Across the street from Independence Hall on Tuesday morning, there was a moment when, as observers as disparate as David Gergen and Jon Stewart noted, a major American politician spoke to us as if we were adults.
There are two transcripts related to that moment in our American life that I want to deal with. The first is of Senator Obama’s speech, delivered at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia; then I’ll talk about a certain response to it that exemplifies from where the fight is going to come.
The transcript of Obama’s speech is here; there is YouTube video of it here.
Unclean Hands
Let me first start by saying that Senator Obama does not have clean hands on this issue. His campaign has been just as guilty of “playing the race card” as Senator Clinton’s--if not more so. To pick just one example, there was the moment when Senator Clinton said in a speech, “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.” To me, that never read as a denigration of Dr. King’s role in the civil rights movement, it was simply a realistic reading of the often-necessary interplay between visionaries and institutions, and it was also just what she said it was: a recognition of the role that governments can play when they are run well. (Not to say that the Johnson administration was always well run, but let’s not get distracted by that argument.) I’ve said for years now, when small-government activists get all up in my face about how government should keep out of everything except defense and trade, that the Civil Rights Act is a prime example of something that a powerful central government can do beyond the initial scope of its powers--the southern states clearly didn’t want to enact any such legislation, but were forced to by the combined strength of the northern and western states, to everyone’s long-term benefit. Dr. King could not have done it alone, and that’s exactly the point Sen. Clinton was trying to make.
But the Obama campaign took it as an attempt to downplay Dr. King’s importance, which I for one never thought it was, and it bothered me--a lot--that the Obama campaign was willing to go there.
So when I heard that Sen. Obama was going to deliver a “major address” on the subject of race, I did not approach it with the same sort of “Obamatry” that characterizes some of his more ardent supporters--an unquestioning adoration that is in itself a little worrisome. No, I simply wanted to hear what he had to say, hoping against hope that he might just say something valuable.
The Race Problem
Scapegoating of The Other is a problem that has been long with us--for exactly as long as The Many have been exploited by The Powerful Few. Limiting our discussion to the American experience, Howard Zinn has pointed out how white landowners in the southern colonies pitted their black slaves against the local native tribes in order to keep both in line. None of this is new; our current “immigration debate” was sparked by absolutely nothing--except for a desire by those in power to invent an argument by which they could keep themselves in power. There was no actual event that set it in motion, the number of people illegally crossing the border is pretty much the same as it has been for quite a while now, but some bright spark realized that by exploiting fear of The Other, s/he could make plenty of good political hay. And so we continue to fuss and fret over the issue, all the while dancing to the tune of The Powerful Few.
Through it all, at least since the Civil Rights Act (1964), race has been much spoken of, but almost never with any seriousness. Opportunities for minorities slowly grew over time, and as we (by “we” I mean white people such as me, which in its broader sense means those of us who happen to have been born into the “right” club) saw those opportunities expand, we allowed ourselves to believe, without ever really questioning whether it was actually true or not, that the problem was resolved or, at least, resolving.
But all that meant was that we grew fat and self-satisfied, ignoring whatever subterranean currents still remained, hiding away in our desperate little souls. When a Michael Richards came along, a comedian taking outrageousness past the point of comedy, we jumped on that poor man with a word that has become every bit as bad as “pedophile,” calling him “racist” without ever questioning whether maybe we all had some Michael Richards in us.
Actually, that’s probably exactly why we jumped on him so hard--how dare he say what we know we’re not supposed to say! That breaks the code, it brings something into the open that we’d prefer remain buried. And as a result, Michael Richards’s career is destroyed--and we once again manage to avoid having the real discussion about race that we desperately need to have.
But then on Tuesday, Barack Obama stepped up to the podium.
The Speech
Running about forty minutes long and delivered, deliberately, without preacher-like fervor, the speech was clearly a bit of damage control in the wake of comments by Sen. Obama’s longtime, pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But there are lots of ways to approach damage control, and Sen. Obama took the high road, using Rev. Wright’s inflammatory preaching (“God damn America!”) to search for the pain beneath it--and then to reach even higher and seek for the pain that underlies the myriad forms of racism in every American’s soul. He worked just as hard to find the resentments felt by underprivileged whites as he did in elucidating the long history of subjugation and oppression felt by blacks in America.
Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience--as far as they're concerned, no one handed them anything. They built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and they feel their dreams slipping away. And in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.
Perhaps Obama is uniquely qualified to make such a speech, coming from a racially-mixed background that makes him both black and white, with relatives, as he noted, spread across three continents. (Lord knows George Bush could never have given a speech such as this--setting aside the question of whether he’s even capable of it, he simply wouldn’t be credible.)
The whole purpose of the speech was to take the broader view. Rev. Wright said some reprehensible things, but Obama also told of the man he’s known for more than twenty years...
As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children.... He contains within him the contradictions--the good and the bad--of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
Which of course reminds me of that greatest of American poets, Walt Whitman, who gloried in the rich complexities of life, and who of course said “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).” Whitman understood this over a century ago; Obama understands it now. But The Powerful Few need us to wallow in false certainty; they peddle a Manichaean, black-and-white (literally) worldview in which a “wrong” word automatically equates to a wrong person, in which no one is allowed to be complex but must be perfectly simple--or else immediately and categorically denied. Often these Powerful Few are professed Christians, but they have of course entirely forgotten--willfully forgotten--Christ’s warning: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”
Or, as Obama put it himself:
Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
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.
(Within minutes of this you heard conservative pundits proclaiming how offended they were that Obama had “stooped” to the political in this passage. The Powerful Few will do what they must to protect their privileges--but that’s for the next installment of this little essay.)
Obama’s best passage is also his most insightful:
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress had been made; as if this country--a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old--is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen--is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope--the audacity to hope--for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
It is here that his endlessly-repeated leitmotif of change shifts its shape, metamorphosing from a political slogan to something like a real ideology--a vision of an America that is never static, that, as Obama said in his speech, “...may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.” America represents an ongoing evolution in the idea of human rights, a constant expansion from the limited sense that Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote “all men are created equal,” an expansion that continues today with all its attendant strains--Jefferson surely never imagined that transgendered individuals would one day seek their equal rights, but once that door of equality was opened, it was inevitable that one day everyone, absolutely everyone, would insist on passing through. The process is never easy, but it becomes impossible if we look at the nation as something static and constant and cold, something that does not evolve or change.
Obama himself is the change he seeks; and if there’s any justice at all in the world, the challenge he posed on Tuesday--implicitly asking us, by treating us as adults, whether or not we will in fact act like adults--will end with him in the White House. Where my most fervent hope is that he will continue to lead through challenge for the next many years, exactly as he did this week.
Now that, that would be the kind of president I’ve been waiting my whole life for.
Next time... the Powerful Few jabber back.
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