by Tad Cronn
To the cheers of CNN, President Obama came out unannounced Friday and gave a brief press conference about the Trayvon Martin case and its aftermath.
Unfortunately for the rest of America, after some obligatory “respect the decision” talk, Obama then proceeded to fan the flames of racial division with his usual “it’s all about me” routine.
“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son,” Obama dissembled. “Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And 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 — that doesn’t go away.”
Obama can relate because when he was Trayvon’s age, he was a pothead too, just like Trayvon, hanging around with his “choom gang,” the local stoner cabal.
Although there’s never been a suggestion that the young Obama wanted to be a gang banger, he still identifies with the criminal lifestyle Trayvon was aspiring too.
But in a case that actually had nothing to do with race, Obama had to try to make it about just that, so he whipped out the old white guilt card.
“There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they are shopping at a department store. And that includes me,” he said. “… There are very few African- American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.”
Hell, I’ve been followed in stores, most recently by a black security guard. Because I’m very tall, I’ve also occasionally had the interesting experience of women or small children suddenly noticing me and gasping or even shrieking. Back when I worked in real estate and handed out fliers on my “farming” trips, I had one woman take a look at me — in my nice suit, no less — through her window, quickly lock her door and threaten to call police before I could even knock. (I eventually won her over, though.)
Sorry to disillusion you, black America, but this stuff happens to everybody.
The talking heads on CNN spent hours analyzing how “personal” Obama had made the Trayvon Martin case with yet another useless call for a national “dialogue” on race.
What Obama did and intended to do, of course, was to ramp up the racial divisions on display right now across the country, because a divided populace is easier to manipulate. He added salt to the wounds with speculation about what might have happened if Trayvon weren’t black.
“If a white male teen would have been involved in this scenario,” he said, “both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.”
If Trayvon had been white but had the same attitudes and history, then the fight with George Zimmerman would have ended the same way, with a dead teen. Obama’s right that the aftermath would have been different, however, because there would have been no race hucksters, from Al Sharpton to the president himself, to try to politicize the case.