Obama Finally Talks About Race

Now, I want him to win.

Obama’s silence on race was a sticking point for me, and I eyed his upcoming “speech on race” with trepidation. Fortunately, low expectations can breed sleeper hits. His address on the issue of race in America was more than I could ask for from a politician running a national campaign for the presidency.

Sure there was the hokey and grandiose invocation of our supposedly great forefathers engaged in this grand experiment of “democracy.” There were moments too, when he clutched at a multiculturalist angle for why issues like health care affect all Americans (which of course, it doesn’t impact them in the same way). But there also was an acknowledgment that black anger is rooted in something real and legitimate. And he followed it with the politically savvy, but incisive point, that working class white people get lost in the shuffle of black versus white, a resentment that conservatives have long exploited.

There was not, in the way of policy prescriptions anything that made Clinton and Obama very different from each other. What each promised now would have to be hammered out and refined later anyway. The difference was in style and messaging, where I found neither to be inspiring. But perhaps this speech was what I had been waiting for: where Obama moved from race-silent to race-conscious. And as a mainstream politician, he has shifted the paradigm, if ever so slightly, in a significant way. Yes, Obama threw his mentor Reverend Wright under the bus. But at least he picked him up and dusted him off afterwards.

I still do not believe that an Obama presidency will dramatically change the lives of people of color and queer people either at home or abroad. But I do now believe that there is more of a possibility for communities to create a spaces for themselves under him than they would they could under Clinton or McCain. Maybe I’m getting a touch of Obamania after all.

~e.a.

The full YouTubed speech begins here: