President of the US talks racial profiling, calls for revision of Stand Your Ground laws

Jul 20, 2013 05:28 GMT  ·  By

Following a week of heated debates on the George Zimmerman verdict in the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin, President Barack Obama has issued a new statement on the matter. You can hear his speech below in full.

The topic on which Obama chose to focus was that of racial profiling in America, a reality to which all African-American men are more than accustomed to, he says.

Without disputing the verdict in any way (in fact, Obama congratulates the judge, the prosecution, and the jury for a job well done in the trial), the President argues that racial profiling was the reason Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by Zimmerman, a community guard.

“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” Obama says.

“And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there's a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it's important to recognize that the African- American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that – that doesn't go away,” he continues.

Obama says he knows how severe the issue of racial profiling in America is because he’s experienced it himself, before he was Senator.

“There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they are shopping at a department store. And that includes me,” he says.

From that to concluding that things would have been different if Martin was a white male teen was but a step, with Obama saying that he’s convinced “both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.”

The President ended his speech by saying that all Stand Your Ground laws need to be revised because, as Martin’s case has shown, they can cause more harm than good.

“If Trayvon Martin was of age and was armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? If the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we should examine those laws,” he says.