By David K. Shipler
On Monday’s holiday, Barack and Michelle Obama
visited an elementary school in Washington, DC, filled backpacks with books for
kids, helped make planters for the school’s vegetable garden, and celebrated the
service of AmeriCorps mentors. But Martin Luther King Jr. Day passed with no speech
by the first African-American president about race in America. Nor, in his
final State of the Union address last week, did Obama include a discussion of
the state of race relations, despite the strains and fault lines that have
grown more visible in recent years.
On matters
of race, he has not used his bully pulpit very well. Not that he’s ignored the
topic: Very occasionally over his two terms, he’s offered some of the most
eloquent and insightful commentary heard from any president, usually at a
ceremonial or tragic moment. He has initiated a series of concrete policies
aimed at improving the lot of minorities, including a task force on policing that
might help counter bias in uniform.
But what he has not done, for
whatever reasons, is spark and guide the kind of ongoing, searching
introspection that the country needs. This is a loss for all of us.
Bill
Clinton, a president whose acute sensibilities were shaped by his upbringing as
a white kid in Arkansas during the Civil Rights Movement, organized a national
conversation on race during his second term.
