According to Politico’s Roger Simon, when Barack Obama proclaimed to the world that “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” he did so to prevent riots in the streets across America:
(The) speech came at a time of political crisis. The Zimmerman acquittal was a different kind of crisis. There had been demonstrations, and President Obama could not afford to have them grow into riots. But he also wanted white America to understand what black America was going through post-verdict.
Simon’s glowing review of Obama’s seventeen minute speech is awkwardly titled: “Race talk over. Problem solved.” White guy Simon turned to white guy David Maraniss to reinforce the claim that the president would rather not talk about race at all, but he has been dragged into the conversation by horrible white racist cops and George Zimmerman:
Race seemingly became unimportant, if not irrelevant, to the first black president of the United States. He rarely spoke about it, only when circumstances pressed him – once when a notable African-American Harvard professor was detained by a cop for forcibly entering his own home after being locked out, and again when a jury found the man who shot Martin not guilty.
Has it occurred to Simon that perhaps it’s at least a little bit racist to claim that marauding hordes of black men and women were only moments away from rioting in our streets and were only subdued because our black president made a few remarks?