Does Obama subject African Americans to "targeted scorn"?

Yesterday I put up some thoughts about Obama's commencement speech at Morehouse College, in blithe and admittedly self-imposed ignorance of what others had said about it (I plead lack of time, fatigue and eagerness to get my thoughts down -- and will also cop to not wanting to complicate that quick-stream).  I thought it was an awesome speech, in the pre-colloquial sense of awesome, as in awe-inspiring.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, however, greets the speech (and a parallel commencement address by Michelle) with a powerful indictment. In response to a passage in which Obama admonishes the Morehouse Men, "there's no longer any room for excuses" -- e.g., being held back by racism, Coates writes:

This clearly is a message that only a particular president can offer. Perhaps not the "president of black America," but certainly a president who sees holding African Americans to a standard of individual responsibility as part of his job. This is not a role Barack Obama undertakes with other communities.

Taking the full measure of the Obama presidency thus far, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this White House has one way of addressing the social ills that afflict black people -- and particularly black youth -- and another way of addressing everyone else. I would have a hard time imagining the president telling the women of Barnard that "there's no longer room for any excuses" -- as though they were in the business of making them. Barack Obama is, indeed, the president of "all America," but he also is singularly the scold of "black America."

There is undoubtedly a lot of truth to this. As Fallows notes in response, though, Obama has to walk a razor-thin tightrope when addressing African Americans directly or matters of race generally -- or, better, as Fallows put it, "a tiny, little rope suspended across a Grand Canyon." By way of additional mitigation, Fallows notes,  "We all take a different tone in setting expectations for "our own."

I would add three further mitigating thoughts. First, in his admonishments throughout the speech, Obama was channeling the historic messages of Morehouse itself -- including in the passage Coates focused on:

Obama bridges a chasm

Waiting for Obama to speak tonight, I thought, as I'm sure many did, that he could not simply give another tender and eloquent consolation speech, as he did when Gabby Giffords was shot.  He can be so eloquent about love, and family, and the nation as family -- you could even say that's why he was elected, as that theme catapulted him to prominence in 2004.   But that would not be enough tonight. The policy void is too gaping, the collective guilt about all these mass murders too raw, his own silence on the gun front too deafening.

And yet, he could not very well talk to an auditorium full of grieving parents and a grieving community about legislation he would send up to Congress.   How would he square that circle?

He did so in the simplest terms. He boiled down all human endeavor, our whole duty, from the personal to the professional to the political, to taking care of children, to creating a community that takes care of its children.  And after five years of uplifting flattery, he said that we all have to do it better. He drew a straight line from the love we all feel for our children to our collective failure to keep them, and all of us (not just children literally understood, as he invoked all the recent massacres), safe from mayhem - and more broadly, to foster their welfare and potential. The speech text is not up yet; here is a NYT quote-and-paraphrase: