



Obama is not the first president to try to co-opt King’s legacy.

In a suspiciously well-timed bit of political theater, the nation’s first African-American president has toothlessly endorsed the significance of marijuana reforms in Washington and Colorado for weakening a racist drug war – right in time for the federal holiday celebrating the message of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In an interview with the New Yorker published on Sunday, January 19th, Barack Obama opined that it was “important” for the voter-demanded cannabis regulations “to go forward.”

“Middle-class kids don’t get locked up for smoking pot,” explained the president, who has a law degree from Harvard and experience working as a community organizer in an economically depressed Chicago neighborhood. “Poor kids do. And African-American kids and Latino kids are more likely to be poor… It’s important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished.”

The comments have drawn qualified praise from reform advocates, who appreciate the expressed sentiment even while noting the probable political calculus behind the interview. “I don’t know that Obama’s increasingly supportive stance toward legalization represents a sea change in his own personal philosophy – he’s an African-American former law professor who has to know prohibition is destructive to people of color and to the criminal justice system generally,” said Major Neill Franklin (Ret.), executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “But it does show the political calculus is changing and smart leaders are scrambling to be counted on the right side of history. Now he needs to back up those words by allowing banks to work with marijuana businesses and making other needed reforms to support legalization.”

The timing of the interview’s publication, released the afternoon before Martin Luther King Day and mere hours before the traditional beginning of the US news cycle, may reflect a desire by Obama to test the waters of reform before throwing his full weight behind it. The connection between the racial character of the president’s comments and the legacy of the civil rights reformer honored by the federal holiday is too obvious to miss. Should the reaction from major media outlets be largely positive, Obama’s comments may signal a shift in policy for a two-term president looking to shape his legacy. For the nation’s first minority president to ignore an urgent issue with such obvious racial implications would be unbecoming, indeed.

Only time will reveal the full motives behind Obama’s comments on marijuana. But for now it’s 2014, and the US has a black president willing to at least acknowledge the importance of ending a policy which has resulted in arrests of black Americans at nearly four times the rate of whites nationwide. Happy MLK Day, everybody.