Even forty years after civil rights pioneers like Dr King opened up the political landscape for black America, racial injustice is a subject that is mostly taboo. Most modern campaigns, nervously watching each new poll, steer candidates clear of this sort of political tangle, fearing that the grievances involved are too widespread and complex, the opposed viewpoints irreconcilable. Until very recently, the Obama camp seemed to have accepted the conventional wisdom and avoided references to the senator’s unusual biography, focusing instead on “meat and potatoes” issues like universal healthcare, withdrawal from Iraq, the oncoming recession or the fine-print of NAFTA.
That complacency ended last week when video of Rev Jeremiah Wright’s tirades began to dominate media coverage of the Democratic campaign. Quietly confident that they had finally found dirt that would stick to Obama, his political opponents converged in ecstasies of outrage, apparently horrified to discover that a ‘black’ candidate could be friendly with someone who harboured such extreme and occasionally absurd views about the workings of contemporary America. After months of supposedly adoring media attention, Obama was trapped in a catch-22: abandon Wright and alienate black voters, or stand by him and confirm fears that his candidacy was uncomfortably similar to Sharpton’s or Jackson’s after all. The long speech in Philadelphia in which Obama addressed this problem last week may not be enough to secure his party’s nomination, but it does provide a fascinating glimpse of the president he could be. Praising Obama’s ‘intellectual and emotional acuity’, Hendrik Hertzberg of the The New Yorker, one of the shrewdest political commentators in the country, said this: “Obama has a feel for the texture of American life, both in its complexity and in its grand themes. He has a sure command of the terms of the American civic religion. And he has an understanding of the American past that does justice to many kinds of historical experience. Especially impressive here is his treatment of two kinds of volatile parochialism, black anger and white-working-class resentment: he explains their origins without making excuses for their destructive forms, and he hints at the positive potential of their commonalities.”
Much more could be said along these lines, but perhaps the speech will be remembered for even simpler reasons. First, that it was written by Obama himself; not a committee of speechwriters and pollsters. Second, it was long (nearly 40 minutes) and nuanced and resisted sound bites (there is no noticeable applause for the first 16 minutes). Finally, it was delivered with Obama’s trademark calm, with no trace of anger or panic. Besieged by sound bites, Obama responded with a mature, thoughtful and refreshingly serious analysis of the country’s racial problems, instead of the much narrower face-saving remarks that so many people expected. He dodged nothing, he made no easy choices and he singlehandedly raised the discussion of race in America to the level that Bill Clinton tried to take it a decade ago. Remarkable by themselves, these achievements also suggest that Obama may be the sort of politician who thrives under pressure, a quality the next president will undoubtedly require if he/she is to achieve anything meaningful.
After The New York Times placed a transcript of the speech online, it quickly became one of the website’s most popular articles; the complete 37-minute speech has been viewed more than two million times at YouTube, and parts of it have been watched by millions of television viewers across the United States. Even at a local level, the speech has had an unusual resonance. In North Carolina, for example, a hip-hop station stopped playing music long enough to broadcast the entire speech. In our age of spin, politicians’ words are usually taken with a pinch of salt, and rightly so. Obama’s success at suspending this scepticism, however temporarily, holds out the hope that reasonable political discourse, while still distressingly rare, is still possible in America.
(Editor’s note: The text of Barack Obama’s speech appears in the Guyana Review included in this issue)
