. Obama made the decision knowing how powerfully his election had raised the hopes of African-Americans — and knowing that no matter what he did, it would not be seen as enough.

“I remember thinking, ‘They are going to hate us one day,’” said Melody Barnes, who is black and served as Mr. Obama’s first domestic policy adviser, recalling her sadness when she stood in an auditorium in those early months as a crowd cheered for the success of the new president. “I knew that we couldn’t do everything that people wanted to meet those expectations.”…

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Obama’s Delicate Balance on Issue of Race and Policing

The New York Times
2017-07-08

Mark Landler, White House Correspondent

Michael D. Shear, White House Correspondent

WARSAW — As Air Force One headed for Europe on Thursday afternoon, President Obama holed up in the plane’s office editing a Facebook post meant to express his anguish at two deadly shootings by police officers. Given what had happened, he told his aides, he didn’t think it was enough.

Wrestling with what the appropriate thing to do instead was the start of a wrenching 10 hours in which Mr. Obama would find himself whipsawed by grim events back home, forcing him to once again search for the right tone in a moment of national shock and mourning.

In that time, Mr. Obama delivered a trans-Atlantic call for racial justice after the gruesome deaths of two black men at the hands of the police, only to face the same television cameras hours later to denounce the killings of five officers by a black sniper.

For Mr. Obama, the killing of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., and Philando Castile in suburban St. Paul and the bloody reprisal in Dallas encapsulated the challenge he has faced throughout his presidency: how to confront a justice system that he views as tilted against the very people whom he, as the nation’s first black president, seemed singularly equipped to help…

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U.S. ‘Not Cured’ of Racism, Obama Says, Citing Slavery’s Legacy

The New York Times
2015-06-22

Michael D. Shear, White House Correspondent

Christine Hauser, Reporter

WASHINGTON — Just days after nine black parishioners were killed in a South Carolina church, President Obama said the legacy of slavery still “casts a long shadow” on American life, and he said that choosing not to say the word “nigger” in public does not eliminate racism from society.

In a wide-ranging conversation about race, including his own upbringing as a man born to a black father and a white woman, Mr. Obama insisted that there was no question that race relations have improved in his lifetime. But he also said that racism was still deeply embedded in the United States.

“The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives, you know, that casts a long shadow, and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on,” the president said during an interview for Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast that was released on Monday. “We’re not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not.”

He added, “Societies don’t overnight completely erase everything that happened two to 300 years prior.”

Mr. Obama has been more open about the issue of race during his second term, in part because of racially charged episodes in the last several years. The killing of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager in Florida, and the protests that followed several police shootings have prompted the president to be more reflective about his own racial identity and the nation’s.

In the hourlong interview, Mr. Obama talked about being a rebel during his youth and “trying on” different kinds of personas as he struggled to understand what kind of African-American man he wanted to be.

“I’m trying on a whole bunch of outfits,” Mr. Obama said. “Here’s how I should act. Here’s what it means to be cool. Here’s what it means to be a man.”

He said that a lot of his issues when he was young “revolved around race” but that his attitude changed around the time he turned 20. That is when he began to understand how to honor both sides of his racial identity, the president said.

“I don’t have to be one way to be both an African-American and also someone who affirms the white side of my family,” he said. “I don’t have to push back from the love and values that my mom instilled in me.”…

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Unrest Over Race Is Testing Obama’s Legacy

The New York Times
2014-12-08

Julie Hirschfeld Davis, White House Reporter

Michael D. Shear, White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON — As crowds of people staged “die-ins” across the country last week to protest the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police officers, young African-American activists were in the Oval Office lodging grievances with President Obama.

He of all people — the first black president of the United States — was in a position to testify to the sense of injustice that African-Americans feel in dealing with the police every day, the activists told him. During the unrest that began with a teenager’s shooting in Ferguson, Mo., they hoped for a strong response. Why was he holding back?

Mr. Obama told the group that change is “hard and incremental,” a participant said, while reminding them that he had once been mistaken for a waiter and parking valet. When they said their voices were not being heard, Mr. Obama replied, “You are sitting in the Oval Office, talking to the president of the United States.”

For Rasheen Aldridge Jr., 20, a community organizer from St. Louis who attended the meeting, it was not enough. “It hurt that he didn’t seem to want to go out there and acknowledge that he understands our pain,” Mr. Aldridge said in an interview. “It would be a great mark on his presidential legacy if he would come out and touch an issue that everyone is scared to touch.”

