My own Obama speech moment: as I was walking home late on the night of the speech, I ran across four black teenagers, probably 15 or 16 years old. They started to cross the street as I approached. As we passed in opposite directions I heard one of them say, "You see that Charlie Manson-looking motherfucker? Why they let serial killers walk around this time of night?"My first reaction was to think, "Jeebus. Do all brown haired, bearded white men look alike?" But afterward, when I looked up a Manson photograph and considered the circumstances—the late hour, the ghoulish complexion modern street lamps lend to white people—I thought, "No wonder they crossed the street." Then I went on to contemplate Manson's enduring cross-cultural appeal.
I didn't read the speech or many reactions to it until yesterday, when the various narratives were well formed. There seems to have been considerable anticipation that Obama would throw someone under a bus, either himself or his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. In the aftermath, the consensus on the right seems to be that he threw his elderly white grandmother under the bus, although there doesn't seem to be much realization that they, the outraged horde, are the bus, and that they had to drive crazier than Keanu Reeves in Speed to pick off grandma.
Here's what Obama said about his grandmother. "I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother -- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love."
Can't you just hear the sickening thud?
Me neither.
Shelby Steele, perhaps the preeminent black conservative these days, as vocal as Clarence Thomas is mute (and as sane as Alan Keyes is crazy), says that Obama threw his mother under the bus when he joined and stayed with Reverend Wright's church, where, Steele writes, "he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable."
My guess is that Obama's mother would have been welcomed in the church and that she would have been able and perfectly willing to feel comfortable and safe, and I suspect the same would be true for any white person who chose to attend the church regularly and become part of its community. But, as another, more liberal black writer notes, Steele is philosophically unprepared to grant Obama the capacity to negotiate the two worlds, black and white, without ultimately betraying both, and himself, and ultimately, the rest of us.
Darryl Pinckney's essay in the New York Review of Books, constructed around a review of Steele's recent book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win, predates Steele's Wall Street Journal op-ed by a few weeks. Perhaps as much as anyone, Pinckney is capable of empathizing with Obama's quest for identity. He grew up in Indianapolis during the 1960's, a member of that community's deeply-rooted black aristocracy, attending sparsely integrated North Central High School on the conservative city's affluent north side, only thirty or so miles from the one-time Ku Klux Klan capital of Greenwood, Indiana.
After graduation he attended Princeton and Columbia, and lived for years in Germany and England. Aside from being an intellectual cut above most of us, and living with the opportunities and hazards that that station brings, he has lived a life in which he both sought out and had thrust upon him situations in which he was indelibly other; not so much as Obama, but enough to make him sensitive to the condition and to spend considerable energy attempting to resolve it. Despite his empathy, though, and his disagreements with Steele about Obama's potential and the role of black identity in realizing it, Pinckney doesn't seem able to muster much enthusiasm for an Obama presidency beyond as a receptacle for an emerging youth activism.
Another essay, this one from Jonathan Raban in the London Review of Books, also identifies Obama's otherness as central to his appeal and his potential.
... a tragic sense of life is exactly what has marked Obama’s candidacy from the beginning. His powerful memoir, Dreams from My Father, written in his early thirties, is shot through with that sense: its gravely intelligent, death-haunted tone, beautifully controlled throughout the book, is that of an old voice, not a young one – and the voice of the book is of a piece with the plangent, melancholy baritone to be heard on the campaign trail.
Those who hear only empty optimism in Obama aren’t listening. His routine stump speech is built on the premise that America has become estranged from its own essential character; a country unhinged from its constitution, feared and disliked across the globe, engaged in a dumb and unjust war, its tax system skewed to help the rich get richer and the poor grow poorer, its economy in ‘shambles’, its politics ‘broken’. ‘Lonely’ is a favourite word, as he conjures a people grown lonely in themselves and lonely as a nation in the larger society of the world. (Obama himself is clearly on intimate terms with loneliness: Dreams from My Father is the story of a born outsider negotiating a succession of social and cultural frontiers; it takes the form of a lifelong quest for family and community, and ends, like a Victorian novel, with a wedding.)
Like Pinckney's, Raban's essay anticipates the Obama speech by some weeks but helps illuminate it and the reaction to it, which includes responses from people who fall into the "empty optimism" camp and Clinton partisans, many of whom now find evidence of disingenuousness if not outright treachery in every Obama utterance.
Obamaphiles, and some presumably objective observers, rate the speech among the greatest in US political history, ranking it with inaugural addresses by Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and with John Kennedy's 1960 speech on religion and the separation of church and state. David Corn described the speech as "daring and unique", and found virtue in a feature that others decried: Obama's characterization of Reverend Wright's charge that the US remains a fundamentally racist society as a generational trait, with the implication that the existential bitterness of some older black Americans inhibits their ability to recognize positive change.
It was a good speech. What prompts many people to describe it as great is, I think, that it was so adult by contrast to most of our political discourse. What made it adult was Obama's unwillingness to jettison the complexity of his life in favor of the sort of moronic narrative favored by the press and tolerated by the public. A number of people vehemently disagree with Obama's repudiation of some of Wright's remarks, but no one is calling the speech simplistic.
The speech bore fruit in unexpected orchards. Fox News anchor Chris Wallace was shocked into chastising two of his colleagues for doing their jobs, which is to say, manufacturing quotes and distorting Obama's meaning. Failed GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee told MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, in defense of Reverend Wright, that "I'm going to be probably the only conservative in America who's going to say something like this, but I'm just telling you: We've got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told, "You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can't sit out there with everyone else. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus." And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had a more, more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me."
I wrote some while back that Obama's candidacy had the potential to burst the boil of racism in this country, but that the process, successful or not, would be indescribably ugly. You can see the possibility of success in the responses from Wallace and Huckabee, and you can see the beginnings of the backlash against not so much Obama, but the notion that race remains an issue that white people must address, in the knee-jerk reactions from the likes of Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh, and the lower-key rejection of a dialog and the premise of a call for one from the post-racist crackers at the Powerline blog, as collected by Dave Neiwert. From Limbaugh: "It is clear that Senator Obama has disowned his white half, that he's decided he's got to go all in on the black side ..." From Buchanan: "Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America ... this time, it has to be a two-way conversation ... We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?"
Elsewhere, Glenn Greenwald at Salon flags a racist screed in which the writer names several black men who in his view are beyond the pale (as it were). "Black people," he says, "will know what I mean when I demand they concede that the following people are niggers ..."
Let the conversation begin.
There are of course other conversations we need to have. If Obama threw anyone under the bus it was Palestinians, with his casual dismissal of the troubles in the Middle East as "emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam" rather than "the actions of stalwart allies like Israel". The line requires a willful misreading of Palestinian history, in which religion played only a relatively small role prior to this decade, and is no more constructive in resolving the issue than is opening a discussion about racial tensions with a list of black men who must be stipulated to be niggers.
Obama seems to own a generous measure of what John Keats described as "negative capability", the ability to cultivate and thrive amid uncertainty and doubt. Keats said it was the essential quality of great poets; it's also a good quality to find in a leader, one that has been badly needed and missed during the past seven years.
But he also seems inclined at times to dismiss the ability, which isn't so good. He is probably alone among presidential candidates in having the capacity and opportunity to initiate deep discussions of economic class, of the Palestinian disaster, of the piratical nexus between business and politics, but he is far from alone in shying away from doing so when it's inexpedient, which I'm sure is among the reasons John Edwards has thus far declined to endorse him.
That combination of ability and hesitation is what lends him the promise of being either the best US president since World War II, or the most lethally disappointing. His speech did little to settle the question.
