Obama: ‘It Hurts’ When Whites Dismiss Protesters As ‘Political Correctness or Reverse Racism’

Tuesday at the memorial service for the five slain Dallas police officers, President Barack Obama said that “it hurts” when peaceful protestors who are attempting to forward their grievances with the police treatment of African-Americans are “dismissed perhaps even by your white friends and co-worker and fellow church members again and again and again.”

Obama said, “When study after study shows that whites and people of color experience the criminal justice system differently–so that if you are black you are more likely to be pulled over, searched or arrested, more likely to get longer sentences, more likely to get the death penalty for the same crime. When mothers and fathers raise their kids right, and have the talk about how to respond if stopped by a police officer, ‘Yes, sir, no, sir,’ but still fear something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door, still fear that kids being stupid and not quite doing things right, might end in tragedy.”

“When all of this takes place, more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid,” he added. “We can’t dismiss as a symptom of political correctness or reverse racism. To have your experience denied like that, dismissed by those in authority, dismissed perhaps even by your white friends and co-worker and fellow church members again and again and again, it hurts. Surely we can see that, all of us.”