Barack Obama

WASHINGTON — When racial tensions erupted midway through his first presidential campaign, Barack Obama came to Philadelphia to decry the “racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.” Over time, he said, such wounds, rooted in America’s painful history on race, can be healed.

Six years later, the stalemate suddenly seems more entrenched than ever. As Obama pleads for calm and understanding in Ferguson, Mo., he’s struggling to determine what role — if any — the nation’s first black president can play in defusing a crisis that has laid bare the profound sense of injustice felt by African-Americans across the country.

As Obama sought to strike the appropriate tone Monday, he appeared to be trapped between the need, as president and commander in chief, to stand up for the government’s right to ensure law and order, and the inclination, as an African-American, to empathize with those whose say the killing of an unarmed black man just goes to show how blacks are treated differently by police.

“In too many communities around the country, a gulf of mistrust exists between local residents and law enforcement. In too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and seen only as objects of fear,” Obama said at the White House, in his most expansive comments to date about the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown just outside St. Louis.

But while Obama lamented the disproportional apprehension of young black men, he pointedly argued that’s not solely the fault of overzealous cops. Police officers must be honored and respected for the difficult job they perform, Obama said.

“There are young black men that commit crime,” the president said. “We can argue about why that happens — because of the poverty they were born into and the lack of opportunity or school systems that fail them or what have you — but if they commit a crime, then they need to be prosecuted, because every community has an interest in public safety.”