Obama's Race Speech

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Barack Obama was compelled to give what will go down as an historic speech on race in America as a result of the exposure of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright's, bombasts from the pulpit excoriating the racist character of American society. Political fortunes in America are lamentably made or broken by the power of sound bites, often repeated over and over again, like Big Brother's mantras chiseling into shape the consciousness of citizens who have access to no other conflicting truths.

What is clear is that Obama has attempted to soar over the issue of race in his elevating discourse of national reconciliation and striving for the common good. It is fascinating how little we have heard from the reverends Jackson and Sharpton, and we can only imagine that it is not an accident. We can suspect that the Obama camp has worked hard to ensure that they don't wax vociferous out of fear that turning Obama into a "race candidate" will frighten white voters and ditch what has been an historic and noble effort to transform the presidency and American politics.

Whether in the absence of the Wright imbroglio, Obama would have addressed the issue of racism in America, remains, for the moment, unknown. What is certain is that having done so, Obama has furthered his reputation as a grandiloquent orator, as politically astute, indeed, as brilliant, and if this ethicist can go out on a limb, morally authentic.

As a speech, Obama's address on race was a piece of soaring rhetoric which reaches the highest circles of American political oratory. Its dialectical oscillations from the personal to the political, from the microcosmic (the finale invoking the anecdote of the 23 year-old white woman, Ashley, inspiring an elderly black man to be politically involved, could bring the most battle hardened political veteran to tears) to the macrocosmic concerns about the economy, framed the immediate and far reaching issues which have made Obama's campaign so inspiring to so many.

But Obama's speech was also an act of unmasking, and therefore approached a level of candor that politicians flee from as from poison. Not only did he condemn Jeremiah Wright's Malcolm-X style rants (he referred to him twice as his "former pastor") but he gave a long overdue frontal assault on right-wing media clowns who "built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism." Obama made explicit what everyone knows, viz., that blacks and whites when not in the company of the other will let fly racial sentiments that they would not publicly utter.

But Obama did something else which may well determine whether a great and intelligent speech (Could one imagine George W. Bush giving it?) will be politically persuasive, or remain compelling to only an elite corner of the voting public. He denounced Reverend Wright's views as being "divisive" and "distorted," while proclaiming him a beloved individual in his life. He asked his auditors to recall their loyalty to their own minister, priest or rabbi, even while dissenting from their occasional utterances. He invoked his love for his white grandmother, as he said he cringed at her occasional racist remarks. And he acknowledged the persistence of racism, while bidding his audience not to conclude that American society is static (as Wright's sermon's often implied).

In other words, Barack Obama has asked Americans to hold two contradictory ideas in their minds at the same time. Is this something that the American public, whose political sophistication has fallen beneath the bottom of the charts, can rise to entertain? If so, Barack Obama's speech may do more than nudge us beyond the "stalemate" of racial discourse to which he alludes. He may have pushed our nation ahead to a position of political seriousness.