Sunday Open Thread [7.21.13]

Charles Blow at the NYT has been one of the best and most moving commentators on the injustice done to Trayvon Martin. Today, he talks about Barack Obama’s impromptu Friday speech on the matter:

On Friday the president reached past one man and one boy and one case in one small Florida town, across centuries of slavery and oppression and discrimination and self-destructive behavior, and sought to place this charged case in a cultural context.

It can be too easy when speaking of race, bias, stereotypes and inequality to arrive at simplistic explanations. There is often a tendency to separate legacy traumas and cultural conditioning from personal responsibility, but it cannot be done. The truth is that racial realities are complicated, weaving all these factors into a single fabric.

There is no denying that an enormous amount of violence — both physical and psychological — is aimed at black men. That violence is both interracial and intraracial. Too many black men inflict that violence on one another, feeding a self-destructive cycle of victimization until hope is crushed to the ground and opportunity seems beyond the sky.

All of this must be considered when we speak of race, and those conversations cannot be a communion of the aggrieved. All parties must acknowledge and accept their role in the problems for us to solve them. Only when the burden of bias is shared — only when we can empathize with the feelings of “the other” — can we move beyond injury to healing.

And while I’m here, one of the higher rated comments of this article really speaks to the one big thing about Barack Obama that I don’t think people will come to terms with until he is well gone from office:

What struck me as infinitely sad while listening to our President speak was the fact that no matter how carefully he picked his words, no matter how low key he kept his speech, no matter whom or what he addressed, there is a segment of our society that simply are too wound up in their hatred and distrust(daily and viciously stoked by those of talk radio and cable outlet) to hear him.
I respect him all the more that he keeps trying to reach out to them anyway.
THAT, is leadership.

I’m not always happy about it, but I do respect it too.

The problem of easy assumptions about who black men are — here’s a story about the time Barack Obama went to a Tina Brown book party and was asked to get a drink for one of the attendees.

The moving words of the white father of a 17-year old mixed race son:

My goal is to keep the conversation about race going, with my son and anyone willing to have an open mind and heart; to make clear not all white men harbor these beliefs – that likely most of us wish to have fairness and justice to be independent of the color of one’s skin. I will write and talk about this to whoever will listen.

I will work as hard as I can to move against the NRA (who is mysteriously silent on this case), because it is my firm belief that this frightened little man, without the concealed gun, would never have escalated his actions to the point of confronting this teenager, must less shooting him dead.

I will work to see that “Stand Your Ground” initiatives fail wherever I can, because Trayvon Martin wasn’t afforded his right to stand his ground after being stalked and harassed by a strange adult; that Stand Your Ground is a license to kill – an instrument of oppression.

Of course the NRA is nowhere to be seen here. They certainly don’t want to be responsible for getting African Americans to arm themselves against the people they’ve been most successful at scaring to death. We certainly can’t disrupt this bit of deception:

What interests you today?