The Hope For Something Audacious

(Interrupts self-imposed moratorium on discussing politics...)

So here we are; I said, this would get bigger over the weekend, and it did.  I said, he probably has to talk about where he comes down, not on the inflammatory words that Jeremiah Wright said, but the ideas that animate them.  I said, it's hard to be the candidate who transcends a discussion we're not even having, so that we can move beyond a conflict we like to think is over, anyway.

On the other hand, like Mitt Romney, I'm not sure Barack Obama should be giving a speech about faith.  I don't know that a lot of good can come from it, I think it has the potential to raise as many questions as it purports to answer. And yet, I know he needs to give "the speech." And I know that if he manages to pull it off, we will be in a whole different political campaign.

(Pauses... Adjusts wig... continues:)

I'm as curious as anyone to see what Obama will say; his tendency to generalize, to say "we're going to talk about specifics" while not doing exactly that make it hard for me to see how he can, as promised, explain the questions of racial divisions that we have, his faith, and how we can move towards coming together.  I suspect he's going to enumerate a few of the "community grievances" of the black community - softer notions of the things Wright talks about, then say "the time has come to move on" and then fall back on his old "we are the change we've been waiting for" lines.

We are the world, too.

I hope (honestly) that I'm wrong about this; the part of me that feels a certain kinship with Barack Obama and his story, thinks that he - like many of us mixed race kids of a certain age - can actually bridge the gaps that exist in our culture, explaining to both sides of the divide what the other thinks, and expressing the sense that we can actually come together.  It's all in me... I think it's all in him, too.

In the past few weeks, engaging in the various debates around the "people who've gone too far" that we've kind of been having in the blogosphere, I've grown more comfortable with wading into the hard stuff of race that makes us all so uncomfortable. In some ways I think we don't have a choice; the alternative - silence, groping for things to say and ways to say it - is just not acceptable to me. But engaging those discussions, rather than avoiding them, has underlined for me how far we are from really finding common ground. When we can't agree on basic terms (like racism vs. prejudice), resort to the "my oppression is worse than yours" comparisons, suggest that this is a discussion where only some voices can be given validity... we're not going to get very far.

In that sense, this speech doesn't actually have the weight that so many of us attach to it; no one speech could get us from where we are to where we should be (a place, I suspect, that's different from where we want to be). Successfully pointing us in a direction, taking the edge of some of the most extreme views... those would be major accomplishments in advancing a discussion of race in America.  Here's hoping. What else can you do?

Comments

[jinbaltimore]

Have you read Sullivan? He's calling a long night at the Black Party HIS Rev. Wright.