{"id":32454,"date":"2013-07-20T03:06:13","date_gmt":"2013-07-20T03:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=32454"},"modified":"2016-12-30T23:53:30","modified_gmt":"2016-12-30T23:53:30","slug":"obama-tackles-trayvon-racial-profiling-full-transcriptvideo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=32454","title":{"rendered":"Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The White House<\/a>
\nOffice of the Press Secretary
\nJames S. Brady Press Briefing Room
\n2013-07-19, 17:33Z (13:33 EDT)<\/p>\n

Barack H.\u00a0Obama<\/a><\/strong>, President of the United States<\/p>\n

I wanted to come out here, first of all, to tell you that Jay is prepared for all your questions and is very much looking forward to the session.\u00a0 The second thing is I want to let you know that over the next couple of weeks, there\u2019s going to obviously be a whole range of issues\u2014immigration, economics, et cetera\u2212we’ll try to arrange a fuller press conference to address your questions.<\/p>\n

The reason I actually wanted to come out today is not to take questions, but to speak to an issue that obviously has gotten a lot of attention over the course of the last week\u2014the issue of the Trayvon Martin ruling<\/a>.\u00a0 I gave a preliminary statement right after the ruling on Sunday.\u00a0 But watching the debate over the course of the last week, I thought it might be useful for me to expand on my thoughts a little bit.<\/p>\n

First of all, I want to make sure that, once again, I send my thoughts and prayers, as well as Michelle\u2019s, to the family of Trayvon Martin<\/a>, and to remark on the incredible grace and dignity with which they\u2019ve dealt with the entire situation.\u00a0 I can only imagine what they\u2019re going through, and it\u2019s remarkable how they\u2019ve handled it…<\/p>\n

..You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son.\u00a0 Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.<\/strong>\u00a0 And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there\u2019s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it\u2019s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn\u2019t go away.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 That includes me.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That happens to me\u2014at least before I was a senator.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That happens often…<\/strong><\/p>\n

…And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these \u201cstand your ground\u201d laws, I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? 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?<\/p>\n

And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws…<\/p>\n