President Obama made a surprise appearance in the White House briefing room Friday to share his thoughts on the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, saying it is important to look at the case through the lens of past discrimination.
“Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” Obama said in extensive remarks that were deeply personal and reflective. “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 continued: “And I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.”
Obama, who spoke about both his own experience as a black man and what he sees in his daughters and their relationship to children of other races, noted, ”There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of being followed in a department store. That includes me.”
But he also struck a hopeful note, saying, “As difficult and challenging as this episode has been, things are getting better.”
“We should also have confidence that kids these days I think have more sense than we did back then, and certainly more than our parents did or our grandparents did,” Obama said. “And along this long journey, we’re becoming a more perfect union, not a perfect union, but a more perfect union.”
The president said he and his deputies were considering pursuing a few concrete policy options in the wake of the George Zimmerman verdict, such as trying to train state and local law enforcement officials how to better deal with issues of racial bias, and explore if laws such as “stand your ground” would “encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations” rather than defuse them.
More broadly, he said he wanted to pursue a “long-term project” of “thinking about how to bolster and reinforce African American kids. There are a lot of kids out there that need help, that are getting a lot of negative reinforcement.”
And individual Americans, he said, would have to “do some soul-searching” about their own inherent racial biases, and ask, “Am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can?”
“That would I think be an important exercise in the wake of this tragedy,” he said.
Full transcript of Obama’s remarks on Trayvon Martin
