Barack Obama
Related: About this forumPresident Obama Tells Mayors Racism is a ‘Blight’ on Nation
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President Obama speaks at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in San Francisco Friday.
KQED - JUNE 19, 2015
President Obama told hundreds of mayors in San Francisco Friday that this weeks massacre at a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, shows that racism still haunts the United States.
The apparent motivations of the shooter reminds us that racism remains a blight we have to combat together, Obama said during a keynote speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
We have made great progress, the president said. But we have to be vigilant because it still lingers and when it is poisoning the minds of young people, it betrays our ideals and tears our democracy apart.
The president also used the speech to insist he has not given up on federal gun control reforms, even after being rebuffed by Congress in the wake of the December 2014 slaughter of 20 first-graders and six adults at a school in Newtown, Connecticut.
If Congress had passed some common-sense gun safety reforms after Newtown after a group of children had been gunned down in their own classroom reforms that 90 percent of the American people supported we wouldnt have prevented every act of violence or even most. We dont know it would have prevented what happened in Charleston, no reform can guarantee the elimination of violence, Obama said. But we might still have some Americans with us. We might have stopped one shooter, some families might still be whole, yall might have to attend fewer funerals.
http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/06/19-obama-speaks-in-San-Francisco
yallerdawg
(16,104 posts)We will not have equal opportunity until we have equal outcomes.
The outcomes tell us we have a whole lot of work to do. If we don't care about outcomes, and the ongoing serious disproportionate limitations and impositions on blacks and other minorities including women, we are not the democratic society we profess to be.
Overt ugly racist acts are tragic. Covert subtle institutional racism of America is our ongoing, unending national shame.
ucrdem
(15,703 posts)The idea that the US or any G-12 nation has "overcome racism" in any kind of satisfactory way is ridiculous and at this point, after dozens of filmed and widely publicized police shootings and beatings going back to Rodney King, it's really hard to claim naiveté as an excuse for thinking so.
sheshe2
(87,475 posts)It's difficult to imagine a less propitious week for that argument. No sooner had the court pronounced racism dead than its skeleton emerged from cupboards galore and started doing the can-can on primetime.
The day before the ruling, the trial of George Zimmerman opened in Florida. Zimmerman, who is Latino, shot dead an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, claiming he looked "suspicious". He was neither charged nor arrested for several weeks, and then only after nationwide protests. Zimmerman, who had never met Martin, referred to the boy as a "punk" and complained to the police dispatcher: "They always get away." Zimmerman weighs 250lbs and had a 9mm handgun; Martin, 17, weighed 140lbs and had a packet of Skittles and a can of iced tea. Zimmerman claims he was acting in self-defence. "He shot him for the worst of all reasons," said state prosecutor John Guy in his opening statement. "Because he wanted to.''
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/30/us-supreme-court-thinks-racism-dead
sheshe2
(87,475 posts)Damn straight!
Thanks ucrdem.