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Did any black colleges ask Obama to speak? We may never know
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| Contributor | kal |
| Last Edited | kal Jun 02, 2009 03:48am |
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| Category | Commentary |
| News Date | Tuesday, June 2, 2009 09:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | It was, I thought, a fairly simple question - which threatened nothing more than the arrogance of the White House's Praetorian Guard.
I wanted to know how many black higher education institutions have asked Barack Obama - the nation's first black president - to be their commencement speaker this spring.
Black voters, many of them students at historically black colleges and universities, turned out in record numbers to help lift Obama to the presidency. While overall voter turnout in 2008 was roughly the same as in 2004, the black vote rose 23.5 percent, and 95 percent of black voters cast their ballots for Obama, according to David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
So when the White House announced that Obama would give the commencement address at three schools this year, I wondered why none of them was black.
Maybe political considerations kept the president from speaking at a single black school. Maybe it was an oversight. Maybe the White House staffers who decide such things didn't think a black school was an impressive enough setting for a presidential commencement speech. Or maybe they worried that it might make Obama look too black to those who believe his election has ushered in a post-racial era.
Whatever the reason, the White House doesn't want to talk about it.
My efforts to get the names of the black schools that invited the president to speak were rebuffed. "We don't give out that kind of information," White House press aide Corey Ealons told me.
Imagine that. The list of black schools that asked Obama to give a commencement address is a state secret. Press secretary Robert Gibbs didn't bother to respond when I e-mailed him to ask whether Ealons correctly stated the White House's policy.
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