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A House Divided by Thomas J. Sugrue

July 28, 2013

Article III of an 11-part Series on Race in America - Past and President
A House Divided

By Thomas J. Sugrue

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Thomas J. Sugrue

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Why do middle-class Blacks have far less wealth than Whites at the same income level? The answer is in real estate and history.

In 1973, my parents sold their modest house on Detroit's West Side to Roosevelt Smith, a Vietnam War veteran and an assembly-line worker at Ford, and his wife, Virginia (not their real names). For the Smiths - African-Americans and native Mississippians - the neighborhood was an appealing place to raise their two young children, and the price was within their means: $17,500.

The neighborhood's three-bedroom colonials and Tudors, mostly built between the mid-1920s and the late '40s, were well maintained, the streets quiet and lined with stately trees. Nearby was a movie theater, a good grocery store, a local department store, and a decent shopping district. Like many first-time home buyers, the Smiths had every reason to expect that their house would be an appreciating investment.

For their part, my parents moved to a rapidly growing suburb that would soon be incorporated as Farmington Hills. Their new house, on a quiet, curvilinear street, was a significant step up from the Detroit place. It had four bedrooms, a two-car attached garage, and a large yard. It cost them $43,000. Within a few years, they had added a family room and expanded the small rear patio.

Their subdivision, like most in Farmington Hills, was carefully zoned. The public schools were modern and well funded, with substantial revenues from the town's mostly middle- and upper-middle-class taxpayers. All of the creature comforts of the good suburban life were close at hand: shopping malls, swim clubs, movie theaters, good restaurants.

My parents lived in the Farmington house for a little over 20 years. When my father retired in the mid-1990s, the property had appreciated by about $100,000. They did not get rich from the proceeds of their home sale-indeed, after adjusting for inflation, the house was worth slightly less than they paid for it, not even counting interest costs and taxes. But it nonetheless allowed them to walk away with about $80,000.

For the Smiths it was a far different story. Detroit had been losing population since the 1950s, and especially after the 1967 riots there was massive "White flight" from the city. The neighborhood in which the Smiths invested went from mostly White to Black within a few years, along with the rest of Detroit. For the city as a whole, those who remained were not as well off on average as those who left, meaning that even as the tax base shrank, the demand for city services went up, setting off a vicious death spiral. Soon, schools and infrastructure groaned with age, and the city's tax base shrank further as businesses relocated to suburban office parks and shopping centers. By the end of the '70s, the decline of the auto industry and manufacturing generally compounded Detroit's woes, as production shifted to Japan or the South in search of cheaper labor and fewer regulations.

As the downward cycle continued, investors and absentee landlords-fearful that their property values would decline as Detroit got poorer and Blacker-let their properties run down. Rising crime led to a drop in pedestrian traffic both downtown and in neighborhood shopping districts, and also to increasing demand for additional police protection. As the cost of city services surged and the tax base shrank, Detroit came to have among the highest property tax rates in the nation, which was another reason for people to move out if they could.

Meanwhile, places like Farmington Hills, which were all White in the '70s and '80s, were direct beneficiaries of Detroit's decline. The seemingly insatiable demand for suburban real estate raised housing values; well-funded schools attracted families with children; local malls had few, if any, vacancies; and new shops and office parks seemed to spring up daily.

The same year that my father retired, I visited my childhood neighborhood, and drove past the Smiths' house. The lawn was lush, the shrubs well tended. They had built a garage. The old siding had been replaced and the original windows updated. I stopped at a local real estate broker's office to check out the housing prices in the area. The Smiths' home was not for sale, but another house just two blocks away, almost identical to it and in move-in condition, was on the market for $24,500. Over two decades, Roosevelt and Virginia Smith's house in my parents' old neighborhood, despite love and care and investments, had appreciated by only about $7,000.

After adjusting for inflation, their house was worth about 60 percent less than they had paid for it

In the United States, where real estate is the single largest source of asset accumulation for the middle class, the story of the Sugrues and the Smiths goes a long way to explaining the expanding disparities between White and Black wealth. The two families-like many Americans-invested in real estate both for its use value and as a gamble on the future. But one family did far, far better than the other.

