Race and the Race for the White House: The Substance of Obama’s Speech

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By David Dayen
d-day

I want to discuss Barack Obama's speech on race and politics, but first I want to say that I have a problem with these expected blog posts on expected speeches that the dynamics of 21st-century campaigns demand. This election has turned into some kind of bizarre series of rituals, like an season of Greek theater where everybody knows the plot and the audience is left to judge the work on the presentation. The parade of comment, counter-comment, conference call about comment, distancing from comment, and major speech incorporating remarks about comment is the real distraction in this campaign, diverting from a looming economic recession (a recession at BEST) and a tragic stalemate in Iraq. Rarely does anything good for the country come out of this exchange.

Furthermore, I'm sick and tired of this "action figure" conservatism where a bunch of stay-at-home bloggers decide for others what they should do in particular situations. "If I were Obama, I would have stood up during the sermon and fired a poison dart at Rev. Wright and talked about the need to cut the capital gains tax!" The imagined fantasies of these clowns resemble a Chuck Norris movie, when the realities involve far more Cheetos and nasal spray.

That out of the way, this speech by Obama, and I might as well embed the YouTube...

...does have value and merit, and actually stands alone as a beginning point, not an end to a controversy.

In answering the question "why didn't you leave the church, Sen. Obama?" he offers a different question. "Why are you looking at one speech and one church and one moment when the issue, what we've been facing for 230 years, is race in America?" The distraction that I mentioned at the top is what takes these questions about race off into cul-de-sacs, detours, and blind alleys. This speech is actually the first true conversation about race in America in this campaign. It's one that makes people uncomfortable and uneasy and hedging. I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood; have seen up-close bias in particularly the older generations of my family; have lived in Chicago, where you can be in the Loop and see all the African-Americans on one side of the subway headed south and all the white people headed north; and have engaged with the issue of race from at best a detached viewpoint. What I do believe, and what Sen. Obama remarked upon today, is this issue of distraction, which feeds biases on all sides and disables us from working together to come to terms with race and solve the problems people of all races share. I thought this was an important moment. Obama talks about white resentment and anger, which play on racial fears, and how these have been skillfully used to "forge the Reagan coalition," which is a pretty big admission for a political candidate: