Ta-Nehisi Coates on Obama Family Oratory

Mr Coates calmly and coherently lays out where the President and First Lady have failed in addressing African-American institutions (it's commencement address season)

How the Obama Administration Talks to Black America
"Convenient race-talk" from a president who ought to know better at The Atlantic

begin quote  But I also think that some day historians will pore over his many speeches to black audiences. They will see a president who sought to hold black people accountable for their communities, but was disdainful of those who looked at him and sought the same. And then they will match that rhetoric of individual responsibility with the aggression the administration showed to bail out the banks, and the timidity they showed in addressing a foreclosure crisis which devastated black America (again.) And they will match the rhetoric with an administration whose efforts against housing segregation have been run of the mill. And they will match the talk of the importance of black fathers with the paradox of a president who smoked marijuana in his youth but continued a drug-war which daily wrecks the lives of black men. I think those historians will see a discomfiting pattern of convenient race-talk. quote ends