Obama’s remarks were broadly criticized, especially from progressive members of the Democratic Party, like New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“What if activists aren’t PR firms for politicians & their demands are [because] police budgets are exploding, community resources are shrinking to bankroll it, & [people] brought this up for ages but it wasn’t until they said ‘defund’ that comfortable people started paying [attention] to brutality,” she wrote in a Twitter thread shortly after the Obama interview was published.
Ocasio-Cortez didn’t mention Obama by name; in his response to Noah, the former president similarly avoided responding directly to anyone about his remarks. But he did say there were “two or three writers” he admired who claimed Obama was trying to “chastise” the Black Lives Matter movement.
“And you go, ‘What? Hold on a second, I just spent the whole summer complimenting them. What are you talking about?’” Obama said.
Echoing the thesis of his original comment, Obama told Noah he was trying to “translate the very legitimate belief that how we do policing needs to change. That there is, for example, a homeless guy ranting and railing in the middle of the street—sending a mental health worker rather than an armed untrained police officer to deal with that person might be a better outcome for all of us and make us safer.”
“If we describe that to not just white folks but, let’s say, Michelle’s mom, that makes sense to them,” he said. “But if we say ‘defund the police,’ not just white folks but Michelle’s mom might say, ‘If I’m getting robbed, who am I going to call, and is somebody going to show up?’”
In her comments about “defund the police,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote, “The thing that critics of activists don’t get is that they tried playing the ‘polite language’ policy game and all it did was make them easier to ignore. It wasn’t until they made folks uncomfortable that there was traction to do ANYTHING even if it wasn’t their full demands.”
She added, “The whole point of protesting is to make [people] uncomfortable. Activists take that discomfort [with] the status quo & advocate for concrete policy changes. Popular support often starts small & grows. To folks who complain protest demands make others uncomfortable… that’s the point.”
While Obama didn’t address Ocasio-Cortez, he did explicitly focus on the idea of activism and its relationship to the disruption of the norms.
“The concern in these debates is often, ‘Oh, are we just trying to make white people comfortable rather than speaking truth to power,’ right?” he said. “That’s the framework we tend to think about these things. The issue to me is not making them comfortable. It is, can we be precise with our language enough that people who might be persuaded around that particular issue to make a particular change that gets a particular result that we want, what’s the best way for us to describe that?”
Before moving off the topic, Obama concluded, “Part of this is also everyone has different roles to play. An activist, a movement leader is going to provide a prophetic voice and speak certain truths that somebody who is going to be elected into office will not be able to say.”
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