When President Obama spoke at the memorial service in Dallas on 12 July, he returned to one of his frequent refrains. The speech, most remarkable perhaps because the president has had to delivery so many similar to it, included many themes that Obama often invokes: America’s complicated and fraught racial history, the goodness of humanity, and the lie of intransigent polarization. Perhaps the most familiar theme that Obama reiterated in this speech was the importance of thinking in familial terms in order to achieve racial justice and end police violence. Obama told the nation:
But then I am reminded of what the Lord tells Ezekiel. “I will give you a new heart,” the Lord says, “and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone, and give you a heart of flesh.”
That’s what we must pray for, each of us. A new heart. Not a heart of stone, but a heart open to the fears and hopes and challenges of our fellow citizens.
That’s what we’ve seen in Dallas these past few days, and that’s what we must sustain. Because with an open heart, we can learn to stand in each other’s shoes and look at the world through each other’s eyes. So that maybe the police officer sees his own son in that teenager with a hoodie, who’s kind of goofing off but not dangerous.
And the teenager — maybe the teenager will see in the police officer the same words, and values and authority of his parents.
With an open heart, we can abandon the overheated rhetoric and the oversimplification that reduces whole categories of our fellow Americans, not just opponents, but to enemies.
In this section of the speech, Obama depicts familial relationships as a negotiation with others, empathy, or fellow feeling. These affective attachments do not necessarily extend from family ties (just ask anyone who’s had to come out of the closet), and yet time and again Obama reiterates family as a primary site of attachment and interconnectedness. I am reminded of Kennan Ferguson‘s conception of family as BOTH connectedness and controversy, what he terms “community and incommensurability.” For Obama, as ever, family is always exclusively community, obscuring both the complexity of familial relationships and the potential for locating fellow feeling in other social relationships.
Full Speech:
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