Keli Goff & Mark Anthony Neal Talk POTUS and Racial Profiling on Minnesota Public Radio

The Daily Circuit | Minnesota Public Radio

President's Remarks Made it Clear: Black People aren't Paranoid


Keli Goff: Political correspondent for The Root and author, "The GQ Candidate"Mark Anthony Neal: Professor, African and African American Studies, Duke University***President Barack Obama's first extended comments Friday about the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial were significant because they validated African-Americans' claims of widespread profiling, according to guests interviewed on the Daily Circuit.Kelli Goff, a columnist for The Root, said her white friends seem to think that such perceptions result from paranoia, not reality.On Friday, Obama said African-Americans might have reacted as they did to the confrontation between George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin because they know what it's like to be followed through a store, or to hear car doors being locked when they approach. "That includes me," he said. "Those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida.""There were a lot of people who heard him give those remarks whose reaction was, 'That has happened to the president?' And that's why it was significant," Goff said. "There were a lot of people ... who thought there was a measure of paranoia that we as African-Americans were operating under in reaction to the verdict and in reaction to the events that night."And when the president of the United States says, 'I had to become a senator to stop being followed around in department stores,' it recognizes racial profiling not as an African-American problem but as an American problem."And many black Americans had been waiting impatiently for Obama to make such remarks, said Mark Anthony Neal, a professor at Duke University."I don't think Tavis Smiley was wrong necessarily when he said that the president was shoved to the podium on Friday in order to make this statement," Neal said. "I think he was also partially shoved by the women he shares the house with."