President Obama is under attack from one side (mostly whites) for what he “has said” about Trayvon Martin. Now, he is under attack from the other side for what he has “not said” about Trayvon Martin.
Today, Huffington Post contributor Kirsten West Savali attacked Obama for what happened last week on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
In a piece for Huff Post BlackVoices, Savali suggests that Obama dropped an opportunity to speak about Martin and the acquittal of his killer, George Zimmerman.
Savali wrote, “(President Obama) chose to instead unnecessarily conflate (Trayvon’s) brutal killing with the ‘disproportionate’ number of black men involved in ‘criminal activities and violence’.
She went on to write that Obama took a “play from the rule book of every racist pundit” who suggested that Martin was a “teen thug with a history of bad behavior”.
That from an Obama supporter because the President said, “We all know that young African-American men disproportionately have involvement in criminal activities and violence…”
The writer continues: “… (Obama’s) flippant statement about Trayvon’s presumed character and his stereotypical assessment of the black community beg the question:
What in the hell does the slaying of an unarmed black child have to do with black criminality?”
Those words of anger were followed by this statement: “It is no easy feat to come across as both cowardly and concerned at the same time.”
Savali concluded: “After watching President Obama’s appearance on Leno, I’m extremely pleased that I held my applause after his “eloquent” impromptu speech on Trayvon Martin last month. Deep down I knew that something he said — or didn’t say — down the road would prove he didn’t deserve it.”
So what do we take from this?
For all the Trayvon Martin “likeness” that President Obama put on the nation during the trial and after the verdict … for all his efforts to “shame” whites into accepting that Trayvon’s death was wrong — Obama is learning that bigotry is a two-way street … and maybe beginning to learn it for the first time.
In the South, there’s a saying, You know that you are wrong … when your own dog bites you.