Every once in a while, a scholarly book fundamentally shifts how we understand a problem. One of those books was published in 1995, two years after my parents sold their house. Sociologists Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro's Black Wealth/White Wealth stepped into a stale debate about race, class, and inequality in the United States with new data and a fresh perspective. The authors acknowledged the gains of the civil rights era: Black-White income gaps had narrowed. Minorities were better represented at elite institutions of higher education than could have been imagined in 1960. And while in the '60s the most prominent Black elites were car dealers or owners of "race businesses" that catered to Black customers, by the end of the twentieth century the number of Black engineers, lawyers, and corporate executives had grown. Newsmagazines trumpeted the high incomes of Black sports stars and celebrities. "The New Black Middle Class" became a tagline. African Americans might not have wholly overcome the legacy of centuries of slavery and segregation, but they had come a long way.

But Oliver and Shapiro told another story, a sobering one about the persistent gap between Black and White wealth. They methodically gathered and analyzed data about household assets, like real estate holdings, bank accounts, stocks and bonds, cars, and other property, that constitute a family's portfolio. Their findings were staggering: despite all of the gains of the previous quarter century, the median Black family had only 8 percent of the household wealth of the median White family. The asset gap was still strikingly wide among middle-class and wealthy Blacks, who, despite their high incomes, still had about a third the assets of comparable Whites.

The racial wealth gap has several specific causes beyond the broad legacy of systematic racial segregation, discrimination, and unequal opportunity. Wealth is passed down from generation to generation-even if only modestly. But going back generations, Blacks had little opportunity to get a stake hold. Upon emancipation, they were mostly penniless, without land or access to credit (see Reid Cramer, "The American Dream, Redeemed," page 45), and almost all Blacks were excluded from the various Homestead Acts that, beginning in 1862, allowed so many poor White families to accumulate land and, with it, wealth.

Meanwhile, most African-Americans earned too little to save; most lacked access to the loans and capital necessary to start a business or buy stock or own their own homes. Lack of financial assets made African-Americans more vulnerable to unemployment and medical emergencies, less likely to be able to pay for their children's college education, and more likely to be stuck with the burden of supporting impoverished parents or to face poverty themselves in old age.

Even with the coming of Social Security and stronger protections for organized labor under the New Deal, most Blacks were excluded from the benefits because they worked as tenant farmers or domestics who were not covered by the new plans. Two other Depression-era federal programs-the Home Owners' Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration-encouraged homeownership and bankrolled suburbanization, but in the North and South alike, whole neighborhoods were redlined, many of them Black.

Many African-Americans lost out on the benefits of the post-World War II GI Bill as well. As Ira Katznelson points out in his book When Affirmative Action Was White, of the 3,229 home, business, and farm loans made under the GI Bill in Mississippi during 1947, Black veterans received only two. Until 1968, it was virtually impossible for Blacks to get access to the kinds of long-term, low-interest mortgages that made wide-scale homeownership possible.

Even after the passage of civil rights laws, dozens of studies showed that minorities had a harder time getting access to market-rate mortgages. Moreover, Black home buyers were likely to be steered to neighborhoods of older housing stock, often in declining central cities, places where housing values often depreciated rather than appreciated. This meant that Blacks, if they were lucky enough to be homeowners, were often trapped in neighborhoods on the margins, economically and politically. As it turns out, the Sugrues and the Smiths were fairly typical of the Black and White families that Oliver and Shapiro studied in the mid-'90s. And what has happened since then is even more disheartening.

Beginning in the '90s and lasting until the bursting of the real estate bubble, some progress was made. The percentage of Black households that owned their own homes increased from 43.3 percent in 1994 to 47.2 percent in 2007. Partly this reflected a still-growing Black middle class; partly it reflected important government efforts to end racial discrimination in mortgage lending, along with the arrival of new, responsibly crafted forms of mortgages for which more people, particularly African-Americans and Latinos, could qualify.

