Obama Race Speech Analysis

Senator Barack Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia, March 18, 2008 was noteworthy. What follows is the commentary and analysis of 10 members of the BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board.

Bill Fletcher, Jr.

Senator Obama offered a brilliant and inspiring address which was, nevertheless, a bit problematic. On the one hand, he spoke to the people of the United States about race in a manner that has only occasionally taken place (such as during the Jesse Jackson campaigns). He spoke as someone from both inside and outside the African American experience and was completely unapologetic about the rage that we feel, as a people, for the injustices that we have suffered over the centuries.

Yet Senator Obama, at one and the same time, attributes much of the anger of Rev. Wright to the past, as if Rev. Wright is stuck in a time warp, rather than the fact that Rev. Wright’s anger about the domestic and foreign policies of the USA are well rooted–and documented–in the current reality of the USA.

Senator Obama’s address offers the vision of hope and change, which are critical for all those engaged in the struggle for social justice. He correctly identifies that this is not the same country that it was 50 or 100 years ago. He also correctly identifies that race still matters in the conditions of African Americans. He also insists that the issues facing African Americans must be joined with the issues facing other oppressed people, including but not limited to white working people, and not reserved for us alone. In that sense he suggests the importance of the links among those who have found themselves under the heal of this system.

For a mainstream politician running for the Presidency, and particularly for an African American running for the Presidency, this was a critical speech to give. It was essential that he not walk away from, or disown Rev. Wright. At the same time, when we live in a society that is so much in denial of the actual conditions of the oppressed both inside and outside our borders; that has come to accept torture; that often cannot comprehend the tragedy facing the Palestinians; that was angry about, yet threw up its hands in the face of the Katrina disaster (and the government’s lack of response); that witnesses major banks and corporations disembowel communities and face few consequences, the anger that was displayed by Rev. Wright should not have surprised anyone. It is both anger AND hope that are critical for a genuine movement that wishes to transform this country. The anger of a Rev. Wright is not a throw-back, but is a reality check.

BlackCommentator Editorial Board Member Bill Fletcher, Jr. is Executive Editor of The Black Commentator. He is also a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies and the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum. Click here to contact Mr. Fletcher.

William L. (Bill) Strickland

My first reaction to the smear campaign against Barack Obama kicked off by Fox News’s guilt-by-association tarring of Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was smugly racial. After all, they had attacked Reverend Wright for being “unpatriotic” and “un-American”, but they had not dared to say that what Wright had said was untrue, that America is run by rich white people, that Hillary Clinton didn’t know what it meant to be black and that America was founded on racism.

But after reading Obama’s speech, two time-distant recollections triggered another thought about America’s problem which goes far deeper than right-wing race-mongering.

The first recollection was of Jack Nicholson in the movie “A Few Good Men” where prosecuting attorney, Tom Cruise makes a demand saying: “I want the truth!” and Jack thunders back: “You can’t handle the truth!” The second memory was of a question posed in the post WW II era either by the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre or the Algerian writer Albert Camus. One of them asked: “Can a system condemn itself?”

That is, I think the real issue: Can America face the truth about itself and its History? Reverend Wright is doubtful and Obama is hopeful, but forty years ago another truth-telling black man, also speaking in a church, called America the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” His name was Martin Luther King, Jr. and he too, like Reverend Wright and Obama, was pilloried for telling the truth about his country.

But if the truth is un-American, one may rightly ask: Can America be changed. Obama hopes so.

We shall see…

BlackCommentator Editorial Board Member Willian L. (Bill) Strickland – Teaches political science in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is also the Director of the Du Bois Papers Collection. The Du Bois Papers are housed at the University of Massachusetts library, which is named in honor of this prominent African American intellectual and Massachusetts native. Professor Strickland is a founding member of the independent black think tank in Atlanta the Institute of the Black World (IBW), headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Strickland was a consultant to both series of the prize-winning documentary on the civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize (PBS Mini Series Boxed Set), and the senior consultant on the PBS documentary, The American Experience: Malcolm X: Make It Plain. He also wrote the companion book Malcolm X: Make It Plain. Most recently, Professor Strickland was a consultant on the Louis Massiah film on W.E.B. Du Bois – W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices. Click here to contact Mr. Strickland.

Ethel Long-Scott

Justice – It’s in the Details

The speech on race in America that Barack Obama gave in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008 was moving and sounded wonderful, as full of hope and the possibility of change as most of his speeches. But it did nothing to unravel the central contradiction of Mr. Obama’s candidacy. That contradiction is rooted in the fact that America has always needed a class of workers who are kept downtrodden and in poverty to make its economy work. That is a fact that has not changed, and none of the remaining presidential candidates are dealing with it.

In the beginning it was slavery that provided that group of second class workers, who toiled away at vital jobs in unspeakably inhumane conditions for no pay at all. Later, when the nation’s hardest, least desirable but still essential jobs were being done by newly arrived immigrants – of all colors – racism still locked most African Americans into virtual slavery even after the institution of slavery was officially ended.

