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| Meet Armstrong Williams |
He, like many of the youth of Ferguson, Missouri, grew up without his father present. And yet his life experience could not be more distant than that of the typical inner-city teenager growing up in a single-parent household.
Given his obviously otherworldly powers of persuasion, it is rare that one comes face to face with the stark reality that Mr. Obama does not know what it is like to grow up poor and uneducated in America’s toughest slums. After the death of Trayvon Martin, Mr. Obama lamented the teen, saying that if he had a son, he would probably look a lot like Trayvon.
But in almost every category other than sex and pigmentation, Barack Obama and Trayvon Martin share almost nothing in common. And in making the comparison, Mr. Obama was being deliberately misleading about his own identity. In fact, as a successful lawyer, author and father, Mr. Obama has much more in common with the maligned 1 percent than with the youth of America’s slums.
Sure, he worked in inner-city Chicago after college. But his experience in Chicago was more like that of a Peace Corps volunteer off to see the world and make a difference than someone who had deep cultural and family ties to the community. He alluded to as much in his memoir, “Dreams of My Father,” when he stated:
“If the language, the humor, the stories of ordinary people were the stuff out of which families, communities, economies would have to be built, then I couldn’t separate that strength from the hurt and distortions that lingered [t]he stories that I had been hearing from the leadership, all the records of courage and sacrifice and overcoming of great odds, had arisen out of a very particular experience with hate.
That hate hadn’t gone away I had to ask myself whether the bonds of community could be restored without collectively exorcising that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams.”Even though he uses the phrase “our lives,” he is clearly referring to “their” outlook on life. Mr. Obama explicitly and conscientiously rejected inner-city culture as a framework for personal and community growth.
And while he found some strength in the “records of courage and sacrifice” that were being recounted to him by inner-city community leaders, he also found that those histories were too corrupted by hatred (or fear of hatred) to make them a foundation for progress and, ultimately, ascendancy to the pinnacle of power in America.
While Mr. Obama might even empathize with the plight of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown, his response to overcoming was just the opposite of the crowd that gathered nightly in Ferguson and waived their arms in mocking admonition to the riot police.
It would not have been to express indignation by rioting and looting. Mr. Obama’s response would have been to raise his arms in the classroom, making his voice a contribution to the creation of law and public policy in America.
It would have been to become a lawmaker in hopes of one day changing it for the benefit of all Americans.