Obama was interviewed for this article by Washington Post reporter Eugene Robinson, regarding his speech at the NAACP's centenial. You can read the full column here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte... Some highlights from the interview:
"President Obama's speech Thursday marking the 100th anniversary of the NAACP's founding was widely reported as a "tough love" message directed at black America. 'I've noticed that when I talk about personal responsibility in the African American community, that gets highlighted,' Obama said in an interview Friday. 'But then the whole other half of the speech, where I talked about government's responsibility . . . that somehow doesn't make news.'"
"'Don't underestimate the degree to which a speech like the one I gave yesterday gets magnified throughout the African American community,' Obama told me in the Oval Office, where a bust of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. surveys the room in silent admonition. 'Folks on Friday go in and get their hair cut, they're getting ready for the weekend, they're sitting in the barber's chair, and somebody said, 'Did you see what Obama said yesterday?' It sparks a conversation. . . . And part of what my goal is here is to make sure that I'm giving a lot of folks permission to talk about things that maybe they've talked about around the kitchen table but don't get fully aired in public.'"
"Obama embodies two trends that have made the African American community increasingly diverse. He is the son of a Kenyan immigrant -- at a time when highly educated people from Africa and the Caribbean are coming to this country in record numbers. And he is biracial -- the product of a kind of relationship that long was illegal in many states."
"'I think that I would add a third element . . . which is a generational shift,' Obama said. 'If we haven't already reached this point, we're getting close to reaching it, where there are going to be more African Americans in this country who never experienced anything remotely close to Jim Crow than those who lived under Jim Crow. That, obviously, changes perspectives.'"
"'One of the ways that I think that the civil rights movement . . . weakened itself was by enforcing a single way of being black -- being authentically black. And, as a consequence, there were a whole bunch of young black people -- and I fell prey to this for a time when I was a teenager -- who thought that if you were really 'down' you had to be a certain way. And oftentimes that was anti-something. You defined yourself by being against things as opposed to what you were for. And I think now young people realize, you know what, being African American can mean a whole range of things. There's a whole bunch of possibilities out there for how you want to live your life, what values you want to express, who you choose to interact with.'"
"Said Obama: 'I do think it is important for the African American community, in its diversity, to stay true to one core aspect of the African American experience, which is we know what it's like to be on the outside.'"
"If we ever lose that, then I think we're in trouble. Then I think we've lost our way."
Obama is correct in pointing out this "third element," and that the danger is by that generation never having lived under or experienced Jim Crow, we risk losing that core aspect of the African American experience of what its like to be on the outside. Obama, as do I, see value in that.
Some say its good that current and future generations will never know Jim Crow and that is a benefit to race relations in general, as they will be less likely to see things through the lens of race. That's also kind of like saying if I don't know enough about my business to know when the deal I've got isn't the best for me, its good for business in general when I don't recognize it and attempt to address it. In the end, not only do I lose, but business in general loses, but for one unscrupulous one's short term gain.
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Sunday, July 19th 2009 at 12:44PM
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