The Speech, Itself

As Redstar noted to me yesterday, my initial impressions of Barack Obama's speech yesterday concentrated on the political aspect - since the speech was meant to address an issue on the campaign trail, I thought it reasonable to ask what effect it would have in terms of the primary contest.  Still, there's the other, more discussed aspects of the speech - the role it plays in raising or general awareness of issues around race.

As I said, I think in many ways the speech was brilliant - it's true, I'd agree, that few, if any, people have said, so directly and in such a widely disseminated forum, the things Barack Obama said about how people view race in this country.  But I think what's instructive about what he said is what has happened since, as scores (and scores... and scores) of white liberal commentators laud the speech so broadly.  As he has since he first started attracting widespread attention and laudatory praise, Barack Obama is once again being returned to his place as "transcender of racial problems", or as Shelby Steele put it prior to the speech, his familiar role as a racial bargainer.

What this wave of good feeling tends to ignore - yet again - is the point Barack Obama made about race: that we are in a terrible place, and the media, in part, is to blame for it.

What was remarkable about the speech was the care Obama took in developing his case; he it wasn't that, as some said, he could have rushed to condemn Jeremiah Wright more conclusively than he has (let's remember, the man has been forced into retirement from his church, pushed out of an advisory role to the campaign, and his more inflammatory remarks labeled "Stupid" and passe). What Senator Obama could have done, more pointedly, was assume that we didn't need to be told what some of our racial problems are, and he didn't provide the easy comfort on that which we normally expect.

Still, what Obama said was tough, and not encouraging: he talked about the anger and resentment in the black community, that is not shared with others, an anger that animates the fiery oratory of preachers like Wright and the divisive debates we have on major issues.  He said that ethnic whites tend to see black community complaints as whiny and meant to take away their own precarious gains.  And then, more crucially, he said the media's focus on overplaying racial tensions (like Ferraro - though he elided past his own campaign's role in the story - as well as Wright) isn't helping, as I quoted yesterday:

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.

Lauding the speech yesterday and into today, editorialists focused on the descriptions of anger and the call for us to rise above it; what they glossed over was their own role in the story: the focus on deciding who can speak "authentically" on race issues (which has everything to do with why this is a speech Obama could give, as opposed to Hillary Clinton, or John McCain), and turning debates into "who suffers more" or who has it worse. My mom pointed out to me last night the accuracy of Obama's linking the sensationalizing of the OJ verdict to racial tensions - she and I recalled how stunning the divided moment was; but as I responded then, what changes because of this speech? We know now what we knew then: that this country is deeply divided, with little way to talk across racial lines.

As if to underline that tension, today we have, as above, hordes of white commentators ready to tell us that Obama "told us an important truth"; the question isn't whether they understand what he told us.  The question is, what do they plan to do about it?  Did any of these self-congratulating white folks ask a black person about black rage? Have they offered any sort of notion of how we can bridge these gaps, move forward... become, as Obama suggested at the end of speech, the people who change the way we do politics?

If I focus on the politics of the speech, it's because I think the speech's main goal, and effect, was to restore to Obama the mantle of being above race.  But that doesn't move the primary race to anywhere new; it's simply the conversation we've been having since Iowa, where white people congratulate themselves for a vote that somehow erases our shared, ugly, racial past. I'd love to think the speech did more than that.  But let's not kid ourselves - by seying "great speech, now we can move on" we are, yet again, not having the discussion about race we don't want to have.  Proving, of course, that Obama was right: we will only discuss this amongst ourselves... in that other room, with the people like ourselves.

Comments

[scottreads]

Great comment. As Somerby at the Daily Howler has noted, the MSM has had a crucial role in pimping racial division at every turn, and there's been no examination of that.