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Obama Tells Mourning Dallas ‘We Are Not So Divided’ Obama Tells Mourning Dallas, ‘We Are Not So Divided’
(about 4 hours later)
DALLAS — President Obama said on Tuesday that the nation mourned along with Dallas for five police officers gunned down by a black Army veteran, but he implored Americans not to give in to despair or the fear that “the center might not hold.” DALLAS — President Obama said on Tuesday that the nation mourned with Dallas for five police officers gunned down by a black Army veteran, but he implored Americans not to give in to despair or the fear that “the center might not hold.”
“I’m here to say that we must reject such despair,” Mr. Obama said at a memorial service for the officers in Dallas. “I’m here to insist that we are not so divided as we seem. I say that because I know America. I know how far we’ve come against impossible odds. I know we’ll make it because of what I’ve experienced in my own life.” “I’m here to insist that we are not so divided as we seem,” Mr. Obama said at a memorial service for the officers in Dallas, where he quoted Scripture, alluded to Yeats and at times expressed a sense of powerlessness to stop the racial violence that has marked his presidency. But Mr. Obama also spoke hard truths to both sides.
Mr. Obama acknowledged that the killings — “an act not just of demented violence but of racial hatred” — had exposed a “fault line” in American democracy. He said he understood if Americans questioned whether the racial divide would ever be bridged. Addressing a crowd of 2,000 at a concert hall, the president chided the police for not understanding what he called the legitimate grievances of African-Americans, who he said were victims of systemic racial bias.
“I’m not naïve,” he said. “I’ve spoken at too many memorials during the course of this presidency.” “We cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid,” Mr. Obama said to applause. “We can’t simply dismiss it as a symptom of political correctness or reverse racism. To have your experience denied like that, dismissed by those in authority, dismissed perhaps even by your white friends and co-workers and fellow church members again and again and again — it hurts.”
Mr. Obama acknowledged the limitations of his own words, and quoted from the Gospel of John: “Let us love not with words or speech but with action and in truth.” But the president also turned to the protesters of the Black Lives Matter movement and said they were too quick to condemn the police. “Protesters, you know it,” Mr. Obama said. “You know how dangerous some of the communities where these police officers serve are, and you pretend as if there’s no context. These things we know to be true.”
Mr. Obama, as he has before, balanced praise for the heroism of police officers with a blunt acknowledgment of racial bias in the criminal justice system. “We can’t simply dismiss it as a symptom of political correctness or reverse racism,” he said. It was the poignant speech of a man near the end of his patience about a scourge of violence that he said his own words had not been enough to stop. Mr. Obama spoke after a week in which the police killed two black men, in Minnesota and Louisiana, and Micah Johnson, the Army veteran, killed the five officers in Dallas.
Behind him, a row of police officers did not clap. But when Mr. Obama added, “We ask the police to do too much, and we ask too little of ourselves,” the officers behind him applauded. “I’ve spoken at too many memorials during the course of this presidency,” Mr. Obama said. “I’ve hugged too many families. I’ve seen how inadequate words can be in bringing about lasting change. I’ve seen how inadequate my own words have been.”
The president appealed for an honest debate over the tensions inherent in policing and the nation’s legacy of racism. “It is forging consensus, and fighting cynicism, and finding the will to make change,” he said. He acknowledged that the Dallas killings — “an act not just of demented violence but of racial hatred” — had exposed a “fault line” in American democracy. He said he understood if Americans questioned whether the racial divide would ever be bridged.
“I confess that sometimes, too, I experience doubt,” Mr. Obama said. “I’ve been to too many of these things. I’ve seen too many families go through this.” “It’s as if the deepest fault lines of our democracy have suddenly been exposed, perhaps even widened,” Mr. Obama said. “And although we know that such divisions are not new, though they have surely been worse in even the recent past, that offers us little comfort.”
Former President George W. Bush spoke earlier at the memorial. “Today the nation grieves, but those of us who love Dallas and call it home have had five deaths in the family,” Mr. Bush said. He added, “At times it seems like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together.” Americans, he said, “can turn on the TV or surf the internet, and we can watch positions harden and lines drawn, and people retreat to their respective corners, and politicians calculate how to grab attention or avoid the fallout. We see all this, and it’s hard not to think sometimes that the center won’t hold and that things might get worse.”
But, Mr. Bush said, “Americans, I think, have a great advantage. To renew our unity we only have to remember our values.” But Mr. Obama insisted on holding out hope.
Mr. Obama had huddled with his speechwriters for much of Monday, hoping to find words that would not only console the officers’ grief-stricken families but also reassure a nation fearful that racial divisions are worsening after the Dallas slaughter and the killing days before of black men by the police in Louisiana and Minnesota. “Dallas, I’m here to say we must reject such despair,” Mr. Obama said, adding that he knew that because of “what I’ve experienced in my own life, what I’ve seen of this country and its people — their goodness and decency — as president of the United States.”
Mr. Obama approached the effort with the frustration of a man who has poured his heart and soul into similar speeches, only to later feel that nothing has changed and no one is listening. This was the 11th time in his presidency that he sought to comfort a city after a mass killing, and the second time in a month that such a killing grew out of bias. He cited both the Dallas police and protesters as part of that decency. “When the bullets started flying, the men and women of the Dallas police, they did not flinch and they did not react recklessly,” Mr. Obama said. “They showed incredible restraint. Helped in some cases by protesters, they evacuated the injured, isolated the shooter and saved more lives than we will ever know. We mourn fewer people today because of your brave actions. ‘Everyone was helping each other,’ one witness said. ‘It wasn’t about black or white. Everyone was picking each other up and moving them away.’”