But around the turn of the twenty-first century, there also grew up a huge new industry of predatory lenders that targeted members of minority groups, including those who already owned their homes and were persuaded to refinance on what turned out to be usurious terms. In 2006, more than half of the loans made to African-Americans were subprime, compared to about a quarter for Whites. And a recent study of data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act found that 32.1 percent of wealthy Blacks, but only 10.5 percent of wealthy Whites, got higher-priced mortgages-those with an interest rate 3 or more points higher than the rate of a Treasury security of the same length.

The bursting of the real estate bubble has been a catastrophe for the broad American middle class as a whole, but it has been particularly devastating to African-Americans. According to the Center for Responsible Lending in Durham, North Carolina, nearly 25 percent of African Americans who bought or refinanced their homes between 2004 and 2008 (and an equivalent share among Latinos) have already lost or will end up losing their homes-compared to 11.9 percent of White families in the same situation. This disparate impact of the housing crash has made the racial gap in wealth even more extreme. As Reid Cramer, director of the Asset Building Program at the New America Foundation, puts it, "Basically, we have gone from an average minority family owning 10 cents to the dollar compared to the average White family to now owning less than a nickel."

The median Black family today holds only $4,955 in assets.

In recent years, concerns about racial disparities have largely faded from national politics. It is now a commonplace that we have entered a post-racial era. The concerns of the civil rights era are obsolete. A Black family occupies the White House. Conservative jurists and even many liberals are arguing with greater conviction than ever that affirmative action programs and the Voting Rights Act are no longer necessary in a color-blind America. For his part, the first African American president has been remarkably silent on questions of race. University of Pennsylvania political scientist Daniel Gillion examined decades of presidential speeches and found that Barack Obama has said less about race than any Democratic president since 1961.

But for all of the talk about hope and change, the racial wealth gap has not only persisted, it has worsened. And it is this gap that is the most powerful measure of differential well-being by race. Wealth has profound consequences throughout the life cycle, from putting a down payment on a first home to spending your last days in a skilled nursing facility. Starting a business? Paying for college tuition? Making ends meet when you've lost your job? Covering extraordinary medical expenses? Retiring? Assets matter.

On each of these counts, minorities face an insecure present and a very precarious future. Consider just one measure: the Brandeis Institute on Assets and Social Policy estimates that only 8 percent of Black seniors and only 4 percent of Latino seniors have sufficient economic resources to be economically secure in retirement. "These seniors," write a team of Brandeis scholars, "do not just have to watch their pennies; they are truly struggling every day, forgoing basic expenditures, such as medical appointments and household maintenance, just to make ends meet."

A few years ago, I met Roosevelt Smith. He still owned my parents' old house on Detroit's West Side, which was a rental property by then, and he gave me a tour. It was in good shape-pretty much the same house that my parents sold, but with newly refinished floors and some new kitchen cabinets and tiles and the garage out back. He's a resourceful guy who bought a second, larger house nearby-another asset, a nest egg for the future. But together, the two houses aren't worth much. The median listing price for homes in Detroit is now just $21,000, or about the cost of a Chevy Malibu-and, like the car, likely to depreciate in value from the moment you buy it. Detroit's population has fallen from 1.85 million in 1950 to a little more than 700,000 today, and as population falls housing demand falls with it. Today, nearly every block has abandoned homes on it. The Smiths probably have more in household assets than the $4,955 median for Black families, but not a lot.

In contrast, my parents' assets have provided them with a cushion of security and more than modest comfort, from that family room they built in the '70s to the cottage in northern Michigan they built forty years ago and later renovated for their retirement. Along the way, my parents used their savings to help pay for three college tuitions. They helped me buy my first house because I didn't have enough savings for the 10 percent down payment. When their health deteriorated, they drew from their assets to rent an apartment in a comfortable retirement community. Barring a medical disaster, which my mother could at least partially cover using her remaining assets, my sisters and I can expect a small sum from her estate. Last year, my mother sent me a check-she called it, rather morbidly, a "down payment" on my inheritance-that totaled more than twice the household assets of the median Black family.

