23
Mar
Obama’s Rorschach speech on race in America
My own Obama speech moment: as I was walking home late on the night of the speech, I ran across four black teenagers, probably 15 or 16 years old. They started to cross the street as I approached. As we passed in opposite directions I heard one of them say, “You see that Charlie Manson-looking motherfucker? Why they let serial killers walk around this time of night?”
My first reaction was to think, “Jeebus. Do all brown haired, bearded white men look alike?” But afterward, when I looked up a Manson photograph and considered the circumstances—the late hour, the ghoulish complexion modern street lamps lend to white people—I thought, “No wonder they crossed the street.” Then I went on to contemplate Manson’s enduring cross-cultural appeal.
I didn’t read the speech or many reactions to it until yesterday, when the various narratives were well formed. There seems to have been considerable anticipation that Obama would throw someone under a bus, either himself or his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. In the aftermath, the consensus on the right seems to be that he threw his elderly white grandmother under the bus, although there doesn’t seem to be much realization that they, the outraged horde, are the bus, and that they had to drive crazier than Keanu Reeves in Speed to pick off grandma.
Here’s what Obama said about his grandmother. “I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
“These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”
Can’t you just hear the sickening thud?
Me neither.
Shelby Steele, perhaps the preeminent black conservative these days, as vocal as Clarence Thomas is mute (and as sane as Alan Keyes is crazy), says that Obama threw his mother under the bus when he joined and stayed with Reverend Wright’s church, where, Steele writes, “he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday — for 20 years — in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable.”
My guess is that Obama’s mother would have been welcomed in the church and that she would have been able and perfectly willing to feel comfortable and safe, and I suspect the same would be true for any white person who chose to attend the church regularly and become part of its community. But, as another, more liberal black writer notes, Steele is philosophically unprepared to grant Obama the capacity to negotiate the two worlds, black and white, without ultimately betraying both, and himself, and ultimately, the rest of us.
Darryl Pinckney’s essay in the New York Review of Books, constructed around a review of Steele’s recent book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, predates Steele’s Wall Street Journal op-ed by a few weeks. Perhaps as much as anyone, Pinckney is capable of empathizing with Obama’s quest for identity. He grew up in Indianapolis during the 1960’s, a member of that community’s deeply-rooted black aristocracy, attending sparsely integrated North Central High School on the conservative city’s affluent north side, only thirty or so miles from the one-time Ku Klux Klan capital of Greenwood, Indiana.
After graduation he attended Princeton and Columbia, and lived for years in Germany and England. Aside from being an intellectual cut above most of us, and living with the opportunities and hazards that that station brings, he has lived a life in which he both sought out and had thrust upon him situations in which he was indelibly other; not so much as Obama, but enough to make him sensitive to the condition and to spend considerable energy attempting to resolve it. Despite his empathy, though, and his disagreements with Steele about Obama’s potential and the role of black identity in realizing it, Pinckney doesn’t seem able to muster much enthusiasm for an Obama presidency beyond as a receptacle for an emerging youth activism.
Another essay, this one from Jonathan Raban in the London Review of Books, also identifies Obama’s otherness as central to his appeal and his potential.
… a tragic sense of life is exactly what has marked Obama’s candidacy from the beginning. His powerful memoir, Dreams from My Father, written in his early thirties, is shot through with that sense: its gravely intelligent, death-haunted tone, beautifully controlled throughout the book, is that of an old voice, not a young one – and the voice of the book is of a piece with the plangent, melancholy baritone to be heard on the campaign trail.
Those who hear only empty optimism in Obama aren’t listening. His routine stump speech is built on the premise that America has become estranged from its own essential character; a country unhinged from its constitution, feared and disliked across the globe, engaged in a dumb and unjust war, its tax system skewed to help the rich get richer and the poor grow poorer, its economy in ‘shambles’, its politics ‘broken’. ‘Lonely’ is a favourite word, as he conjures a people grown lonely in themselves and lonely as a nation in the larger society of the world. (Obama himself is clearly on intimate terms with loneliness: Dreams from My Father is the story of a born outsider negotiating a succession of social and cultural frontiers; it takes the form of a lifelong quest for family and community, and ends, like a Victorian novel, with a wedding.)
