“Obama to the world: Ferguson shows what makes American leadership so important”
“It’s remarkable that Obama invoked Ferguson not as a way to talk to about the American system, but as the concluding argument of a lengthy foreign policy speech to non-Americans arguing for a strong US leadership role in the world. This was about repositioning Ferguson, in many ways a disgraceful moment for the US, as an example of American greatness so significant that it was meant to justify ambitious, somewhat hawkish US foreign policy initiatives in the Middle East and Europe.”
That bit of the speech is really interesting, framing Ferguson in alignment with other identity-based conflicts occurring in other parts of the world in a way that I think is important and uncommon. The media can portray other conflicts as arcane, barbaric, medieval, not American, and therefore we do not learn from other’s struggles and can be really incredibly patronizing about super complicated conflicts. The ‘US exceptionality narrative’ in which we are removed from these kinds of conflicts is problematic because it pressures Americans to ignore American conflicts in order to not lose our sense of self. (Like, I think this is why we don’t talk about Native Americans unless we are talking about the first Thanksgiving or something).
The speech also weirdly other-izes Black people in some ways in America, sort of casting Black identity as the new and interloping identity; or is it making references to non-White groups that have had recent large waves of immigration? I don’t know, either way it’s sort of saying that White America is the original America in a way that I don’t like.
