In a rare and public reflection on race last Friday, US President Barack Obama called on the Americans to do some soul searching over the death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his shooter, saying the slain black teenager “could have been me 35 years ago.” Empathizing with the pain of many black Americans, Obama said the case conjured up a hard history of racial injustice “that doesn’t go away.”
Despite his emotional comments on the case, the president appeared to signal that the Justice Department was unlikely to file federal civil rights charges against Zimmerman. Traditionally, he said, “these are issues of state and local government,” and he warned that the public should have “clear expectations.”
As the US president urged the public to accept the verdict — “once the jury’s spoken, that’s how our system works” — he also gave voice to the feelings held by many angered by the jury’s decisions.
“When you think about why, in the African- American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, 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 doesn’t go away,” Obama said during his 20-minute remark.
There’s a sense, Obama said, “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.”
“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,” he said. “That includes me.”
In a departure from his typical caution on legal matters, the president also waded into the thorny debates on racial profiling and Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, despite the fact that neither was formally raised during Zimmerman’s trial.
And he raised the provocative question of whether Martin himself, if he had been armed and of age, “could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk” and shot Zimmerman if he felt threatened when being followed.
Seeking to inject a sense of hope into his otherwise sombre remarks, the president said race relations in the United States have improved with each passing generation. He said his young daughters and their friends are “better than we were.”
Before Friday, his only comment on the verdict had been a written statement in which he called Martin’s death a tragedy and appealed for calm.
A Florida jury last week acquitted George Zimmerman of all charges in the February 2012 shooting of Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old. The verdict was cheered by those who agreed that Zimmerman was acting in self-defence, while others protested the outcome, believing Zimmerman had targeted Martin because he was black.