Like Pinckney’s, Raban’s essay anticipates the Obama speech by some weeks but helps illuminate it and the reaction to it, which includes responses from people who fall into the “empty optimism” camp and Clinton partisans, many of whom now find evidence of disingenuousness if not outright treachery in every Obama utterance.
Obamaphiles, and some presumably objective observers, rate the speech among the greatest in US political history, ranking it with inaugural addresses by Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and with John Kennedy’s 1960 speech on religion and the separation of church and state. David Corn described the speech as “daring and unique“, and found virtue in a feature that others decried: Obama’s characterization of Reverend Wright’s charge that the US remains a fundamentally racist society as a generational trait, with the implication that the existential bitterness of some older black Americans inhibits their ability to recognize positive change.
It was a good speech. What prompts many people to describe it as great is, I think, that it was so adult by contrast to most of our political discourse. What made it adult was Obama’s unwillingness to jettison the complexity of his life in favor of the sort of moronic narrative favored by the press and tolerated by the public. A number of people vehemently disagree with Obama’s repudiation of some of Wright’s remarks, but no one is calling the speech simplistic.
The speech bore fruit in unexpected orchards. Fox News anchor Chris Wallace was shocked into chastising two of his colleagues for doing their jobs, which is to say, manufacturing quotes and distorting Obama’s meaning. Failed GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, in defense of Reverend Wright, that “I’m going to be probably the only conservative in America who’s going to say something like this, but I’m just telling you: We’ve got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told, “You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus.” And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had a more, more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.”
I wrote some while back that Obama’s candidacy had the potential to burst the boil of racism in this country, but that the process, successful or not, would be indescribably ugly. You can see the possibility of success in the responses from Wallace and Huckabee, and you can see the beginnings of the backlash against not so much Obama, but the notion that race remains an issue that white people must address, in the knee-jerk reactions from the likes of Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh, and the lower-key rejection of a dialog and the premise of a call for one from the post-racist crackers at the Powerline blog, as collected by Dave Neiwert. From Limbaugh: “It is clear that Senator Obama has disowned his white half, that he’s decided he’s got to go all in on the black side …” From Buchanan: “Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America … this time, it has to be a two-way conversation … We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?”
Elsewhere, Glenn Greenwald at Salon flags a racist screed in which the writer names several black men who in his view are beyond the pale (as it were). “Black people,” he says, “will know what I mean when I demand they concede that the following people are niggers …”
Let the conversation begin.
There are of course other conversations we need to have. If Obama threw anyone under the bus it was Palestinians, with his casual dismissal of the troubles in the Middle East as “emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam” rather than “the actions of stalwart allies like Israel”. The line requires a willful misreading of Palestinian history, in which religion played only a relatively small role prior to this decade, and is no more constructive in resolving the issue than is opening a discussion about racial tensions with a list of black men who must be stipulated to be niggers.
Obama seems to own a generous measure of what John Keats described as “negative capability”, the ability to cultivate and thrive amid uncertainty and doubt. Keats said it was the essential quality of great poets; it’s also a good quality to find in a leader, one that has been badly needed and missed during the past seven years.
But he also seems inclined at times to dismiss the ability, which isn’t so good. He is probably alone among presidential candidates in having the capacity and opportunity to initiate deep discussions of economic class, of the Palestinian disaster, of the piratical nexus between business and politics, but he is far from alone in shying away from doing so when it’s inexpedient, which I’m sure is among the reasons John Edwards has thus far declined to endorse him.
That combination of ability and hesitation is what lends him the promise of being either the best US president since World War II, or the most lethally disappointing. His speech did little to settle the question.
