This week, President Barack Obama honored the men at Morehouse Collegeby serving as their commencement speaker.  But some are saying that the president gave these young black men the kind of speech he’d never have the courage to give to a white audience.   The president’s message on personal responsibility might seem appropriate to some, but it has been argued that President Obama’s administration uses black personal responsibility as an escape from their own responsibility to back substantive policy against racism.

Tim Wise, a white anti-racism essayist, says that the president is often quick to lean on this racial double standard when speaking with members of the black community:

Sometimes, white privilege is as simple as knowing that, generally speaking, if you’re white, you’ll be perceived as competent and hard-working until proven otherwise, while people of color — even those who have proven themselves competent and hard-working — will still be subjected to presumptions that they just might not be, and that somehow, they (but not you) need to be reminded of the importance of hard-work and personal responsibility, lest they (but never you) revert to some less impressive group mean.

Yvette Carnell goes further to note that while Barack Obama’s father wasn’t the most extraordinary role model, neither was his mother Ann Dunham.  Carnell states that during many of the president’s early years, his mother often “dumped” him with his grandparents so she could live the life of a single woman with no kids.

What criticism does Obama have for the mother that first dragged him to Indonesia, where he was relentlessly bullied, and then dumped him to live with his grandparents?

This was no life for a young Black man to live, being abandoned by his mother, left to be raised by racist whites.

Source: http://www.yourblackworld.net/2013/05/black-news/was-president-obama-being-disrespectful-to-morehouse-men-some-are-saying-yes/