Obama talks race, religion in moving address at Charleston funeral

CHARLESTON, S.C. – President Barack Obama challenged the nation Friday to face up to its legacy of racial discrimination, insisting that it would betray the memory of the victims of the black church massacre here to “allow ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence once again.”

In a moving address in which he frequently slipped into the cadences of a pastor and even led the predominantly black audience in a rendition of “Amazing Grace,” Obama returned repeatedly to the themes of race and religion. He praised the grace shown by the victims’ families and hailed South Carolina’s quick action to remove the Confederate battle flag from its Capitol grounds in response to the racially motivated killings, but said, “I don’t think God wants us to stop there.”

Obama said the shocking nature of the killing of nine worshippers, including the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the pastor of the Emanuel AME church and a state senator who was an early supporter of Obama’s 2008 presidential bid, required that Americans not “settle for symbolic gestures” and follow up “with the hard work of more lasting change.”

“For too long, we’ve been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present,” he said. “Perhaps we see that now. Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty, or attend dilapidated schools, or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career.”

At times in his more than six years in office, Obama has seemed to struggle with the expectations that came with being the nation’s first black president, particularly in speaking about race. References to his faith have also been sparing, a consequence in part of the political challenge that his affiliation with a combative black pastor posed during his first presidential campaign.

He embraced both on Friday. A draft of his remarks prepared for the president’s review Thursday night was returned to aides the next morning with significant revisions and additions.

He called for reforms to the criminal justice system and policing tactics as well as an examination of how bias “can infect us even when we don’t realize it,” from the overt use of racial slurs to “the subtle impulse to call Johnny back for a job interview but not Jamal.”

The grace shown by the families of the nine victims toward the suspect in the massacre, Dylann Roof, was an example for others to emulate, Obama said. Grace is not earned but given to us by God, he said, citing Scripture. “It is up to us now to make the most of it,” he said.

“None of us can or should expect a transformation in race relations overnight,” he said. “Every time something like this happens, somebody says, ‘We have to have a conversation about race.’ We talk a lot about race. There’s no shortcut. We don’t need more talk.”