But Mr. Obama has not been the kind of champion for racial justice that many African-Americans say this moment demands. In the days since grand juries in Missouri and Staten Island decided not to bring charges against white police officers who had killed unarmed black men, the president has not stood behind the protesters or linked arms with civil rights leaders. Although those closest to Mr. Obama insist that he feels a new urgency to capitalize on the attention to racial divisions, few dispute that he is personally conflicted and constrained by the position he holds…

…The son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya has struggled with questions about his own racial identity — described in his book “Dreams From My Father” — but Mr. Obama is by nature cool and cerebral and rarely shows emotion in public…

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Obama’s Path Was Shaped by Mandela’s Story

The New York Times
2013-12-05

Michael D. Shear

WASHINGTON — Without Nelson Mandela, there might never have been a President Obama.

That is the strong impression conveyed from Mr. Obama, whose political and personal bonds to Mr. Mandela, the former South African president, transcended their single face-to-face meeting, which took place at a hotel here in 2005.

It was the fight for racial justice in South Africa by Mr. Mandela that first inspired a young Barack Obama to public service, the American president recalled on Thursday evening after hearing that Mr. Mandela, the 95-year-old world icon, had died. Mr. Obama delivered his first public speech, in 1979, at an anti-apartheid rally.

Mr. Obama’s first moment on the public stage was the start of a life and political career imbued with the kind of hope that Mr. Mandela personified. “The day that he was released from prison gave me a sense of what human beings can do when they’re guided by their hopes and not by their fears,” Mr. Obama said on Thursday.

“Hope” would eventually become the mantra for his ascension to the White House.

On two continents separated by thousands of miles and vastly different political cultures, the lives of the two men rarely intersected. Weeks before their only meeting, Mr. Obama wrote Mr. Mandela a letter that Oprah Winfrey carried to South Africa. As Mr. Obama later emerged as a national political leader, he and Mr. Mandela occasionally traded phone calls or letters.

But the trajectories of the two leaders, who broke political and social barriers in their own countries, were destined to be connected, even if mostly from afar. Mr. Obama wrote about Mr. Mandela as a distant but inspirational figure in the forward to Mr. Mandela’s 2010 book, “Conversations With Myself.”

“His sacrifice was so great that it called upon people everywhere to do what they could on behalf of human progress,” Mr. Obama wrote. “In the most modest of ways, I was one of those people who tried to answer his call.”

Mr. Mandela and Mr. Obama served as the first black leaders of their nations and both were looked to by some as the vehicles for reconciliation between polarized electorates. Both won the Nobel Peace Prize, in part for their charisma and their ability to inspire and communicate…

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In Wake of Zimmerman Verdict, Obama Makes Extensive Statement on Race in America [with video]

The New York Times
2013-07-19

Mark Landler, White House Correspondent

Michael D. Shear, White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON — President Obama, making a surprise appearance on Friday in the White House briefing room to address the verdict in the Trayvon Martin killing, spoke in personal terms about the experience of being a black man in the United States, trying to put the case in the perspective of African-Americans. They were Mr. Obama’s most extensive comments on race since 2008, and his most extensive as president.

“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 — that doesn’t go away,” Mr. Obama said in the briefing room. “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.”…

…Mr. Obama issued a statement shortly after the verdict. But on Friday, he talked more broadly about his own feelings about the verdict and the impact it has had among African-Americans. “You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son,” he said. “Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”…

…Mr. Obama had been under pressure from some African-Americans to weigh in more forcefully after the verdict. For several days, his spokesman deflected questions about Mr. Obama reaction.

But on Friday, after several days of silence, the president appeared eager to offer his thoughts. He declined to take questions, but talked at length about his personal experience as a black man and about the historical context that shapes African-American responses to cases like the one involving Mr. Martin.

“That all contributes, I think, to a 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,” Mr. Obama said.

When Mr. Martin was shot in 2012, the president offered an emotional response, saying that “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon” and adding that “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids.”…

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Rare Visit Underscores Tangles in Obama’s Ties to Africa

The New York Times
2013-06-26

Michael D. Shear, Nicholas Kulish and Lydia Polgreen

DAKAR, Senegal — As a freshman senator from Illinois, Barack Obama told a packed auditorium in Kenya’s capital, “I want you all to know that as your ally, your friend and your brother, I will be there in every way I can.”

But he will not be there. President Obama, who Wednesday began his second trip to sub-Saharan Africa since taking office, will skip his father’s homeland once again, a reflection of the many challenges that his administration has faced in trying to make a lasting imprint across the continent.

Despite decades of American investment to promote stability in the volatile region of East Africa, Kenya just elected a president indicted by the International Criminal Court, accused of bankrolling death squads driven by ethnic rivalry. It was the outcome that Washington had desperately tried to avoid, and Mr. Obama’s advisers determined that a photo op of the American president shaking hands with a man awaiting trial was not one they needed.

“It just wasn’t the best time for the president to travel to Kenya at this point,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser.

For Africans across the continent, the election of an African-American president signaled a transformative moment in their relationship with the United States, one that would usher in a special understanding of their hopes and needs…

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