Sojourners had an article about the President’s comments from the White House press room last Friday. My comment in response to the article was that I thought the president's remarks were both instructive and healing. His delivery in the press conference mode was the perfect medium, rather than his "campaign to the crowds" mode. That he could calmly speak in the tone of an intimate conversation made it much easier for us white folks to hear him. The most profound and poignant moment for me was when he described the experiences of a young black man getting on the elevator and seeing a woman back up and clutch her purse, of hearing car doors lock as he walks across the street – then saying, "This has happened to me." I think the president advanced the conversation tremendously.

You can read the Sojourner article, “A History of Discrimination Earns President Obama a Right to Speak” at http://sojo.net/blogs/2013/07/22/history-discrimination-earns-president-obama-right-speak

The most profound and poignant moment for me was when he described the experiences of a young black man getting on the elevator and seeing a woman back up and clutch her purse, of hearing car doors lock as he walks across the street – then saying, "This has happened to me."

I have to say, I do this kind of thing when almost any man approaches and even some women, if they don't have children with them. It depends where I am. There is nothing especially discriminatory about it, in the sense of unfairness and a woman can hardly help it if she feels suddenly scared.

Maclin, it's very sad that this presidency has not brought about the real change it could have.

Indeed. I'd say it's tragic too.

I seem to recall your buddy Daniel mumbling something in this forum about 'racial healing'. It is rather much to expect politicians to have much of an effect on the culture. Given the wretched institutional sclerosis we face, it is actually rather much to expect them to have an effect on the political architecture either.

That having been said, you pick up the newspaper and you get the impression that the administration repairs to the default settings of the Democratic Party, and that means there will be assiduous efforts to render public policy worse than it already is (Thos. Perez, "Comprehensive immigration reform", &c).

One way to interpret the blatherskite about 'diversity' and also much of the immigration boosterism you hear is to understand it all as a comment on other subcultures within the country. You have an academic subculture heaping scorn on the children of those bourgeois who do not share the tastes and prejudices of academics and then you have the haut bourgeois in general being dismissive of the common-and-garden (non-exotic) working class. Sometimes this has lucid expression:

http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/17/rubio-doubles-down-into-disaster/

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I do not know if it would promote racial healing, but it would be agreeable if a prominent personality they could not dismiss appeared on a college campus and told the faculty and administration present that their attitude toward their revenue sources was unseemly. It would not promote racial healing, but it would advance honest discussion, to say plainly to Democratic members of Congress that promoting population replacement for purposes of political gamesmanship is an indicator that you do not share the interests of the extant population and that (once upon a time) people who sought to dethrone the sovereign ended their days one head shorter.

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And I think we all recall the situation as it was from about 1964 to about 1993, when we were all told that it was illegitimate to be the least bit concerned about security in urban living. You will recall we were told "law and order" was code for something else; those people never did get around to letting the rest of us know just what was the code for 'law and order'.

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Do you get the impression that the contempt for evangelicals in this country is offered without inhibition?

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You see, the trouble with your hope is that it hinges on those around the president of having a sense of where actual cultural wounds are and what might be done to address them. Fat chance.

Maclin, it's very sad that this presidency has not brought about the real change it could have.

It could do nothing of the sort. Our politicians have managed to balance the federal budget three times since 1961. That tells you what they can manage.

"It is rather much to expect politicians to have much of an effect on the culture...."

Not by command, of course, but they do have an effect. Surely Clinton's tomcat persona and brazen lying had some effect on making that kind of thing more acceptable. If Obama addressed the racial situation more fairly and completely, instead of focusing on the clutched purse and the locked doors, for instance, he might even have some direct influence.

One not fully appreciated or understood, I think. The Clinton years in general may have been the point where the current situation of extreme bitterness and win-at-any-cost hostility became the norm. I'm not sure about that--the Reagan and for that matter the Nixon years were pretty bad, too. But it seems like things went to a new level then, and stayed.

Question, is Eleanor Holmes Norton in the habit of making utterly fraudulent remarks, is she unaware of the facts of the case and ordinary descriptive statistics about crime in this country, or is that all a matter of indifference (she knows a story and she is sticking to it)? That broad ran the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during the Carter Administration. Could she have adjudicated any case fairly?

I drive through a fairly wealthy neighborhood on my way to work. I see a lot of people walking and jogging. I noticed the other day that whether someone registers on me as out of place or not depends mostly on what they're wearing and their general demeanor, certainly way more than on race. There's a black guy I see walking a dog occasionally: big man, dressed in a way that's far more L.L. Bean than gangster. He's atypical, so I notice him, but he doesn't really look out of place. There's a less affluent neighborhood right adjacent to that one, which I also pass through, and there's also a big black guy I see walking there. He wears a sideways baseball cap and saggy jeans, and sort of shuffles along rather than striding like the other guy. He would look out of place.

Obviously we can badly misjudge people on the basis of things like that, but the idea that we can force people not to form those kinds of impressions is silly and doomed. Pattern recognition is a very elemental function of the mind.

Best I can tell from a distance, Tracy Martin is a man with several different aspects to him; the most important aspect would be "average American". He is a long-haul truck driver - right near the median of compensation and skill-level in this economy. It is doubtful that anything in his background has prepared him for the maelstrom he has inhabited for the last 18 months. To add to that, people are naturally emotionally partisan for their own, and that can cloud their judgment. Benjamin Crump was supposedly recommended to TM by a shirt-tail relation, and TM made a seminally bad decision in retaining the man (and his odious appendage, Ryan Julison).