“The president recognizes that it’s not just people in Dallas who are grieving, it’s people all across the country who are concerned about the violence that so many Americans have witnessed in the last week or so,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said on Monday. Mr. Obama concluded: “See, that’s the America I know.”
Mr. Obama’s task was especially tough because Dallas has already undertaken many of the steps that his administration has advocated to improve race relations and foster better community ties with the police. The police chief, David O. Brown, has won high marks for his frank and unsparing remarks after the tragedy. A row of police officers behind Mr. Obama in the concert hall did not clap when Mr. Obama spoke of racial bias in the criminal justice system, saying that “when all this takes place more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid.”
During a news conference on Monday, Chief Brown, who is black, said that he remained committed to reform, and his message to those protesting police conduct was simple: “Don’t be part of the problem. We’re hiring. Get out of the protest line and put an application in. We’ll put you in your neighborhood.” But when Mr. Obama added, “We ask the police to do too much, and we ask too little of ourselves,” the officers behind him applauded.
The remarks by Mr. Bush, who lives in Dallas, were a rare event in his post-presidency. While in office, Mr. Bush faced his own set of problems with the nation’s racial divisions. Law enforcement officials who attended the service broadly welcomed Mr. Obama’s remarks.
As part of his message of “compassionate conservatism,” Mr. Bush made racial harmony a greater emphasis than many Republicans have in recent decades, and he sought to extend his party’s outreach to African-Americans, though without great electoral success. He won about 11 percent of the black vote in 2004, roughly the same as other modern Republican nominees who did not face Mr. Obama. “To me, this is one of his best speeches I’ve ever heard,” said Chief Warren Asmus of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, who saw the speech as a milestone in the acrimonious national debate about policing and race.
Mr. Bush appointed the first and second black secretaries of state and promoted his No Child Left Behind education program in part to help minority students and to combat what he called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” “He started to build that bridge that I think hasn’t been built for a long time,” Mr. Asmus said. “From what I heard today, I see it as a turning point.”
He did not face the sort of repeated racially charged episodes that have occurred during Mr. Obama’s presidency, but he was heavily criticized for not reacting faster to help New Orleans and its large African-American population after Hurricane Katrina. He wrote in his memoir that being accused of not caring about black victims was the lowest moment of his presidency. But Chief Terrence M. Cunningham of the Wellesley, Mass., police said that while he liked much of Mr. Obama’s speech, he was concerned about the president’s discussion of the shootings by the police in Louisiana and Minnesota, which remain under investigation.
Now, Mr. Bush is being called upon to help succor his own city. “It’s almost like he’s put his thumb on the scale a little bit,” he said. “Let’s let the facts come in.”
As for Mr. Obama, his speech called for greater understanding from all sides of the debate while emphasizing that race relations are much improved since the 1960s. Some protesters responded positively to Mr. Obama’s remarks.
“When we start suggesting that somehow there is this enormous polarization and we’re back to the situation in the 1960s — that’s just not true,” Mr. Obama said on Saturday at a news conference in Warsaw. “You’re not seeing riots, and you’re not seeing police going after people who are protesting peacefully.” “I liked his speech,” said Dominique Alexander, the founder of Next Generation Action Network, an activist group in Dallas that organized the protest the night of the shooting. The president, he said, “did a good job” in a situation where “both sides are mourning, both sides are hurting.”
Rather, concerns about police conduct have grown, he believes, in part because of the wide distribution of videos of the police on social media, which have heightened awareness even as episodes of improper behavior have declined. Many conservatives were angry about a reference Mr. Obama made in his remarks to gun control, when he said that “we flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book.”
“And the fact that we’re aware of it may increase some anxiety right now, and hurt and anger,” Mr. Obama said over the weekend. “But it’s been said, sunshine is the best disinfectant.” Three others spoke at the memorial, including former President George W. Bush, a Dallas resident who said his city was not prepared for the evil visited upon it on Thursday, nor could it have been. “Today the nation grieves, but those of us who love Dallas and call it home have had five deaths in the family,” Mr. Bush said. He said the forces pulling the country apart sometimes seemed greater than the ones bringing it together.
Mr. Obama has been criticized by civil rights leaders for choosing to visit Dallas instead of Louisiana or Minnesota. He has also been criticized by some police officials, who say he has worsened racial tensions by faulting some police conduct. “Too often we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions,” Mr. Bush said to applause. “And this has strained our bonds of understanding and common purpose.”
“This president and his administration absolutely do not have our back and make our jobs more dangerous,” William J. Johnson, the executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, which represents about 240,000 law enforcement officers, said on Sunday. The memorial was held in the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, a cavernous concert hall with a massive 4,535-pipe organ dominating the back of the stage. Nearly all of the auditorium’s seats were filled, many with men and women wearing blue police uniforms from places like Massachusetts and South Carolina, and from towns throughout Texas, like League City, Huntsville, Robinson and La Marque. They walked into the hall under a giant American flag strung from fire trucks.
On Monday, Mr. Johnson attended a meeting at the White House during which law enforcement officials discussed with Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. the best ways to build trust between the police and communities. On one side of the stage, five seats sat empty except for uniform hats and folded American flags to memorialize the five dead.
In every speech on policing and race, Mr. Obama has tried to strike a balance, acknowledging bias in the criminal justice system but saying that it is not an indictment of all police officers.
“So when people say ‘black lives matter,’ that doesn’t mean blue lives don’t matter; it just means all lives matter, but right now the big concern is the fact that the data shows black folks are more vulnerable to these kinds of incidents,” Mr. Obama said just before the police officers were killed in Dallas.
He again walked that tightrope on Tuesday.