I have never thought of myself as a particularly wealthy person, and by the standards of the top 1 percent I'm not one. Despite the swings of the economy and a divorce settlement that drained my retirement account, I own a house worth more than twice its original purchase price. I have squirreled away some money in a mutual fund to help pay for my children's educational expenses: college is just a few years off, and it won't be cheap. I can also use some of my assets as collateral for loans to help pay their way. And, if my investment decisions prove to be wise, I will have a substantially larger retirement nest egg than my parents had. If I have extraordinary medical expenses, I have funds to fall back on. I also drafted a will, and hope that my heirs-my family and a few charities-will be able to benefit from my good fortune.

There are many White folks who are not as fortunate as my parents were, and even the modest legacy they were able to build may be becoming increasingly rare among younger generations of Americans of all races. Still, like most Whites, I am a beneficiary of the racial wealth gap. And until that gap narrows, we can't begin to talk about the dawning of a post-racial America.

Thomas J. Sugrue is the David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book is "Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race." This article, the third of an 11-part series on race, is sponsored by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and was originally published by the Washington Monthly Magazine.

U. S. Pushes 'Secret War' in Somalia While Oil Companies Fish for the Gold

July 28, 2013

U. S. Pushes 'Secret War' in Somalia While Oil Companies Fish for the Gold

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from GIN

(TriceEdneyWire.com) – In a good week, reports from the Horn of Africa couldn’t be more upbeat. “Somalia is a good news story for the region,” declared Johnnie Carson, U.S. ass’t secretary of state for African affairs last October, “for the region, for the international community, but most especially for the people of Somalia itself.”

This year, however, the news picture went from upbeat to grim. Foreign Policy magazine reported that the U.S. has upped its aid to Somali intelligence agencies allied against al-Shabaab, the country’s Islamist insurgency. Training camps were preparing Ugandan peacekeepers to fight Somalia militants, and Predator drones, fighter jets and nearly 2,000 U.S. troops and military civilians were being parked at a base in neighboring Djibouti.

Despite billions in U.S. aid spent on Somalia to, as President Obama observed: “strengthen the security of the United States and promote world peace,” a new U.N. report confirms that “the military strength of al-Shabaab, with an approximately 5,000-strong force, remains arguably intact in terms of operational readiness, chain of command, discipline and communication capabilities.”

“By avoiding direct military confrontation, it has preserved the core of its fighting force and resources.”

Meanwhile, as the U.S. is pulled deeper into this costly and seemingly unwinnable war, Western oil companies from Canada and Norway are trolling Somalia’s semi-autonomous regions – Puntland and Somaliland – for potentially-enriching oil exploration contracts.

In some cases Somaliland and Puntland have awarded licenses for exploration zones that overlap.

The U.N. Monitoring Group warns:“Potentially, this means that exploration operations in these blocks, conducted by both DNO (Norway) and Africa Oil (Canada) under the protection of regional security forces, its allied militia or private forces, could generate new conflict between Somaliland and Puntland.”

“It is alarming that regional security forces and armed groups may clash to protect and further Western-based oil companies interests,” the U.N. report said.

Mandela Improves as South Africa Celebrates His 95th Birthday

July 21, 2013

Mandela Improves as South Africa Celebrates His 95^thBirthday

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(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Former South Africa President Nelson Mandela remains hospitalized in critical condition, but has made “sustained improvement” since June 8, President Jacob Zuma’s office reports.

According to the Associated Press, “Zuma gave the update after visiting Mandela at the Pretoria hospital where he is receiving treatment. During the visit, he told the anti-apartheid leader of the love and support of all South Africans that was displayed at the leader's 95th birthday celebrations on July 18.”

Mandela has received an outpouring of prayers and well-wishes since he was hospitalized June 8 for a recurring lung infection. The Nobel Peace Prize recipient is revered around the world because of his 27-year incarceration during racial apartheid White minority rule and his rise to the presidency in 1995.

