Obama Needs To Be King-Like, Not King-Lite

By Tavis Smiley, 

Is it appropriate for the president to occupy that sacred space? Does Obama have the moral authority to speak where King spoke? Does anyone?

My honest answer to these questions: I don’t know. But here is what I do know. The future of our democracy is inextricably linked to how seriously we take King’s legacy. A legacy of unarmed truth and unconditional love. A legacy of brilliant prose and prophetic witness.

The president’s decision to honor the march is proper and commendable. But when he stands where King stood and delivers a speech of his own, he inevitably invites comparisons between his words and King’s. I hope Obama rises to the challenge to be truly King-like, not just King-lite. His speech cannot be full of great sound bites but devoid of sound public policy.

Obama’s election in 2008 was a good down payment on King’s dream of racial equality, but it did not fulfill the dream. Instead of lecturing black audiences about personal responsibility, as he so often has, now is the time for the president to bear witness to the unrelenting pain and suffering of his most loyal constituency — a constituency still denied true economic freedom by institutional and structural barriers that have yet to be addressed, much less alleviated.

Following the recent not-guilty verdict for George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin, the president did finally give voice to the struggle for human dignity that black men in particular endure almost daily. “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,” Obama said. And the decision this month by Attorney General Eric Holder to no longer seek mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug offenses — citing the “shameful” racial disparities in sentencing — is smart public policy.

But we have known for 40 years that mandatory minimums are a bad idea. Why so long? Could not an administration committed to social justice have done this in the first term?

The unsettling truth is that during the Obama era, black America has fallen even further behind. The African American unemployment rate, for instance, remains stubbornly and disproportionately high at 12.6 percent, compared with the national rate of 7.4 percent. And while private-sector jobs are experiencing a slight uptick, the lack of public-sector jobs is suffocating black livelihoods. Sadly, a few black chief executives notwithstanding, race still matters in the private sector. Education is not the great equalizer. I know too many black Ivy League graduates whose degrees cannot close this gap, and heaven help you if you’re applying for a private-sector job with a “black-sounding” name. Researchers have found that these applicants receive up to 50 percent fewer callbacks than applicants with “white-sounding” names.