for everybody. rates of children growing up in single parent households are through the charts in white america. yeah. there s no way that he can articulate a politics of responsibility just for blacks and somehow say that he s doing this as a president of all the united states. i guess part of what i say, he did not racialize. he s standing in a racialized space. there is, on the one hand a critique of president obama. i guess it s less interesting to me than the critique that i experience not so much about what president obama says, but the reception of it. the audience that says yes, this is what is wrong with us. what is wrong with us is us. we need to do better. if we do better, everything will be all right. my angst is whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. does it keep you from asking
i hear president obama. and those of you who are calling for personal responsibility and a desire for absentee fathers to step up to the plate. sure. i mean it s a deeply, human, personal reaction. i get it. but here, we are talking about policy. let s be honest, a woman can do everything right, get an education, marry before having children and can still end up a single mom. dads don t have to be awful, uncaring deadbeats to parent from a distance. the reality of the world we are living in right now is this. single moms are responsible and they are the ones raising sons and daughters every day. single mothers in the u.s. work more than their peers in developed nations. they are holding up their end of the american bargain that offers opportunity in exchange for effort. in response our government owes
because they are married? what are you going do? it s disrespectful for the people who can t get married or don t want to get married. to force it, i understand what he s trying to do. i don t know that in practice it works. i think it s a moment which, you know, he can come as a liberal and join as a conservative. it s interesting. there s multiple president obamas. there s the one doing the bully pulpit, which he does in church rather than i m here to make a policy speech. it felt uncomfortable to me in this moment. the president always try anglated being of the left and carve out space in the center. he s absorbed the rhetoric of the right. the trickle down economics and
violence. if his words sound familiar, it s because we heard similar rhetoric in president obama s speech in chicago. what are the rules about who gets to criticize single parent households? raul raez is here. people went nuts when romney said it. it s interesting the context where people can criticize single moms. there s sketches in the minority communities when they are exposed to the largest society, that s when people become very uncomfortable. for someone like mitt romney whose own legacy in terms of family and wives is complicated. when he talks like that, it confused me when i first saw it. i didn t think it had to do with gun violence.
he s not speaking of that. he did. what happens is everybody forgots that piece and it goes back to the respective piece. i want you to respond to the history. valerie is the adviser to the president talking about gun violence in chicago. she said this about the community she remembers growing up in. when i was a young child growing up, not far from where this girl was killed, if i went down the block and got in trouble, my mother got heard about it. it comes from the community being involved and raising children. we have to partner with faith based institutions. this is the great politics and respectability narrative. back when i was a kid, it was totally different. we have to be able to do that again. couldn t be further from the