Doctors have not publicly said whether he is headed for release from the hospital. Meanwhile, on his birthday, the United Nations declared a “Nelson Mandela International Day” during which people performed community service in his honor.

Getting on Track: Obama's New Economic Plan by William Spriggs

July 28, 2013

Getting on Track: Obama's New Economic Plan
By William Spriggs

News Analysis

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - President Obama has kicked off a series of talks to America's working families on the economy. He started in Galesburg, Ill., where he succinctly described a solution to our economic troubles: making the middle class the engine of American prosperity.

Obama said: I care about one thing and one thing only, and that's how to use every minute of the 1,276 days remaining in my term to make this country work for working Americans again. Several things flow from the emphasis on the middle class. The president indicated that policies in recent years have focused too heavily on what government could do to help the wealthy.

For instance, he pointed out a major switch in post-World War II economic policy when, beginning in the 1980s, "Washington doled out bigger tax cuts to the rich and smaller minimum wage increases for the working poor." And, he observed, "Even though our businesses are creating new jobs and have broken record profits, nearly all the income gains of the past 10 years have continued to flow to the top 1 percent. The average CEO has gotten a raise of nearly 40 percent since 2009, but the average American earns less than he or she did in 1999." This switch in policy and the outcome of growing inequality were fueled in a belief that the engine of American prosperity lay in its wealthy entrepreneurs-not in its vibrant middle class.

The president summarized this as bad economics: "This growing inequality isn't just morally wrong; it's bad economics. When middle-class families have less to spend, businesses have fewer customers. When wealth concentrates at the very top, it can inflate unstable bubbles that threaten the economy. When the rungs on the ladder of opportunity grow farther apart, it undermines the very essence of this country."

Several things flow from this analysis that aren't as clearly articulated by the president's speech at Galesburg. First, the continued emphasis in Washington on runaway government spending and deficits is really a conversation based on a belief that the engine of American prosperity is a rich and privileged class that doesn't have to pay taxes. Profits are up. American growth-the GDP measuring the size of our economy-has recovered and continues to grow. The ability of America to pay its bills is not falling, the willingness of the rich to pay their fair share is. But a conversation dominated by what the rich are willing to pay is a diversion from a conversation on what America needs to sustain its growth. And, it is that frank conversation that people want to take place; then we can judge if spending is growing too fast or deficits are out of control.

The president did mention that the middle class grew when unions could fight for workers. And that has not changed. Middle-class values go to democracy in economic activity-balancing the power of employers and employees. Unions and the right of workers to organize and raise their voices at the table when the pie is being cut are essential to a vibrant middle class. The president must have an agenda to strengthen the rights of workers to organize.

Middle class-led growth had several dimensions to it. The president touched on a few of those elements. One was education and the affordability of a college education. But he left out access to a high-quality education for middle-class children. The massive defunding of public higher education by American states means the greater challenge to middle-class children is access to a high-quality college. The president talked about cost savings that public colleges could engage in, like online course work. I know that the parents who are paying Harvard tuition would not welcome paying for online course work.

In the past, we made the likes of the Universities of California-Berkeley, Michigan and Virginia the public "Ivies," high-quality research universities with rankings that rivaled Ivy League schools but with public "endowments" to level the playing field with the vast endowments of Harvard and Yale so top faculty could be recruited to teach middle-class students. And, in part, the rise in public funding led to a rise in competition for leading professors. This is an element of rising inequality the president did not mention, but must be part of the rebuilding of a middle class-not simply cheapening middle-class educational opportunity.

Middle class-led growth means admitting that people can legitimately demand public goods-like high-quality colleges. The American middle class of the post-World War II era was very dependent on a renewed sense that people could demand public goods-high-quality primary and secondary education, libraries and public parks and quality public roads and highways. In the post-World War II era, much of that demand was met through state and local efforts. But, based on arcane local taxing schemes that often segregated high-quality public goods-like public primary and secondary education on tax sources tied to income segregation. Still, the public sector and public goods are vital to a functioning middle class.

This economic recession was the most severe of the post-war era in shrinking the revenues of state and local governments. The president must address the dying public sector. While he touts the growth of private-sector employment, this recovery has uniquely been marked for the shrinking of public-sector employment. Yet, the demand for schools has not gone down, the demand for public safety-police, firefighters and emergency health responders-remains constant. The president must show more leadership on this.

President Bush responded when the financial sector was collapsing, forcing the American people to see the essential nature of a functioning finance sector-even one that was corrupt and had speculated the nation into a recession. President Obama must make the same case for the public sector. If the financial sector is the "heart" of the economy, then the public sector is the economy's "kidneys." You won't live without a heart, but you also will not live without kidneys.

So, if the lesson that Bush pushed was that there were banks too large to fail, President Obama must be leading us with actions because there are cities too big to fail. The loss of revenue for Detroit-a city straddled with a byzantine fiscal structure designed by Michigan politicians at odds with its major city, and based heavily on income taxes-is not simply the result of a shrinking population base, but a collapsed labor market. The downward spiral the city was sent in by the 2001 economic downturn and the weak recovery through 2007 is a cautionary tale of where we are in state and local finance, not a singular event tied to Detroit's political leadership.

Certainly, the banks saved by the TARP under President Bush and continued when President Obama took office were not managed in a stellar way, either. And, similarly, their failures could be explained away as the function of rotten morals and misguided incentives. But, those truths would not outweigh the calculus of the necessity of their sector to function so we can have a modern economy. Similarly, no truths about Detroit outweigh the necessity of functioning, high-quality, well-funded schools, safe streets, regular sanitation, clean water and well-maintained transportation structures-whether buses or smoothly paved streets.

The president did mention poverty, and among the key elements of the post-war middle class were programs aimed at middle-class safety nets. We don't operate an economy that guarantees success, but a middle class is dependent on an economy that prevents people from falling too far. Today, we are continuing to pull away in the quality of that safety net. Southern states, long in rebellion against a middle-class nation, are speeding up their pulling away from the fabric of America's social safety net. It is why the South is disproportionately the home of America's poor and, as we are learning from recent research, the cradle of the growing immobility of poor.

The South breeds poverty not just through its porous safety net that would prevent poverty, but that same crashing of incomes flattens the mobility of those who do become poor from climbing back. A strong middle class means a renewed commitment to a national set of standards for the adequacy of benefits for unemployment, Medicaid and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. And it means the president must be unequivocal that a solid middle class rests on no cuts to Social Security benefits. In fact, the post-war middle-class society was marked by expansion and increases in Social Security benefits.

The president signaled he had responded to all the Republican criticisms. His health care reform was not slowing job growth. His initial economic plan that passed with no Republican votes reversed the accelerated loss of jobs to continued and steady private-sector job growth. The deficits he inherited from massive tax cuts for the wealthy and unfunded wars were now almost half their size relative to the size of the economy. Now, he wants to have the conversation on restoring the middle class.

Let's hope the talking heads of Washington and the media consensus move with him in describing the nation's problems and change the page with the president. Let's hope the conversation that moves forward is on the real deficits that affect America's working families-the deficit of jobs for our young people, the deficits of quality school slots for our children and the deficit of security for our retirements and health. Fiscal deficit debates need to be relegated to a past vision of America that thought we could grow a country by feeding the rich. That vision failed. The president wants to reignite the American dream; a country of prosperity for all based on the engine of the middle class.

William Spriggs serves as Chief Economist to the AFL-CIO and is a professor in, and former chair of the Department of Economics at Howard University. Bill is also former assistant secretary for the Office of Policy at the United States Department of Labor.

Obama Applauded for Remarks on Zimmerman Verdict by Hazel Trice Edney

July 21, 2013

Obama Applauded for Remarks on Zimmerman Verdict
President Suggests Next Steps

By Hazel Trice Edney

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(TriceEdneyWire.com) – President Barack Obama's surprise address to the nation identifying with the anger and hurt over the Trayvon Martin not-guilty verdict, has won praise from supporters and detractors alike.

