Stoking the fire
President Barack Obama has asked his outgoing attorney general to convene a series of meetings around the country with law enforcement and community leaders following last week’s exoneration of a white police officer who shot and killed a black man in Ferguson, Mo., and the rioting that followed the grand jury’s decision.
But at the first of these meetings Monday at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Eric Holder, the nation’s top law enforcement officer, talked about the end of “racial profiling, once and for all” and “fair and effective policing.”
Once again, the attorney general has stoked the fires instead of helping put them out.
Racial profiling wasn’t the problem in Ferguson. Whether the officer in question, Darren Wilson, knew Michael Brown had just robbed a convenience store or whether he was just asking him initially to use the sidewalk rather than the street, he was in no way stopping him solely because of his race.
So if Holder’s remarks were typical of what President Obama said Monday will be part of a “sustained conversation” about Ferguson in “every region in the country,” the president has done himself no favors in calling for such a conversation. In another conversation over the weekend, civil rights activist Jesse Jackson called the grand jury that exonerated policeman Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown “a hangman’s noose.” And in an interview for Vulture.com, comedian Chris Rock said white American must start not only “owning their actions” but “the actions of your dad.”