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-- A. Serwer
Last week I noted the strangely stilted coverage of the president's speech to the NAACP at its centennial celebration, which focused almost exclusively on the "finger wagging" elements of the speech at the expense of those that discussed the very real social obstacles still facing people of color and even the LGBT community. Eugene Robinson reports that that the president noticed too:
"I've noticed that when I talk about personal responsibility in the African American community, that gets highlighted," Obama said in an interview Friday. "But then the whole other half of the speech, where I talked about government's responsibility . . . that somehow doesn't make news."It doesn't make news because that element of the speech is somehow internalized as the responsibility of "white people," as though the rest of us were still somehow apart from the rest of society that votes, works, and pays taxes. For all this administration's flaws -- that perception is one thing the president seems sincere about changing.
-- A. Serwer