As the nation anticipated Saturday’s protests in cities across the nation in response to the not-guilty verdict in the shooting of the unarmed teenager, President Obama walked into the Brady Press Room at the White House around 1:30 on Friday and gave unscripted remarks on racial strife in America that were uniquely personal.

“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away,” he said in the 20-minute statement, televised live on some stations.

“There are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African-American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me - at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.”

He continued, “And I don't want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear. The African-merican community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws - everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.”

His comments were met with praise from Black leaders, who welcomed his candid remarks.

“That our president has been profiled should encourage all Americans to think deeply about both the depth of this problem and how our country moves beyond it,” said NAACP President/CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous. “The President’s call to examine the role state laws, including Stand Your Ground, play in compounding racial profiling is especially welcome. Let us move forward to bring justice for Trayvon Martin and toward a more united nation that is truly safe for all Americans.”

A statement from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law also applauded the President:

“As the President eloquently stated - drawing from his own personal experience – African-Americans in this country have experienced a long history of prejudice that led to strong emotional reactions about the Zimmerman verdict, about the jury and about an American justice system that convicts Blacks in significantly larger numbers than whites and other racial groups.”

President Obama’s remarks took some of the sting off of the stunning verdict; especially since he has rarely spoken to race issues and had never used such personal examples. But, not everyone was pleased.

The Zimmerman defense team released a response statement saying the verdict was released “fairly and justly.” The defense’s statement continued that they “acknowledge and understand the racial context of this case,” but added, “We challenge people to look closely and dispassionately at the facts…We believe those who look at the facts of the case without prejudice will see that it is a clear case of self-defense, and we are certain that those who take a closer look at the kind of person George Zimmerman is.”

Actually, President Obama was careful not to speak negatively of the jury’s verdict.

“The judge conducted the trial in a professional manner. The prosecution and the defense made their arguments. The jurors were properly instructed that in a case such as this reasonable doubt was relevant, and they rendered a verdict. And once the jury has spoken, that's how our system works,” he said.

He said he only intended to put into context the pain of African-Americans in response to the verdict. This strategy drew compliments from at least one of his biggest critics.

Republican Sen. John McCain told CNN’s State of the Union that Obama’s remarks were "very impressive.” McCain added, “I think we continue to make progress…We still have a long way to go."

The NAACP and other civil rights advocates have pressed for federal intervention in the Zimmerman case, including the possibility of a federal civil rights prosecution. The president was careful not to assert his involvement in Holder’s investigation and announced no upcoming policy proposals to reverse some of the ways that Black are treated. But, he clearly listed what he perceives as some of the answers.

Speaking of racial profiling, he said it “would be productive for the Justice Department, governors, mayors to work with law enforcement about training at the state and local levels in order to reduce the kind of mistrust in the system that sometimes currently exists.
In reference to the “stand your ground” self-defense laws, he said it “would be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if … they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than diffuse potential altercations.”
As a “long term project” he said, “we need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys. And this is something that Michelle and I talk a lot about. There are a lot of kids out there who need help who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. And is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them?”
He was clear that he was not speaking of a new federal program,but hinted that he may call on aspects of the community to discuss next steps. “I do recognize that as President, I've got some convening power, and there are a lot of good programs that are being done across the country on this front. And for us to be able to gather together business leaders and local elected officials and clergy and celebrities and athletes, and figure out how are we doing a better job helping young African-American men feel that they're a full part of this society and that they've got pathways and avenues to succeed - I think that would be a pretty good outcome from what was obviously a tragic situation."
The President suggested that open conversations be had about race. “I think it's going to be important for all of us to do some soul-searching. There has been talk about should we convene a conversation on race. I haven't seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have. On the other hand, in families and churches and workplaces, there's the possibility that people are a little bit more honest, and at least you ask yourself your own questions about, am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can? Am I judging people as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin, but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy.”

In conclusion, the President urged Americans to become “better angels of our nature” by using the negative episodes to gain greater understanding rather than “heighten divisions.” He said: “We’re becoming a more perfect union; not a perfect union, but a more perfect union.”