Obama's race speech

Barack Obama gave a profoundly meaningful speech on Tuesday, a speech he wrote himself over the weekend and into the early morning on Tuesday. For nearly an hour, he did what few politicians in the modern era — certainly no political figures of his caliber in my lifetime — have done: he addressed the issue of race in America. In so doing, he gave yet another reason why he is the best person to lead this country. But even more important than that, he opened the door to a national conversation about race.

It's not a conversation that many of us want to have. Yet, we have conversations about race everyday, which was one of the many themes in Obama's speech. He talked about his white grandmother, and how she has used ethnic and racial stereotypes that made her mixed heritage grandson cringe. For most of us, especially in middle American where I grew up, these are the ways in which we talk about race.

"Look at those black kids with their hats on backwards, playing that rap music."
"They sure can play basketball, those niggers."
"I don't understand why they aren't required to learn English as soon as they get here."

It's been almost 150 years since the Civil War, and more than 40 since the Civil Rights era, but we aren't even close to solving "the race issue." But unlike health care, or immigration, or the war in Iraq, the most important part of dealing with race will not be found in economic charts, or in a specified number of security agents, or in the swiftness with which we can remove our presence from the Middle East. Progress on the race issue will be far more difficult to quantify. The most important part of dealing with it — or at least starting to deal with it — will be in having a national conversation, a meaningful conversation about our stereotypes and prejudices. That's what Obama got rolling on Tuesday.

The reaction to the videos of Rev. Jeremiah Wright demonstrated our country's inadequacies in dealing with race issues. YouTube videos of Wright's sermons were replayed again and again on news networks, and white commentators and politicians expressed outrage. How could a person say such things?!? Yet as the doors to Trinity United Church of Christ have opened to the world, we find that Jeremiah Wright, like most folks, is a complex figure that cannot be reduced to a couple of video snippets, no matter how compelling they are to watch. Wright has done near saint-like work on HIV/AIDS in the black community. He has a loyal following of Christian worshippers who have not budged one inch, despite the media's call to denounce and reject Wright. No, of course I don't believe the government imports crack to kill black people, as Wright has suggested. But perhaps Wright's statements can be put in a larger context, such as his belief that God is more important than country. It's not a belief that I hold, certainly, but it is one that many Americans share with Wright. So if Wright believes that his country has done black people wrong, and that God will look unfavorably on America for such actions, who am I to question that? And when he says such things with conviction in a forceful, angry tone (which is, I think, what truly upset the white commentators), does that make them worse? What does most of white America know about what goes on in black churches? My sense is, not much.

We fear what we do not understand. In this country, many black people fear white people and vice versa. If we can begin a dialogue with one another, we can chip away at that lack of understanding. Less fear is a good thing. Thank you, Barack.

UPDATE:
Mike Huckabee, the Republican preacher and politician (and John McCain supporter), expressed his support for Obama on the Rev. Wright issue on MSNBC yesterday:

"[Y]ou can't hold the candidate responsible for everything that people around him may say or do," Huckabee says. "It's interesting to me that there are some people on the left who are having to be very uncomfortable with what ... Wright said, when they all were all over a Jerry Falwell, or anyone on the right who said things that they found very awkward and uncomfortable, years ago. Many times those were statements lifted out of the context of a larger sermon. Sermons, after all, are rarely written word for word by pastors like Rev. Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously, and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said, that if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you'd say 'Well, I didn't mean to say it quite like that.'"

Later, he defended Wright's anger, too:

"As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say 'That's a terrible statement!' ... I grew up in a very segregated South. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I'm gonna be probably the only conservative in America who's gonna say something like this, but I'm just tellin' you — we've gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names..."