Obama was quick to racialize the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, but reticent on Dallas.
(that's because he's an agitating prick...but anyway)
America has just experienced one of the saddest weeks anyone can remember, certainly since the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks. Two young black men shot to death by policemen, one white, the other Asian, in episodes that seem, in early perceptions, to have been senseless. Then eleven Dallas police officers shot from ambush—at least five fatally—in a racially charged spree of savagery. Such events, and certainly such events in confluence, defy efforts to give expression to the human emotions they unleash. We try, of course, reaching for the most powerful and outrage-charged words we can muster, but everything seems to fall short. It’s too sad, too numbing, too disheartening.
Such events also are too easily exploited for political advantage or philosophical leverage. Whenever a black is killed in confrontation with a white policeman (or, it seems now, an Asian American), the cry goes up that racism must have been at the heart of it.
read on
Obama's Double Standard on Race | The National Interest
(that's because he's an agitating prick...but anyway)
America has just experienced one of the saddest weeks anyone can remember, certainly since the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks. Two young black men shot to death by policemen, one white, the other Asian, in episodes that seem, in early perceptions, to have been senseless. Then eleven Dallas police officers shot from ambush—at least five fatally—in a racially charged spree of savagery. Such events, and certainly such events in confluence, defy efforts to give expression to the human emotions they unleash. We try, of course, reaching for the most powerful and outrage-charged words we can muster, but everything seems to fall short. It’s too sad, too numbing, too disheartening.
Such events also are too easily exploited for political advantage or philosophical leverage. Whenever a black is killed in confrontation with a white policeman (or, it seems now, an Asian American), the cry goes up that racism must have been at the heart of it.
read on
Obama's Double Standard on Race | The National Interest
