president. now, the flip side of it is there are some black folk, maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because i m a black president. you know, ever since president obama was elected to office, the country has been re-examining its feelings about race and prejudice. for many the level and tone of outright disrespect and disdain for the legitimacy of the obama presidency has felt racist. at a time when america is already undergoing tectonic shifts on issues surrounding race, gender, equality, what impact will president obama have on the larger arc of race issues in american history. is he a catalyst for conversation or merely revealing issues that have long been ignored. now surprisingly the right wing conservatives were quick to misconstrue the president s remarks and attack him for playing the race card. you can count on one hand the number of times the president has waded into race publicly. carefully, almost methodically choosing s
subject too much. i remember interviewing him years ago and i was asking about race a lot because the book i was writing had was mainly had to do with race. and after the interview was over, leaving the oval office and he kind of grabs my shoulder and says, remember, i can t talk about this stuff too much because whatever i say, whatever one word or two words or sentence or paragraph, it becomes a grenade. it becomes so explosive whether it was the skip gates incident and this time, he said, look. of course, there s a certain number of people that just don t like me because i m african-american. and then he very quickly turns around and says, but, of course, there are some people that give me a break because i am. in other words, he wants to show his awareness of that. i look at twitter and what is blowing up on twitter on the right, obama plays the race card in my interview. he didn t do that at all. it s absolutely ridiculous.
give me the reaction to the timing and tone of this message. it was deeply personal, remarkable how personal it was. as kristen said we ve never heard him speak about these issues ever in this. he had only given a speech about race overall in 2008. he said last year my son can be trayvon, you know, and that was a very personal comment. this was much deeper when he talked about being followed when he was shopping. that was something he never said. i was just watching. i have covered him for six or seven years and i never heard him speak in that detail about race and sort of extemporaneously, this was not a planned speech. he had a few notes but it wasn t written out. the moment was so profound for those reasons as well as because of how much he crossed. he talked about his daughters and their experience with race. he talked about himself growing up. he talked about america. he managed to speak to the pain that people particularly african-americans are feeling while also if you noticed
speech. just to set the record straight. the column i was talking about published in washington post basically the same day that president obama spoke yesterday and eugene robinson s point was that president obama should not do what he went out and did later in the day. when the president talks about race, he can t help it even if his intentions are good, people feel threatened. at this point in his presidency he could ignore this absurd reality and say whatever he wants. the unfortunate fact is if his aim is to prevent dialogue on race speaking his mind is demonstrably counterproductive. the president weighed in almost casually on the skip gates matter in cambridge and it just all of this blow back and it overheated sort of racial rhetoric that resulted from that. what do you make of the point that eugene robinson was raising yesterday? i don t agree with it. the comments about skip gates were not the most careful thing
at double the rate of whites during police interactions and four times as often in encounters with black suspects do they face force from police. these are not differences of 5 or 10 or 20%. the statistics go to suspects, just to treatment. it goes through the our criminal justice system. that is why this case polarizes because some people don t see it. if you know those facts, you know what some of those problems are. that s sort of the issue here. it s kind of interesting. i thought it was a very powerful thing, powerful speech to listen to. if you look at the history of obama talking about race as president, there isn t too much history to go on. you think about skip gates in 2010. you think about the backlash. it came across as threatening. so my question in watching this