When Obama Became a Black President

As of July 19, a president elected and re-elected on the theme of reconciliation between American communities has become an African-American once again.

“Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.” In throwing out this phrase during an unexpected speech in the White House press room, where journalists were waiting for the spokesperson’s daily briefing, Barack Obama knowingly threw a small bomb. To be sure, on Feb. 26, 2012, immediately after the death of the black teenager killed by a neighborhood watchman, he had already declared that this boy could have been his son. However, since then, the affair had been decided and the killer, George Zimmerman, has been acquitted. Obama — and all the more so since he is the president — had no need whatsoever to come back to something that had already been decided, even if this issue could be considered debatable and has provoked demonstrations of protest throughout the United States. However, Obama deliberately made this declaration, improvising throughout, without his usual recourse to a teleprompter. The first black president of the United States spoke, for the first time in his presidency, as a black American.

His deeply personal appropriation of the affair is visible when one reads the whole of his speech. For example, while recounting instances from his youth, he recalled that because he was black he was often followed with mistrust when he went to the supermarket or that he saw drivers lock their car doors when he crossed the street and women clutch their purses close when he got into an elevator with them. Certainly, he continues, it is not a question of challenging the verdict rendered in Florida but of pointing out that the “African-American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws.”

An Incongruous Position To Take Up

The president of the United States has therefore deliberately accentuated the racial drama of Sanford and the decision reached by the Florida jury six days earlier in the Zimmerman affair, even though the trial had indeed exonerated the actions of the watchman from any racial motivation. Thirty witnesses interrogated by the FBI about Zimmerman’s habitual behavior with respect to black people confirmed that this was not in any way one of his preoccupations. He himself is of mixed background, with one Peruvian parent. And the police dispatcher, who took his call about a suspicious individual on the evening in question, stated that at no point did he speak of a black man. Zimmerman only specified the race of the individual after the operator explicitly asked him about it.

The president’s deliberate taking of this position is all the more incongruous in that it breaks completely with what had been an ideological line of Obama’s political career since he became an Illinois senator.* This impression was reinforced by his first presidential campaign in 2008, in which he sought to present himself as the first president capable of overcoming the racial divide, precisely because he was to be the first black president of the United States. In the course of one briefing, he challenged this political line, which had until now allowed him to govern without the color of his skin being really invoked. Whatever one may think of the debatable acquittal of George Zimmerman, Obama’s change in attitude is most likely a mistake or the calculation of a man who no longer has anything to lose because he cannot be re-elected.

*Translator’s note: The author mistakenly says Michigan here.