Fear of a Black President
Ta-Nehisi Coates | Aug 22, 2012
The irony of President Barack Obama is best captured in his comments on the death of Trayvon Martin, and the ensuing fray. Obama has pitched his presidency as a monument to moderation. He peppers his speeches with nods to ideas originally held by conservatives. He routinely cites Ronald Reagan. He effusively praises the enduring wisdom of the American people, and believes that the height of insight lies in the town square. Despite his sloganeering for change and progress, Obama is a conservative revolutionary, and nowhere is his conservative character revealed more than in the very sphere where he holds singular gravityrace.
Part of that conservatism about race has been reflected in his reticence: for most of his term in office, Obama has declined to talk about the ways in which race complicates the American present and, in particular, his own presidency. But then, last February, George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old insurance underwriter, shot and killed a black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman, armed with a 9 mm handgun, believed himself to be tracking the movements of a possible intruder. The possible intruder turned out to be a boy in a hoodie, bearing nothing but candy and iced tea. The local authorities at first declined to make an arrest, citing Zim*mer*mans claim of self-defense. Protests exploded nationally. Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea assumed totemic power. Celebritiesthe actor Jamie Foxx, the former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, members of the Miami Heatwere photographed wearing hoodies. When Rep*resentative Bobby Rush of Chicago took to the House floor to denounce racial profiling, he was removed from the chamber after donning a hoodie mid-speech.
The reaction to the tragedy was, at first, trans-partisan. Conservatives either said nothing or offered tepid support for a full investigationand in fact it was the Republican governor of Florida, Rick Scott, who appointed the special prosecutor who ultimately charged Zimmerman with second-degree murder. As civil-rights activists descended on Florida, National Review, a magazine that once opposed integration, ran a column proclaiming Al Sharpton Is Right. The belief that a young man should be able to go to the store for Skittles and an iced tea and not be killed by a neighborhood-*watch patroller seemed un*controversial.
By the time reporters began asking the White House for comment, the president likely had already given the matter considerable thought. Obama is not simply Americas first black presidenthe is the first president who could credibly teach a black-studies class. He is fully versed in the works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X. Obamas two autobiographies are deeply concerned with race, and in front of black audiences he is apt to cite important but obscure political figures such as George Henry White, who served from 1897 to 1901 and was the last African American congressman to be elected from the South until 1970. But with just a few notable exceptions, the president had, for the first three years of his presidency, strenuously avoided talk of race. And yet, when Trayvon Martin died, talk Obama did:
When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids, and I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this, and that everybody pulls togetherfederal, state, and localto figure out exactly how this tragedy happened
But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. If I had a son, hed look like Trayvon. I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and that were going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.
The moment Obama spoke, the case of Trayvon Martin passed out of its national-mourning phase and lapsed into something darker and more familiarracialized political fodder. The illusion of consensus crumbled. Rush Limbaugh denounced Obamas claim of empathy. The Daily Caller, a conservative Web site, broadcast all of Martins tweets, the most loutish of which revealed him to have committed the un*pardonable sin of speaking like a 17-year-old boy. A white-*supremacist site called st0rmfr0nt produced a photo of Martin with pants sagging, flipping the bird. Business Insider posted the photograph and took it down without apology when it was revealed to be a fake.
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