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.

Continue reading Obama’s Rorschach speech on race in America