A Personal Note as Obama Speaks on Death of Boy

A Personal Note as Obama Speaks on Death of Boy

by JACKIE CALMES, nytimes.com
March 23rd 2012

WASHINGTON — President Obama did not mention race even as he addressed it on Friday, instead letting his person and his words say it all: "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon."

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Weighing in for the first time on the death of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager shot and killed a month ago in Florida by a neighborhood watch volunteer, Mr. Obama in powerfully personal terms deplored the "tragedy" and, as a parent, expressed sympathy for the boy's mother and father.

"I can only imagine what these parents are going through. And when I think about this boy, I think about my own kids," Mr. Obama said. "Every parent in America," he added, "should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this and that everybody pulls together — federal, state and local — to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened."

While speaking movingly from his perspective as the father of two girls, one a teenager, Mr. Obama notably made no reference to the racial context that has made the killing of Trayvon and the gunman's claim of self-defense a rallying point for African-Americans. Since Mr. Obama first began campaigning to be "president of all the people," as his advisers would put it when pressed on racial issues, he has been generally reluctant to talk about race. And after his historic election as the first black president, Mr. Obama learned the hard way about the pitfalls of the chief executive opining on law enforcement matters involving civil rights.

His remark at a news conference in the summer of 2009 that a white police officer in Cambridge, Mass., had acted "stupidly" in arresting a black Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., at his home led to a national controversy that ended with Mr. Obama holding a peacemaking "beer summit" with the two men at the White House.

Until Friday, Mr. Obama had refrained from commenting on the death of Trayvon, 17, a high school student who was killed on the night of Feb. 26 in Sanford, Fla., near Orlando. George Zimmerman, 28, the neighborhood watch volunteer, said he fired at Trayvon in self-defense, although there is no apparent evidence that the teenager, who held only a bag of Skittles candy and an iced tea, was doing anything wrong.

But when a reporter asked about the case at a White House event introducing Jim Yong Kim as his choice to be president of the World Bank, Mr. Obama, who typically leaves such events ignoring the shouted questions of reporters, seemed prepared.

"It was inevitable given the high-profile nature of this story that he would be asked about it," his press secretary, Jay Carney, said later. He added that Mr. Obama "had thought about it and was prepared to answer that question when he got it."

Mr. Carney himself had refused for days to speak for Mr. Obama about Trayvon's death, and other advisers on Friday likewise declined to weigh in on the thinking at the White House about the case and its repercussions. Mr. Obama's mostly white male inner circle has long been reluctant to talk for their boss when the subject is race, given how personal it is for him. One aide, speaking only on the grounds of anonymity, said that there was no internal debate about how to respond to Trayvon's death, but that Mr. Obama wanted to await the Justice Department's initial review of the case and the announcement this week by his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., that the civil rights division would investigate.

In his remarks, Mr. Obama endorsed the Justice Department investigation as well as efforts by local and state agencies in Florida to examine the circumstances of the shooting. Trayvon's parents "are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and that we're going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened," Mr. Obama said.

Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from West Monroe and Shreveport, La.

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