President Barack Obama warned Tuesday that a week of violence and racial tension exposed the deepest fault lines in American democracy, but urged Americans not to despair because the nation would overcome its divides.
“I understand, I understand how Americans are feeling,” Obama said at an interfaith service for five police officers gunned down in Dallas last week.
The President told relatives of those killed and law enforcement and community leaders that the events of last week had exposed the “deepest fault lines of our democracy” and even widened them.
But he insisted: “We are not as divided as we seem. I know that because I know America.”
Obama said that police officers in Dallas and around the country had embraced a profession that came with risks like no other.
“From the moment you put on that uniform, you have answered a call that at any moment, even in the briefest interaction, may put your life in harm’s way,” Obama said. He also mentioned views among many African-American who believe they have been treated unfairly by police.
“I am not naive,” Obama said, taking pains to argue that his calls for unity were based in his experience of American reality, not fantasy. “I have spoken at too many memorials during the course of this presidency. I have hugged too many families who have lost a loved once in senseless violence,” Obama said.
Obama described the killings of the police officers in Dallas last week as “an act not just of demented demented violence but of racial hatred.”
He acknowledged a sense of fear in the nation and said that the fact the divisions opened up by a week of race and violence were not new, it did not offer Americans much comfort.
“Faced with this violence we wonder if the divides of race in America can ever be breached. We wonder if an African-American community that feels unfairly targeted by police and police departments, that feel unfairly maligned for doing their jobs can ever understand each other’s experience,” Obama said. “We must reject such despair. I know how far we have come against impossible odds. I know we will make it because of what I have experienced in my own life, what I have seen of this country and its people.”