President Barack Obama and First lady Michelle Obama are drawing criticism from progressives for “stereotyping black youth” and for “personal responsibility finger-wagging” in commencement speeches last week.

President Obama was the commencement speaker this year at Morehouse College in Atlanta and Michelle Obama at Bowie State University in Maryland—both historically black colleges and universities.

A sampling of progressive voices speaking up this week:

Trevor Coleman, a former speechwriter for ex-Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, told the Washington Post he was disappointed that Obama almost always defaults to the clean-up-your-act message when talking to predominantly black audiences.

“The first couple of times, it was okay, but I and a lot of other people are beginning to grow weary of it… What made it so gratuitous was this was Morehouse College! In the African American community, the very definition of a Morehouse man is someone who is a leader, who is taught to go out and make a difference in his community.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor at The Atlantic, in a piece titled “How the Obama Administration Talks to Black America” writes:

“…Some day historians will pore over his many speeches to black audiences. They will see a president who sought to hold black people accountable for their communities, but was disdainful of those who looked at him and sought the same. They will match his rhetoric of individual responsibility, with the aggression the administration showed to bail out the banks, and the timidity they showed in addressing a foreclosure crisis which devastated black America (again.) They will weigh the rhetoric against an administration whose efforts against housing segregation have been run of the mill. And they will match the talk of the importance of black fathers with the paradox of a president who smoked marijuana in his youth but continued a drug-war which daily wrecks the lives of black men and their families. In all of this, those historians will see a discomfiting pattern of convenient race-talk.”

“I think the president owes black people more than this.”

Anti-racism activist and writer Tim Wise wrote in a piece on his website titled Bullying Pulpit: Racism, Barack Obama and the Selective Call for Personal Responsibility:

…”It’s hard to know what’s more disturbing.”

“Either that President Obama thinks black grads at one of the nation’s best colleges really need to be lectured about such matters; or, alternately, that White America is so desirous of exculpation for the history of racial discrimination that we need him to say such things, and he knows it, thereby leading him to feed us the moral scolding of black men we so desperately desire, and which he must know will be transmitted to us by way of media coverage of his talk.”

“Either way, the result is tragic.”

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