Tavis Smiley gets President Obama all wrong [View all]

Tavis Smiley gets President Obama all wrong
The host ripped the president's race speech for "lacking leadership." But it's Smiley who's out of touch here
By Brittney Cooper


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The most remarkable thing about this speech is that it is the first time that black men’s humanity and personhood have been the subject of a public conversation at the highest levels of government. By stepping into Trayvon Martin’s shoes, President Obama asked the nation to see him, in that moment, first, as a black man, as the kind of national subject who had been subject to racial profiling, to the sounds of locked car doors as he merely walked down the street, to women (many of them white women, I suspect) clutching their purses and holding their breaths while riding the elevator with him.

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In a total of eighteen minutes, the president did what the prosecutors could not manage to do over the course of two weeks of trial, with over a year to prepare. He demonstrated that Trayvon Martin was a vulnerable kid, unfairly followed, who was victimized because he could only bring his fists and his screams to a gun fight. And after Zimmerman murdered him, the system victimized him further, by suggesting as it does for so many black men, that there is plenty of ground upon which to die, but very little upon which to stand.

The failure to see this, the deliberate choice not to see this, makes it incredibly difficult, then, for me to rock with media pundits and strident Obama critics like Tavis Smiley. Essentially, Smiley argued on Meet the Press this week that because President Obama was “pushed to the podium” at the end of a week of protests rather than walking there of his own accord days earlier, he had again failed to provide “moral leadership.” “Kingian leadership.”

Therein lies the problem: Tavis Smiley and others of his generation crave a resurgence of prophetic leadership. And surely we need it. But they would do well to remember that kings, princes and presidents are rarely prophetic. President Obama is not a part of the black prophetic tradition. His response to Rev. Jeremiah Wright taught us that. He is part of an American democratic tradition that works most effectively when “we the people” lead from below.

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Despite all that, I know that when the president stands up in his black male body and stands in as a character witness for a slain black boy, it matters. When the president argues that the nation has a duty to make black men feel valued and included as full citizens, it matters. And it matters, because no president has ever said it quite like that before. This is what American exceptionalism means for black people: that an extraordinary black citizen’s experiences must act as a guarantee of credit-worthiness, as a co-signer, if you will, for the experiences of the ordinary black citizen. This should not be.

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http://www.salon.com/2013/07/22/tavis_smiley_doesnt_understand_president_obama/

Brittney Cooper is an assistant professor of Women's Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University.