"He could have been me"

Repeatedly, President Barak Obama has proven that words matter, especially when spoken in the liminal zone between the professorial and the poetic.

He is one President who has managed to stay in power and enter people's heads via the power of words. That's a refreshing fact, like a cooling rain shower, in an era of arid technology.

In his poignant statement, delivered in the wake of a brewing protest movements that take a stand against the George Zimmerman verdict, the President succeeded in making the occasion of Trayvon Martin's tragedy, as his own. 

Some highlights from the speech are:

When Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son, [...] Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me, thirty-five years ago.

There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me — at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.

And I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida.

We need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys. And this is something that Michelle and I talk a lot about. There are a lot of kids out there who need help, who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. And is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them, and values them, and is willing to invest in them?

The text of Obama's statement is to be found here.