Barack Obama’s speech on race, whose honesty and nuance are all too rare in American politics, deserves to be read or watched in full. For the first time, I’m persuaded that Obama is a unique politician. He may be opportunistic like the rest, but his horizons are broader. He doesn’t accept the rules as written. He educates, broadens the debate.
We could quibble and say that Obama delivered this speech because he had to, after being forced into a corner by controversy over the words of his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. But what matters to me is that he seized the moment, transforming a corrosive political dispute into a teaching opportunity about what divides us in America.
Far from sugar-coating our differences as politicians tend to do, he proclaimed that black anger and white anger are both real, and have a legitimate source. Both blacks and whites have seen their dreams evaporate over the past generation. Powerful interests stir that anger, dividing us against each other, when in fact our problems are much the same. America is turning into a nation where the privileges of a few take priority over the common good. Rather than being divided by race, we should unite to overcome this crisis which is hurting everyone.
This is a fairly radical idea in American politics, and I’m not suprised that most commentators have passed over it in silence. Here is the core of Obama’s argument. Judge for yourself.
- A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family… all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us. … For 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. …. 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. …
- 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. … 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…. Like the anger within the black community, these resentments… have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. …
- 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. … This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. …
- We have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. … 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. …
- Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools…. This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care…. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.
Here’s the tone-deaf response by Nixon speechwriter, anti-immigrant crusader, and right-wing dinosaur Patrick Buchanan. It’s such a perfect example of white paternalism that it parodies itself. I remember hearing this sort of talk growing up, but I thought it was gone.
- First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships… reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known. …
- Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s… to bring the African-American community into the mainstream. …
- We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?
What’s ironic is that Buchanan’s constituency of working-class whites, many of them second- or third-generation immigrants, are the very people Obama is trying to enlist in a common cause. Whether Obama becomes president, and America takes a step away from its legacy of division, depends in large part on whether disillusioned whites are able to hear Obama’s words, or whether they respond only to Buchanan’s us-versus-them rhetoric of the past.