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As a Black American, I find Mr. North’s experience moving. I have always heard about reverse discrimiation; however, I’ve rejected it, by justifying it due to the many years of unequal treatment, which still exists today; however, I just thought to myself:
What if I was white, and I wasn’t a b+ student, and I was destined for a harder life than educated blacks, latinos, Asians, and affluent whites?
What if, due to being white, I could not get a break by the government or my employers?
I started to feel alone. I just realized that it is true that “White Priviledge” does indeed exist, but the reality is that not every white person can benefit from it. It’s like there is $1000 available to pay 5 people for a one-day job, and there are 7 individuals: 4 white, 1 black, and 1 latino, and 1 Asian - only 5 individuals are needed. The law ensures that minorities get one of those slots; this takes care of the black, latino, and Asian; however, only 2 slots remain - there are only 2 left open for the remaining 4 whites; this means only 2 whites get those remaining slots; however, the other 2 whites are out of luck, and there is absolutely nothing that they can do about it. These 2 left out white people never purposely did anything to me; I should not be so quick to justify them being left out in the cold as payback or justification for something that their ancesters did, or justification for a mentality passed down from their ancester.
I have to say that as a Black American, I’ve never once thought about it like this. I think affirmative action is still needed to ensure inclusion for minorities, but it does need to be changed to include whites somehow. This should be a call for everyone - blacks, whites, Asians, and Latinos - to work hard. Anyone that chooses to slack, whether blacks like me, Latino, Asians, or whites, they should not get an advantage based upon affirmative action. The advantage must go to individuals that can prove that they will do something with the precious gift; it should not be thrown away on someone that will just drop out of college, or sit back and not choose to find a job and work to take care of themselves.
I admit… I’m not exactly sure on what needs to be done in order to resolve this problem of affirmative action, but it does need to be changed; otherwise, we will never truly become a ‘United States’ of America.
A Black American that finally gets it…
March 23rd, 2008 at 9:00 amWhat I like best about Obama is that he will fix my computer - and a lot more! See http://obamawill.com
March 23rd, 2008 at 9:01 amGood to note both that it was a “good” speech and why so many thought it so “great.”
I think the latter term can lead to too much expectations, but realistic idealism still falls on the side of Obama of the three candidates. Esp. if you realize the guy’s limitations.
I’d add that one blog called it a speech on “race, religion and America.” I think that’s good too. Religion played an important part. Maybe, we can add that given many blacks are Muslim in this country, simplistic citations of Islam vis-a-vis Jews (who have a somewhat troubled history with the black community overall) is particularly worthy of a flag.
But, since the speech suggested some reason to expect we are dealing with a mature leader, some potential, a cautious optimism is justified. More than I really feel of the other two active candidates, all things considered. The fact he isn’t god and has flaws kinda is part of that maturity thing.
The immature seem not to quite get it.
March 23rd, 2008 at 9:39 amAs a typical white person (as I understand it, this means that even though I am not prejudiced, others know better and that I am), I am offended by his speech AND by Obama himself.
He reminds me of that Faye Dunaway character in Chinatown who, gets slapped by Nicholson as she repeats, “my sister, my daughter, my sister, my daughter . . .”. Obama–born of a black and a white parental unit, has touted his blackness and Kenyan Granny Sarah–until this Rev Wright debacle. Now, suddenly, the image of Granny Honky has been raised to assuage the hurt feelings of us po white trash so we can make that all important (VOTING DAY) connection with His Milkchocolateness.
Give me a freakin break.
I love the man and separate what he SAD from what he means to me. Uh Huh. Didn’t Goering say that about Hitler? Rev Wright’s vicious and demeaning and (anti-American) diatribes MIGHT be able to be understood in context by an adult; however, Obama has the LACK OF JUDGMENT to bring his young daughters to this man’s church to hear AND be impressed by such venom.
Nice job from the man who touts JUDGMENT as his strong suit!
March 23rd, 2008 at 1:05 pmDiana, I guess you didn’t actually read or hear his speech, or read the above article, or you would have been angry because he accused her of making racist statements. Rather than hear what he had to say, you heard what you wanted to hear. I can just image, during all of President Obama’s State of the Union addresses, you with your fingers in your ears and saying “La-la-la-I ain’t listening.”
