In a Tumultuous Moment, Barack Obama Chooses Reflection

Obama participates in a virtual town hall.
Addressing a Zoom town hall, Obama thanked “young people across the country who put themselves out on the line to make a difference.”Photograph from Obama Foundation / Getty

There are many modes of President Barack Obama, and the one that appeared, on Wednesday, in a Zoom town hall was calm, reflective, optimistic about policy, attuned to injustice, and certain, to his bones, that the current situation was not a complete disaster—or at least not an irredeemable one. “I’ve heard some people say, ‘You have a pandemic, then you have these protests, this reminds me of the sixties, and the chaos, the discord and distrust across the country,’ ” he said, pausing between some of his words to allow viewers to take in his Zoom look—casual, open-collared shirt, with the lighting falling more on an unevenly filled bookcase than on him. “I know enough about that history to say there is something different.” There is, he said, a “broad coalition” that didn’t exist in the sixties, and, even with reports of the violence of a “tiny minority,” polls show that a majority think that the protests are justified. “That’s not the consequence of speeches by politicians, or the result of spotlights in news articles,” Obama said. “That’s a direct result of the activities and organization and mobilization and engagement of so many young people across the country who put themselves out on the line to make a difference. So I just have to say thank you to them.” In short: You’re not alone, and what you do has meaning and value, as you do, and it is part of a larger picture of American progress, as you are. Don’t panic, and don’t despair.

Obama hadn’t previously spoken in a live forum about the protests that have spread across the country since the police killing, in Minneapolis, of George Floyd; an essay the former President wrote was posted on Medium on Monday, the same day his successor in the White House deployed police and the National Guard to clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square, and threatened to deploy the military in states, whether their governors like it or not. Obama’s appearance Wednesday was under the auspices of a group he helped found, My Brother’s Keeper, whose mission is “building safe and supportive communities for boys and young men of color.” The structure of the forum, which was collegial and inclusive, seemed part of the point. It included a panel of activists and Obama’s former Attorney General Eric Holder, in what Brittany Packnett Cunningham, the moderator and a co-founder of Campaign Zero, a group that works against police violence, called a “family conversation.” Perhaps there were other, more electrifying messages that Obama could have given that would, in the moment, have been more emotionally satisfying—a speech he could have given, a spotlight he could have occupied. This is the one he chose, but there is something enduring about it.

Obama did not gloss over the pain in the country. In the past few weeks, he said, structural problems, particularly with racism, had been “thrown into high relief”; there had been “too much violence,” for too long. Like the other panelists, he said the names of some of those who had died: Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sean Bell, Ahmaud Arbery, and others. “Your lives matter,” he said, addressing young people in his virtual audience. “You should be able to learn and make mistakes and live a life of joy without having to worry about what’s going to happen when you walk to the store or go for a jog, or driving down the street, or looking at some birds in the park.” (That last was a reference to an incident last week in New York’s Central Park, in which a white woman called the police on a black bird-watcher.) Regardless of what he thought about the analogies to the sixties, he had been rereading James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” and found it apt. (On Thursday, he tweeted out a link to an essay by Baldwin in The New Yorker which Baldwin later expanded into the book.)

Obama saw “opportunity” in the current moment, with young people “galvanized.” He also believed that there were “folks in law enforcement” who are outraged by what has happened, and want change. And he had ideas: his foundation had helped put together a report on “specific, evidence-based reforms.” He also asked Cunningham to go through a list of her organization’s eight immediate proposals for reducing police violence, which include banning chokeholds and establishing a “duty to intervene” on the part of officers who witness police violence. (While Derek Chauvin had his knee on Floyd’s neck, three other officers stood by; they have now been charged with aiding and abetting the killing, while Chauvin has been charged with second-degree murder.) Obama emphasized that many of these reforms must “take place at the local level”—states, cities, towns. He had made a similar point in his Medium piece, in which he also admonished the small number of people who had engaged in violence to both “model” a “higher ethical code” and to consider what the damage meant in local terms. “I saw an elderly black woman being interviewed today in tears because the only grocery store in her neighborhood had been trashed,” he wrote. When thinking about progress, he said in the town hall, “we need to be clear about where change is going to happen.”

Coming from a former President, those were somewhat cryptic words, particularly since he also offered a defense of electoral politics, which he worried that some had lost faith in. He said that he had “been hearing a little bit of chatter in the Internet about voting versus protest, politics and participation versus civil disobedience and direct action. This is not an either/or. This is a both/and.” But the example he gave of the product of that joint effort was not his own Presidency, although he praised Holder’s work in addressing police violence. Instead, he cited another panelist, Philipe Cunningham, a trans man elected to the Minneapolis city council, as proof of the efficacy of electoral politics: “You need those folks in order to ultimately deliver the goods.”

Obama never mentioned Donald Trump by name, or what sort of goods he has been delivering. In some ways, that was striking, on a day when James Mattis, a retired Marine general, who submitted his resignation as Trump’s Defense Secretary in late 2018, put out an appalled statement, via The Atlantic, about how Trump’s talk of using troops to “dominate” cities was a violation of the Constitution, and an act of division, and undermined the “moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect.” There were hopes that the statement might be a turning point; Senator Lisa Murkowsi, Republican of Alaska, called Mattis’s words “true and honest and necessary and overdue.” But, as consequential and as welcome as Mattis’s words are, he has until now been largely quiet about Trump—too quiet, given what he undoubtedly witnessed while serving in his Cabinet. In contrast, Obama has spoken out often enough over the years, often taking risks or making bold gestures to do so—whether about race, or guns, or when he began singing “Amazing Grace” after the shootings in Charleston, or, for that matter, when he first announced that he was running for President—to earn a moment of reflection and a chance to listen to other voices, such as the activists on his panel. He has had an effect on the national discourse, one that Mattis, too, may have learned something from. Indeed, to Obama’s point about there being a broader coalition now than there was a few decades ago, Mattis urged Americans thinking about the events of recent days not to be distracted by “a small number of lawbreakers”: the protesters’ call for justice was “a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind.” Mattis also decried “three years without mature leadership,” implicitly acknowledging what Obama brought to the White House, along with what has been lost.

“I hope people don’t feel like, well, nothing’s going to happen once we figure this out,” Obama said, toward the end of the event. He repeated a line from Martin Luther King, Jr., that he often cites: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” “We bend it!” Obama said. “All of you have bent it.” There was, in his riff on King’s phrase, an echo of the injunction to flatten the curve—Obama had, earlier, mentioned the disparities in the toll taken by the coronavirus pandemic, which has not gone away—and also a sense of accomplishment. “Keep working, and stay hopeful,” Obama said as he signed off. “Proud of you.” But there is so much to do. And, before this chapter is through, there may be more that Obama needs to say, with more fire next time.


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