Today the fundamentally inhumane contradiction of the American economy is that it doesn’t need American workers anymore – of any color. Companies move jobs to wherever in the world labor is cheapest – or replace human workers entirely with computerized control systems. A handful of big, privately owned global corporations control the economy and get our country to make policies that support their profits by making lavish campaign contributions to both the Democrats and the Republicans.

As a result America, like much of the world, faces a growing polarization of wealth and poverty. In that reality of harsh global capitalism, the new racism is poverty. A new class of dispossessed is growing in America, people of all colors pushed out of the opportunities for good educations, good jobs, good health, good housing. We are becoming more of a police state as this impoverished low-wage and no-wage class is seen as potentially explosive and must be held in check.

As poverty has spread to broader and broader sections of our society, there has been a steady push to put in place a system of laws to contain not African Americans, but the impoverished. Managing and controlling the new class of dispossessed is the new paradigm of policing and incarceration. The main agenda for global corporations is to continue to automate production, eliminate jobs, lower wages and cut benefits, so poverty and homelessness will continue to grow. This has already made our nation the world’s leading prison nation. This travesty is driven by the market economy and global capitalism more than racism.

Mr. Obama’s address failed to address any of this, just as his campaign speeches fail to address it. But his former pastor, The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was trying to raise some of these issues as he advised his congregation not to get so lost in their “middleclassness” that they failed to reach out to those in poverty. Mr. Obama said, “The profound mistake of Reverend 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 – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change.”

And America certainly has changed, in that it has allowed a certain number of African Americans, like our present secretary of state, and our former secretary of state, and Mr. Obama, among others, to join the privileged class. But the profound mistake of Mr. Obama’s speeches is that he speaks as if our economic system isn’t static in its irrepressible need to push a high proportion of its people to the economic bottom, where they can be exploited cheaply for whatever contributions they can make, and pushed out of the economic system entirely – discarded, thrown away – if they cannot be exploited further.

While it is clear that a disproportionate number of African Americans are tortured by inadequate health care; poor housing, inadequate educations, abusive criminal justice, unemployment and high crime, much of this today is because they live in poverty. And in the global capitalism of today these conditions now exist for countless numbers of other Americans, white, Asian, Latino and others.

In Mr. Obama’s Democratic Party, the last two candidates standing represent the longings of historically oppressed groups. Early in the election season both major political parties faced a decline in interest in politics. Both desperately needed new faces in order to enthuse new voters and siphon off some of the discontent with the increasingly corporate direction of our country. Many workers believe that the Democratic Party is going to protect them from escalating job loss and home loss, growing denial of health care and escalating poverty. Nothing Mr. Obama has said so far indicates that he has a program to do that.

Mr. Obama’s speech on race discussed at length the personal impact of historical racism. American workers, whether employed or unemployed, don’t have an organization to protect them from the personal impact of being pushed toward poverty by corporate actions and national economic policy. The major political parties have shown that their main interest is in following the money, and in staying away from where the money isn’t. The new class of poor and working people desperately need an independent politics dedicated to improving their lives. For instance the vast productive power of this largely automated economy could end poverty and homelessness tomorrow, if only the “we the people” controlled it. But that of course would not serve the upper class agenda he now represents. While he was once a community organizer in poor neighborhoods, powerful forces have rallied around him as a presidential candidate.

Besides the unprecedented millions that both the Democratic Candidates have garnered in this election plenty have documented who are the global leaders that serve as part of Obama’s top advisors and they include, Zbigniew Brzezinsk, Dennis Ross who advised Clinton and both Bushes, Anthony Lake, a big proponent and supporter of World Bank and IMF roles as well as generals. We can conclude that while major party politicians can talk about change, they are not likely to fight for the kinds of changes that would really end poverty. To do that, we the people must organize with new ideas and a new vision of justice. In the face of the growing encroachment on rights and democracy we, the people must gain the political power to direct society’s resources so we can end the problems of poverty, national & women’s oppression, and this outrageous war. A new society is not only possible, but necessary.

BlackCommentator Editorial Board Member Ethel Long-Scott – Executive Director of the Women’s Economic Agenda Project, (WEAP). She is known nationally and internationally for devoting her life to the education and leadership of people at the losing end of society, especially women of color. She is dedicated to economic security and justice and believes that the US is engaged in a relentless war against workers and the poor. Click here to contact Ms. Long-Scott.

I welcome Obama’s principled and eloquent response to the “Rev. Wright” controversy. This provided an unprecedented teaching moment for the country, an opportunity for him to address directly the issues of racism in the American polity, and, more subtley, the polarizing tactics of the corporate media. While I do not share his opinion that Rev. Wright’s views are “distorted”, I think he handled the question of their relationship – and by extension his relationship with the Black community – with integrity. It is unfortunate that, as Blackness is apparently equated with lack of patriotism, he felt it necessary to reaffirm his committment to the fight against “radical Islam.” On the whole, however, it was a brilliant exercise of statesmanship.