President Obama and his top spokesman are mostly avoiding responding to harsh criticism from some GOP critics that the president played a role in instigating the shooting of the Dallas police officers by linking the killings of two black men by police this week to “racial disparities.”

“I’m intentionally making an effort not to spend a lot of time responding to those comments,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters traveling with the president in Poland Friday. “The focus of our attention, as the president pointed out earlier, today should be on the families who are grieving.”