This is history: Obama's Big Race Speech.

Barack Obama gave a historic speech today in Philadelphia; it's surely the most daring speech he's given during this campaign, as audacious as (and even more tactically shrewd than) his 2006 'Call to Renewal' speech on progressive Christianity. The half-hour-long speech - a response to the weeklong opportunistic media blitz on Obama and his (former) pastor, Jeremiah Wright - is Obama's clearest-yet articulation of his relationship to the history and state of race relations in the country. But beyond that clarificatory value, and Obama's considered response to Wright's pulpit polemics, today's speech offers stinging criticism of contemporary political and cultural discourse. If you needed proof that Obama is unlike any other candidate in this race, and has been since before the Democratic field thinned to two, look no further:

I can no more disown [Rev. Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him 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.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality. [my emphasis --wgh]

Obama is talking here not just about Ferraro's or anyone else's individual biases or fears or preoccupations; he's also (crucially) talking about the horrible cynicism of the political news media, which time and again have focused on 'the race issue' purely as a political land mine, rather than as a complex set of cultural facts, norms, and myths crying out for illumination and integration. Obama's candidacy is itself moving the discussion of racial identity and difference forward in this country - particularly for young voters and political newbies who've been galvanized by this unprecedented primary season. His speech went a long way to making the case that the way Americans think about politics - about our cultural machinery - is bound up in petty grievances and opportunism, and that opposition-always partisanship, whether political or racial or economic, is antithetical to the communitarian spirit preached (and too rarely practiced) by Left and Right alike.

[W]e 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. [my emphasis --wgh]

That's badass: Obama is kicking traditional horserace coverage of his campaign square in the balls with this portion of the speech. But here he comes to the big payoff, the gutsiest notion in the whole Big Race Speech: insisting that conflict or fear along racial lines is only one of the ways we fail our fellow community members:

That is one option. 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 that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

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; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. 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.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

And there the overt and latent themes of the speech sound out as one: the gap between political generations (i.e. between the Clintons and Obama); the straight-line vision of the corporate news media; the need for economic solutions to superficially racial problems; the (yes, racist) fear of Different-Colored Anger, and the unwillingness to seek common political cause with historical enemies or victims; the cowardly belief that all politicians are the same; the equally cowardly belief that all races or religions are irremediably separated by difference. Hillary and her talk of the glass ceiling, John Edwards and his mill-worker father: both symbols subsumed in a brave evocation of One People (of Every Color).

There are details to nitpick but not now. Today it's enough to mark this page in our ongoing national story. This morning's speech by Barack Obama was a landmark. The Democrats' choice has never been clearer.

Comments

[Audra]

Great stuff wally! i have been waiting to read your commentary on the speech since I listened to the speech today.
I am giddy and love Obama.

[Sherv]

Thanks for the clear-eyed view of this speech, Wally. Almost as soon as the speech had concluded, the talking heads on MSNBC -- whom I've inexplicably come to love over this election cycle -- were making noise about it being the greatest statement on race since King had a dream. It's silly and hyperbolic to elevate a touch of campaign maneuvering to that level. But it is neither silly nor hyperbolic to recognize that this necessary statement of reaction to the realities of a campaign is also a speech neither of Obama's opponents (Clinton or McCain) would have had the wit, the sensitivity, or the guts to make, nor to recognize that it is of a piece with Obama's (stated) total vision of the course our country ought to take from here on in. Really masterful, and, as usual, an indication of how Obama's elegant modes of thought distinguish him from Clinton, with her bizarre combination of wonkiness and low cunning, and from McCain, who seems to be all rickety intuition.

[agi]

I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother

Did the Obama campaign get my message??! I totally called this "but white people don't disown their racist parents" angle the other night, if much less artfully.

Wally, I think I'm finally ready to manage your campaign... for president of the blogosphere.