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Advice Best Left Ignored

Ruben Navarrett Jr. on

SAN DIEGO -- When it comes to what to do about the turmoil in Ferguson, Mo., President Obama is getting some bad advice.

It came from one of the nation's leading African-American intellectuals.

Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson is a brilliant thinker, skilled communicator and one of America's most important voices on matters involving race. But there is one thing he doesn't understand: Barack Obama. Dyson thinks the chief executive has the capacity to give voice to the concerns of African-Americans.

He's wrong about that. Dyson is also out of line to expect it, because the president has to speak for all Americans.

During a recent appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation," Dyson admitted that he yearned for a louder and more powerful response from Obama to the conflict in Ferguson.

Good luck with that, professor. Other African-American thought leaders such as Cornel West, who now teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and PBS host Tavis Smiley have concluded that the nation's first black president is just not into helping black people. West and Smiley have hammered Obama for not pursuing a "black agenda" and for failing to step up when their community feels under siege.

 

Dyson, however, hopes that Obama can be a leader on race.

"This president knows better than most what happens in poor communities that have been antagonized historically by the hostile relationship between black people and the police department," he said.

Really? How do we know that Obama understands those communities? He was raised by a white mother and white grandparents. He grew up in Hawaii, which doesn't have a large African-American population. Obama worked as a community organizer in Chicago, but it's not clear that he experienced hostility from the police there.

Dyson disapproves of Obama's initial remarks on Ferguson, where the president scolded those protesters who were violent.

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