The Speech: Not There Yet But a Good Start

IT HAS TAKEN ME A FEW DAYS TO GET TO WRITING ABOUT BARACK OBAMA’S race relations speech the other day, which some are calling one of the greatest political speeches of all time and others are shooting down as a rhetorical sleight of hand. My delay has to do in part with my busy life and in part with my ambivalence about it.

Let’s start with the simple stuff: Contrary to much of the swooning that’s going on around Obama’s speech, there’s nothing terribly original about a politician addressing the subject of race. It may have been a great speech, as speeches go, but others have tread this ground much more than Obama has in this campaign.

Bill Clinton deserves a lot of credit, for example, for tackling it through his Presidential Commission on Race. Many more cynically minded people never gave the Commission a chance to succeed. Yes, it’s true, it did bog down a bit in side arguments about whether one group’s victimization was greater than others. But it was a good try, and Clinton waded into the subject quite often when his advisors strenuously urged him not to, fearing it would get him into trouble. I think the nation is better for his doing it, but certainly not entirely reconciled with the issue of race.

Certainly, the subject of race was much more of a front-burner issue during the 1960s through the ‘90s than it has been in the last eight years from some reason. Up to the late 1990s, it was a subject about which there was a lot of great writing and speech making (and a lot of silly, noisy rhetoric, too). I know, because in those days  I read everything I could on those subjects. Somehow, there seems to be far less talk about race these days, which is surprising given that the Bush Administration has done precious little to advance the discussion for the better or the worse. Or maybe it's because of it.

Obama’s speech, while noteworthy for opening the subject at all, doesn’t even approach the kind of candid and smart talk I heard up to about eight years ago. It simply reminds people that we have to get back to the talk about it. That's admirable but not epic, as many are portraying his speech.

Most importantly, I’m ambivalent about whether Obama should get a pass, as many are granting him, for indulging the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

I feel a bit like Obama tried to have it both ways when he condemned the words but not the man who delivered them. To me, that’s essentially an endorsement of the words, and it undermines the decency of many African Americans – and I know of many – who would simply have found another church if their pastor had acted this way.

But he has a point that what Wright said is a common theme in the black community - doesn't make it right, but there's something in it for all of us to learn from.

Like Obama’s speech itself, there’s nothing all that new about Wright’s comments. Anyone who has listened to African American radio or read African American newspapers will be familiar with this kind of stuff. Hurtful and potentially dangerous as it can be, whites who are surprised by such sentiment have simply not been paying attention, assuming, I guess, that we’ve ‘gotten past’ all our racial problems – which is itself a reason for African Americans to be frustrated.

I think it’s delusional and dangerous to say some of the things Wright said: that whites are responsible for giving blacks the AIDS virus or that we somehow sowed the seeds of the 9/11 attacks by our previous behaviors, and so on (I've heard much worse). I have long been annoyed and angered by so many African Americans’ unwillingness to distance themselves from this sort of crap.

Still, while the content of speeches like Wright’s may be beyond the pale, that doesn’t mean we should ignore the spirit or the intent of those speeches. There’s something driving it that is telling us that, while we’ve come a long way in a generation or so since Jim Crow, African America is not at all feeling that the journey is over. Many admirable legislative and private-sector initiatives have been put in place to ameliorate the legacy of racism, but there is still much to be despondent about, and the real debate is about whether that’s because of residual white racism.

Yes, it’s good that Obama took a chance, and it’s good to see that the reaction was, for the most part, thoughtful and possibly constructive. I don’t think he’s fully extricated himself from the tight spot that prompted his great speech in the first place, and I'm annoyed with everyone from assuming that he has. Nor did he plow any especially original ground, a so many have suggested he has. But he's on to something. I hope it’s not the last we’ll hear from him on the subject.

Jeff 

Comments

[Marc Gunther]

I think Obama deserves more credit that you've given him here, Jeff. He's obviously personally close to Jeremiah Wright and, equally obviously, he does not share his worldview. This may seem inconsistent but, hey, we are all inconsisent in the way we live our lives. Of course, most of us aren't running for president so we don't have to explain ourselves.

Finding himself in a tough spot, Obama gave an honest, thoughtful speech that embraced some of the complexities of race relations in America today. He tried to account for Wright's views without justifying them.

Peggy Noonan (no liberal) had an excellent column in the WSJ about the speech. She made the point that it was serious in a way that few politicians are when they talk. Here's a link:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/declarations.html

[Jeff Weintraub]

Marc. I agree with much of what you say, particularly about holding public figures to a higher degree of consistency than most of us could ever even aspire to. But, while I truly believe Obama when he says he does not share Wright's views, the only question I have is why Obama chose to remain in the pews for so long while he listened to Wright's rhetoric. I've never been faced with such a predicament myself. While I don't agree with everything I've heard rabbis say from the pulpit, I've never heard them say anything that was so beyond the pale of propriety. I'd like to believe I would have bailed out of that church a lot sooner than Obama did, given the ideas of his minister. But you're right that not all of us lead such morally consistent lives, which doesn't make us bad people. I guess I'm saying that, but for that part of it, he did well with his speech.

[rinky]

His obvious sincerity and thoughtfulness--unlike some of the canned rhetoric we get from politicians meant alot to me. I may be naive,but I believe that he had not heard of that kind of speech earlier and that he belongs to the church not the man. Also that those kinds of bitter feelings
are generational.