According to this story by Christi Parsons in the Chicago Tribune, Barack Obama came with it during a Democratic candidate’s forum yesterday to the NAACP (story below). The article compares his statements to the NAACP with a speech he gave at Howard University, where he spoke in “mostly lofty terms.” At the NAACP event in Detroit, however, Parsons’ describes Obama’s statements as combining “his intellectual assessment of social problems with a stronger does of personal feeling.”
What Parsons’ refers to as “the personal” in Obama’s remarks I simply see as his willingness to speak on silence and inaction in the media– especially when it comes to justice for black people. And even though he’s not talking about anything new, there is something particularly striking in the specter of disproportionate sentencing in this cultural moment, this moment of Paris Hilton and Scooter Libby, of Genarlow Wilson, the Newark lesbians sentencing, and the Jena Six. (Jesse Rae Beard, one of the h.s. students, is pictured, left.) Obama took a good opportunity for shifting the norm, by using specific examples to make other candidates seem too abstract and less connected to the cultural moment, without affecting his own reputation for being “intellectual,” but here humanized, relatable.
The story is a good one. Below it is a Jena Six background story, since I haven’t posted on the case yet:
And here’s a background story related to the Jena Six, whom I will say more about in a later post:
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