President Barack Obama has faced a backlash whenever he talks about race, says Joy-Ann Reid, an MSNBC national correspondent and author of
"Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the Racial Divide."
"What the majority of white Americans wanted him to do was to help the country sort of transgress the racial divide, just sort of get past it and that he would be the person that would talk us past race," Reid said Tuesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
"Whereas African Americans have been, for a very long time, looking for a reckoning on race. They want to really dig deeper into some of the issues that black folk face every day in their daily lives and they wanted a president who would give a catharsis on race."
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Reid said those two competing aims caused friction.
"When Barack Obama began to sort of do … what African Americans tend to do in our lives, which is talk about race, and he did it with the
Trayvon Martin case, especially, and he did it with
Henry Louis Gates — that broke an expectation that a lot of people had, that he wasn't going to do that. The backlash against him followed," Reid said.
In the case of Gates — the African-American Harvard professor arrested at his Massachusetts home by a police officer responding to a caller's report of men breaking and entering — had Obama said it about a white friend, I don't know that it would have had the same impact," Reid said.
"If you think about it, this was a man who lived in his home, who was going into his own home, and was arrested going into his own home."
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