ArcaMax

After a grand jury decided not to indict a police officer in the death of Michael Brown, President Barack Obama stepped up to perform his unofficial yet widely presumed role: racial explainer-in-chief.

It is not a new role, but as he shared a split-screen on TV news channels with live scenes of burning cars, riot police and angry protesters, seldom have the stakes seemed so high.

Minutes earlier, a St. Louis prosecutor announced there would be no indictment of Darren Wilson, the white police officer who shot and killed unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson in August.

As protesters gathered in streets across the nation, Obama urged them to hear the Brown family's stance that hurting other people and destroying property is not the answer.

Inevitably, he said, there is "going to be some negative reaction and it will make for good TV." But he distinguished between peaceful protesters and criminal offenders as he called on police to "work with the community, not against the community."

Obama often has been criticized as the Ferguson crisis has unfolded. He's been accused of not saying enough about Ferguson or of saying too much.

But as the grand jury's decision approached, Obama began to speak out this past weekend in an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos.

In that interview, as in his Monday statement, he expressed a familiar theme, the need for each side of the nation's racial divide to show some empathy for the other side's very different point of view, shaped by their very different life experiences.

"First and foremost, keep the protests peaceful," Obama told ABC.

Second, the president said, walk in the other side's moccasins for a while. He called on his fellow nonwhites to acknowledge that minorities are sometimes profiled by police because their communities are plagued by a higher proportion of lawbreakers.

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