Sherry Chandler

Obama’s speech

Can be read and watched in full at Huffington Post at Barack Obama’s website.

These are good words:

But or all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people - that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

He also says this:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.”

This is Barack Obama’s standard. Let us hold him to it.

Update: Setting the bar high for Obama. Ezra Klein:

But this speech was something I didn’t expect: Honest. It was honest about Obama’s affection for Wright, even as it repudiated Wright’s comments. It was honest about the tragic history of race in America, even as it expressed faith in a redemptive future. It was honest about the resentment peddlers and racial charlatans who try and recast the increasing rarity of the American Dream as the consequence of ethnic competition rather than gross power imbalances. It was honest in its recognition that racial memory influences contemporary thought, honest in admitting that there’s anger in this country, and it’s justified, and that there’s fear in this country, and it’s real.

The speech also deepened and textured the broader theme of Obama’s campaign. “[Whites] are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away,” he said. “In an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.” You can look at “unity” as a pretty word, or you can look at it as a weapon. What came clear in this speech was that Obama’s insistence on the universality of our political and economic experience and ambitions is birthed, in part, by a belief that a recognition of that shared experience can overwhelm our other divisions. Is it more fundamental that some Americans are college educated and some are not, or is it more fundamental that wages are declining for both groups, and that both see their futures slipping away? Is it more fundamental that some Americans are black and some are not, or that both groups dream of owning a home, of providing stability to their families, of feeling spiritually fulfilled and materially cared for?

Obama is hoping that that which unites us is stronger than that which divides. Trinity United Church of Christ, after all, was a middle class black church that preached a message of economic empowerment. Wright’s foreign policy may have been divisive, but the atmosphere of striving ambition, the emphasis on strength in community, and the insistence of economic opportunity would’ve been familiar to quite a few of us.

I would like to believe this stuff is true but I also think it was Obama, or Obama’s team, who started the race-baiting so color me, like Riverdaughter, still a bit skeptical.

Maybe you English majors out there can help me out but doesn’t this passage [quoted in her post] seem incredibly passive? Like, “mistakes were made”, that classic style of the person who doesn’t want to take responsibility for his role in something? The mistakes happened all by themselves. The accusations of racism just popped up out of nowhere. It wasn’t Obama’s campaign and members of the black community that were outraged by the so-called “racist” remarks of the Clinton campaign. No, they never picked through speeches with fine toothed combs looking for the tiniest fragment of a phrase that could be deliberately misconstrued as racist. It was never their intention to highlight these fragments so as to alienate Clinton from the constituency she has served her entire career. It just… happened.

Obama is saying, “Wow! We saw these racial tensions bubble before the South Carolina primary. No one could have imagined that the media could take a couple of unrelated phrases, slam them into a couple of other unrelated phrases and create a racial firestorm that would kill the African-American votes for Clinton

Update the second: And then I read crap like this and remember why I’m so mad:

Is it possible to win the Democratic nomination in such a way as to make winning not worth it?

The Barack Obama campaign thinks so. It thinks Hillary Clinton’s campaign is willing to take any road to the White House, including the low road.

“They would do anything to win, and that means anything,” David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, told me Monday. “There is a frenetic energy around them to commandeer this election in any way they can.”

So it’s a rope-a-dope. Obama takes the high road and Axelrod takes the low road.

Update the third: Juan Cole:

Barack Obama was talking about something very personal to him, about being rooted in family and community. He recognizes that race had shaped both and had wounded both. He refuses to give up on the communities in which he is rooted even if they sometimes act out on issues of race. He cannot, he says, afford to give up, and neither can we. No matter what happens in electoral politics, on March 18, 2008, Barack Obama entered the American history books with his brilliant, searingly honest speech on race.

…

Obama says we have to stop hiding the incompleteness of our struggle with race inequality from ourselves. We have to recognize how traumatized African Americans are by the memory of Jim Crow. We have to recognize how whiteness shapes the working class’s perception of blacks. Most importantly, he argues that we should not be hobbled by the past, that we have to see how fluid and dynamic American society is, such that things can change. Attitudes can be transformed on a large scale, with macro effects.

Amy Sullivan:

I don’t know about you, but I’m not accustomed to hearing politicians admit to making mistakes. At least not without a smoking-gun document, talkative intern, or FBI wire in the picture, and sometimes not even then. And yet that’s precisely what Sen. Barack Obama did in his much-talked-about and just-as-much-misunderstood speech about religion and politics last week (you can listen to it here). Amid the uproar about whether Obama was using the occasion to scold fellow Democrats or to advance a possible 2008 candidacy, it’s been overlooked that he started and ended the address with incidents he regrets from his political career.

…

For the past six years, the most prominent Christian in America has been the president. His belief is not of the “God said it. I believe it. That settles it,” sort that fundamentalists embrace. Rather, Bush subscribes to a syllogistic doctrine of presidential infallibility: God works through Christians; I am a Christian; I have decided to do X; therefore, X is God’s will.

…

Obama’s speech, delivered to an audience of the frustrated religious left, was not a tactical plan for electoral success in November or in 2008. It wasn’t a “We are too religious!” rebuttal to Republicans. It was, for the first time in modern memory, an affirmative statement from a Democrat about “how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy,” as Obama put it.

Update the fourth: Bill Clinton (via Taylor Marsh) at the Million Man March, 1995:

… .. Abraham Lincoln reminded us that a house divided against itself cannot stand. When divisions have threatened to bring our house down, somehow we have always moved together to shore it up. My fellow Americans, our house is the greatest democracy in all human history. And with all its racial and ethnic diversity, it has beaten the odds of human history. But we know that divisions remain, and we still have work to do. (Applause.)

The two worlds we see now each contain both truth and distortion. Both black and white Americans must face this, for honesty is the only gateway to the many acts of reconciliation that will unite our worlds at last into one America.

White America must understand and acknowledge the roots of black pain. It began with unequal treatment first in law and later in fact. African Americans indeed have lived too long with a justice system that in too many cases has been and continues to be less than just. (Applause.) The record of abuses extends from lynchings and trumped up charges to false arrests and police brutality. The tragedies of Emmett Till and Rodney King are bloody markers on the very same road.

…

On the other hand, blacks must understand and acknowledge the roots of white fear in America. There is a legitimate fear of the violence that is too prevalent in our urban areas; and often by experience or at least what people see on the news at night, violence for those white people too often has a black face.

It isn’t racist for a parent to pull his or her child close when walking through a high-crime neighborhood, or to wish to stay away from neighborhoods where innocent children can be shot in school or standing at bus stops by thugs driving by with assault weapons or toting handguns like old west desperados. (Applause.)

…

The great potential for this march today, beyond the black community, is that whites will come to see a larger truth — that blacks share their fears and embrace their convictions; openly assert that without changes in the black community and within individuals, real change for our society will not come. … ..

Possibly related posts:

Clinton’s speech

Obama has his Henry V moment

Poems for President Obama

Barack Obama, Poet

Obama and Appalachia

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