this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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Here's the pertinent section from the article:
So his point was really that people need a diversity of types of people as role models, and that one of his own was a gay professor who showed empathy and kindness. The meme changes it a bit.
So he words it better in the article but the core message that minorities should carry the burden of emotional labor and growth for the ill informed and bigoted is essentially the same
“[the gay professor] would call me out when I started saying stuff that was ignorant”
Granted one can’t learn the struggles of every single minority group in existence but maybe take it upon yourself to learn empathic approaches to listening and communicating. You won’t be perfect of course, no one is, but you’ll put a lot less people in the position of having to explain to you “this is why you’re being an ass right now”
That's not the message I took away from what he said. What I got is that people should have diverse role models because if everyone is just like you, you don't learn empathy. He had someone who would correct him when he was wrong in a kind way, and that person happened to be gay. That experience helped him learn empathy and kindness.
As a straight white guy, I also feel that I've benefited from getting to know queer folk on a personal level - that that experience helped me understand and appreciate diversity, even for people from groups that I haven't yet gotten to know personally. I get to know someone who's, say, trans, and get at least a little exposure to what their experience of life is and how it's differed from mine. It makes me work that empathy muscle, so it's more developed when I met the next person whose experience is different from mine.
That doesn't mean that those people have some responsibility for educating me or teaching me anything. It just means that my exposure to people from different walks of life is useful for my own personal growth.
I think what you say is better than what he said
You describe hearing people you consider friends and learning from them with empathic listening. Reading the article (though tbf I did not listen to the podcast to hear his full remarks and what is in the article is extremely limited) obama presents the idea of minority ambassadors to empathic reasoning:
“That’s one of the things that I think a lot of times boys need, is not just exposure to one guy, one dad. No matter how good the dad is, he can’t be everything.
“And then that boy may need somebody to give the boy some perspective on the dad.”
Perhaps I’m reading too much into his words but this, to me, reads as “pick up the slack for shitty dads that are letting the Internet turn out an army of andrew tate clones”
Also note that unlike you he does not refer to having “friends” but “role models”, putting people on a pedestal and inherently being part of the problem. I again think your comment is better largely because of this point; rather than elevate to a prop you consider these people your actual friends. Again, maybe this is something that obama says in the podcast, which I assume is far longer, but also maybe as a career politician he is so disconnected from reality he doesn’t know what friends are anymore haha
Podcasts tend to be pretty conversational. I'm sure Obama didn't put the thought into the comment that he puts into his speeches, where every word and every sentence is crafted. I just took it to mean that he had this diversity of experience with people he looked up to, and that helped him grow as a person. I personally didn't have a lot of people growing up that I thought of as role models (not that my life was in any way bad, just that I didn't tend to relate to people that way). So maybe the way I took it was slightly different than he meant it because of the differences in our experience of growing up, or maybe he was just trying to equate exposure to diverse people with the development of empathy, and did so in the way it worked him him. Hard to say.