Sen. Barack Obama went before the na tion yesterday and delivered a re freshingly candid analysis of the impact of race in American life.
Whether the address resolves the questions many have about his relationship with his racially extreme former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, is another matter.
Only time will tell.
But the speech was well-crafted and nuanced, recognizing the legacy of racism and discrimination in the nation while letting no one off the hook.
Obama condemned Rev. Wright’s toxic rhetoric – that God should not “bless America, but rather “damn America,” that 9/11 was a case of “America’s chickens coming home to roost” and that America has “supported state terrorism against Palestinians” – but attempted to place the slurs in a broader generational context.
“For the men and women of Rev. Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years . . . At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings,” he said.
But he didn’t excuse black anger: “All too often . . . it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change.”
Obama said that he sees the flaw in Wright’s worldview, which preaches self-help on the one hand while screaming about racism on the other: “What my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.
“The profound mistake of Rev. 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 has been made; as if this country . . . 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,” Obama said.
This is an important truth – of particular relevance to racial grievance-mongers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton – and it speaks to Obama’s own remarkable rise to political prominence.
This he also spoke to yesterday: “I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible.”
That is to say, if America is as bad as Rev. Wright would have it, the Barack Obama phenomenon would not remotely have been possible.
The senator did well to say so.