March 23rd, 2008 at 2:09 pmDiana, in your instance I think “typical white person” just means ill-informed and ignorant. You do serve the useful purpose of illustrating the limits of literacy, though, so congrats for that.
March 23rd, 2008 at 3:06 pmDo all brown haired, bearded white men look alike
No some of us look like Grizzly Adams motherfuckers, which, paradoxically, is completely unthreatening.
It was a good speech, an extra paragraph maybe short of holding with the greats (but I can’t say I’ve ready any of those in their entirety either). Seems funny sometimes that we put so much value on teh things, but I suppose it’s an important part of the job.
March 25th, 2008 at 4:53 amI don’t have the size for the Griz, or the beard for that matter.
I’ve read lots of speeches. The ones that are written by the speaker, as Obama’s was (and Lincoln’s and FDR’s–don’t know about Kennedy), can give you a good sense of the quality of thought. And in the right circumstances, they can have consequences.
March 26th, 2008 at 7:01 amOkay, Diana, I’m going to address your specifics, regardless:
He reminds me of that Faye Dunaway character in Chinatown who, gets slapped by Nicholson as she repeats, “my sister, my daughter, my sister, my daughter . . .”.
Please explain to us how Obama reminds you of the mind-numbing shame of a fictional woman who was raped by her father and who has lived with that secret her entire adult life? I can’t help thinking (and I’m a person who sees linkages all over the place) that you have a very unique cerebral wiring system to find the remoteness connection there, but I’m open to hearing where you get it from.
Obama–born of a black and a white parental unit, has touted his blackness and Kenyan Granny Sarah–until this Rev Wright debacle. Now, suddenly, the image of Granny Honky has been raised to assuage the hurt feelings of us po white trash so we can make that all important (VOTING DAY) connection with His Milkchocolateness.
Whoa, Diana. All I hear — and it seems to be screaming out at us here — is your bitterness over something but it sure doesn’t seem to have any connection I can bear to Obama. He hasn’t “suddenly” done anything, so far as I can tell. He hasn’t thrown anybody under the bus (except — and I read the speech exactly the same way Weldon did — for the Palestinians in what struck me as Obama’s one unfortunate note, pandering as I read it to the Jewish vote here), not his Kenyan grandmother nor his Kansas one. He illustrated how flawed people are, of all stripes. He didn’t disparage any group of people, so this “po white trash” talk of yours comes across as your own chip on your shoulder that you project on to others. It sure ain’t in anything Obama said or has ever said that I know of. (Note: I didn’t vote for Obama in the primary, I voted for John Edwards.)
And your mocking of his biracial reality with “His Milkcholateness” is more of the same. What are you so bitter about? And you seriously don’t think you are demonstrating prejudice here????
Give us a freakin break.
And in your world now, in SAT format, this is what you are smoking?:
Goering: Hitler:: Obama: Wright ???
Wow, Diana. There have been a lot of folks tossing Hitler into American partisan political discourse in recent years but I think you’ve pushed the envelope.
Please explain to me how a man who wants America to wake up to its sins and be better than it is now, be truer to its stated ideals and honor them around the world, and everywhere at home, is “anti-American”? I don’t listen to the drivel that passes on CNN but I gather he’s stated some things very bluntly and rhetorically and crudely, but the content of his objections is that he wishes America were truer to its ideals. That bothers you?
Does it bother you that Wright “suggested that U.S. policies in the Middle East and elsewhere were partly responsible for the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington”? If so, I think you should study up on US policies in the Middle East, going back at least as far as our meddling overthrow of a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953, to institute a torturing regime of the Shah just so we could retain control of our oil company access and profits there.
Did you know this about Jeremiah Wright who you equate with Hitler?:
Quoting from theologian Martin Marty (and suggesting you read the whole article at http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i30/30b00101.htm):
March 26th, 2008 at 4:56 pm