President Obama’s Racial Renaissance |
President Obama’s Racial Renaissance
The New York Times
2015-08-01
Michael Eric Dyson, Professor of Sociology
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
We finally have the president we thought we elected: one who talks directly and forcefully about race and human rights.
When President Obama took the podium at the annual convention of the N.A.A.C.P. in Philadelphia last month, he sounded like the leader I’ve been waiting to hear since his first inauguration in 2009. It was almost as if Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow,” and the former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. had hacked his computer and collaborated on his speech.
Many of Mr. Obama’s admirers and critics have hungered for straight talk on race since he his election. But since taking office, the president had been skittish on the subject and had mostly let it lapse into disturbing silence.
As we prepare to mark the first anniversary of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., this country continues to grapple with what feels like an onslaught of black death.
But now we are doing it with a president — our first African-American president — who has found a confident voice on race…
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Tags: Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times, The New York Times