The President of the United States of America came to the White House briefing today to personalize and emotionalize the Trayvon Martin killing and to tell reporters what it’s like to be a black man in America today.  

It was, in reality, an effort by the President to sell Eric Holder’s plan to bring civil rights charges against George Zimmerman by bringing race into a case in which race had no role.

The President used his speech to demonstrate the racism he claimed to have felt in his life,

And there are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.

Overturned trash cans, vandalism and #JusticeForTrayvon hashtags aside, the non-SEIU members of the country have noticed Zimmerman’s not-guilty verdict was the product of a trial in which the defense’s story made more sense than the one told by a swearing and prancing prosecutor. It also comes from a man who is the recipient of $1.4 billion of our  yearly tax payer dollars to keep him and his family in  the style to which they’ve now apparently become accustomed. 

The President was also trying to hip-check the Charles Barkleys of the world and to further racialize a case against George Zimmerman, the ‘white hispanic’ who has a mixed race family and who shot Trayvon Martin in the midst of the youth beating the crap out of him,

African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. 

I’d like to tell the President that not all of us are like his “typical white Grandmother” who  imputed horrible motives to black men. I’d like to tell him that we’re not all like Jesse Jackson who claims that when he sees a mob of black youth he’s scared. And forget for a moment that the President assumes racism against him was turned off the moment he became a Senator due to the radar we white women possess. 

No, the President is wrong. Wrong. He assumes that because he hears the lock clicks and sees the purse clutching that it’s because he’s a black man. He believes these moves are because of his color.  And as a result of lumping us all into a the bin of racism he has now done a huge disservice to the safety of women. 

Let me be clear: IF he ever heard the clicks it was because he is an M-A-N. 

The overwhelming number of women are intimidated and victimized by men. Sitting at a traffic light or stop sign, women will check to see if they are safe, and if their locks are not deployed…click. We do this not because we don’t trust your color, we do this because we don’t fancy becoming a rape/assault/car-jacking victim.

We don’t know you and we don’t owe you an explanation, we just want to be safe. Now you’re trying to make us out as racists. It’s not about you, it’s not about your color, it’s about crime stats and not wanting to become a victim. 

As a woman who has been a radio talk host for years, black men often use this very example as evidence of racism. I’ve tried to disabuse black men of this specious claim for years. I’d love to simply send this story to the dead letter office. Better yet, why don’t we just round-file this poor excuse. I’m sure there room in the file right next to “long hot summer.”