Obama's Speech, Identifying our Suffering

If you have not yet seen or heard Senator Obama's speech on race do yourself a favor and watch it. It is a good speech. Timely, quite apropos, transforming of potential weakness into an asset, confronting of real issues, and broadly connecting to various folks. Obama pulls off, albeit with less rhetorical verve than some of my favorite speakers, a move that we don't see too often in politics or anywhere else: he could have continued down the path of separation, division, and creating political camps, but instead he goes for bringing as many people along as he can, with seeking ways to reknit community and move as one.

I do teach this for a living, and in my mind Obama is the candidate that is doing one key thing very well: offering himself as bridge for the nation to cross and transcend the pit of suffering in which it has been mired for at least the last eight years. Hillary is too busy running a campaign of the 20th century; that of activating key states and key voters, ignoring so many others, relying on reviving what was liked by many about the Clinton brand, hoping the nomination would get settled by Super Tuesday. McCain (or as he is being called in so many blogs, McCrazy, McPain, McCranky... etc.) promises perpetual war and anger. Obama is not the progressive candidate I'd love to see, but it seems pretty evident to me right now, that he is running the best platform and the best campaign, even with the compromises I have to make as a progressive.

His speech was needed and useful. He made it do quadruple duty perhaps: campaign speech, transcendence speech, speak to the media and the political chattering classes, speak to many Whites, to African Americans, etc. His speech is quite intriguing in how he constructs the subjectivity of quite a few groups, and how he ties them to the fate of the nation. Nothing new there, but within the cynical world of political campaign discourse, it came as a breath of fresh air to see a candidate actually go beyond the campaign. Those many purposes render the speech a bit weak in moments, and his delivery could have been better. Just too many things to do. But no other candidate would have dared to deliver it. I don't think either Hillary or McCain would or could have delivered it.

Not surprisingly, some in the conservative side are just picking at the speech trying to find ways to attack Obama. Par for the course for any political speech, I know. Michael Gerson at The Washington Post gets it quite wrong when he says:

"Barack Obama has run a campaign based on a simple premise: that words of unity and hope matter to America. Now he has been forced by his charismatic, angry pastor to argue that words of hatred and division don't really matter as much as we thought."

Nope. That's not what Obama tried to do, nor accomplished last night. That is such a superficial read, it is incredibly inept for Mr. Gerson's role as journalist and watcher of public discourse. Obama was in no way arguing that words of hatred and division don't matter. Quite the opposite in fact. But, he also argued that we have to love each other into wellbeing, that we have choices to make about how we move forward, That Rev. Wright is neither the first one, nor the most recent to use such words about America, that the anger and suffering that led Rev. Wright to make such statements is all too real to just dismiss lightly, that we have to look deeply at the sources of our suffering if we are to understand them and if we are to have any hope of moving forward... There is so much Obama did do, and try to accomplish in that speech, and Mr. Gerson did not get it.

Perhaps the most pathetic attack I've heard so far has come from conservative commentator Joe Scarborough on MSNBC. Mr. Scarborough chose to focus on Obama's comments about his grandmother, and noted:

“I really wonder why anybody, why any man would throw his grandmother under the bus during a political speech, regardless of the point he was trying to make.”

Again, this particular selection is narrow-minded and misses the point completely. The story about his grandmother was perhaps one of the most important ways of building identification, of establishing a link to a racism that is pervasive, that strikes deeply and insidiously where we might least expect it. I've seen that racism in my extended family. I've also seen it in places that I would not have expected it, so the comment resonated deeply. Obama was not trying to throw his grandma under the bus, and to suggest so is merely to twist his words and context for really cheap political gain.

Obama imagines a greater vision of the United States of America, and attempts to bring us along in that vision. Mr. Gerson and Mr. Scarborough could have taken the opportunity to continue that work. Instead they chose to rehash the old stuff and dwell on hate.

Gerson wants to bring the focus again to Rev. Wright however, and continue castigating Obama for the preaching excesses of the Reverend:

"The problem with Obama's argument is that Wright is not a symbol of the strengths and weaknesses of African Americans. He is a political extremist, holding views that are shocking to many Americans who wonder how any presidential candidate could be so closely associated with an adviser who refers to the "U.S. of KKK-A" and urges God to "damn" our country."

It seems to me that Mr. Gerson, like so many others, does not know in his gut the kind of experience of fear, hatred, systemic and systematic disenfranchisement, devaluation, dehumanization, genocidal feelings, and suffering brought about against him and his people merely because of his personhood. He does not know the anger that can build, the resentment that can grow, the insidious ambivalence against a nation who perpetrated systemically such acts. Those very values about America that Mr. Gerson wants to hold so dear, those religious beliefs supposed to liberate folks, were complicit in the oppression, were central to the subjugation, and continued impoverishment of a whole group of people.

I have not experienced anything of that magnitude either, it has not followed me as an indelible past. Certainly not to that extent, although I have known discrimination, racism, and fear about such things in my life by virtue of accent, language, ethnicity. But it always surprises me that for those who have never had to fear for their lives because of the color of their skin, because of the language they speak... who cannot look back at the history of their people and see some members hanging from trees, or families broken purposefully, or women abused, and the promise of you and your loved ones always finding such hatred around the next bend; yes, for those who don't have that experience it is altogether too easy to dismiss the angry feelings that can fester, the wounds that don't heal, the fear that follows.

I confess that for me, Rev. Wright's words were not that shocking. Delivered in the heat of the moment, with the rhetorical excess of the anger that suffused him, the words were rather similar to the voice of many prophets who damned the people for breaking the covenant. Mr. Gerson spends no time trying to empathize at all. His critique is in short, a sounding of the bell of resentment against what he can only see as an attack on the nation, and a candidate who happened to worship in a church were such words were spoken. The arrogance of U.S. exceptionalism is so high, that we apparently cannot take that language of god-damn America. You see, for the longest of time, since our inception, we've believed God to be on our side, and we've believed ourselves to be God's agents in history.

So my initial response to Mr. Gerson fell along the lines of "how quaint that he sees such words by Rev. Wright as so disturbing!" Here's somebody who seeks to protect the nation against what he considers a scurrilous attack, when perhaps a dignified pause to understand the source of that anger, pain, and suffering would have been far more helpful. Like I said, I'm not surprised that is the response. Notice how, instead of understanding why some people in the world choose to blow themselves up instead of sitting down to talk, so many opt for just "bombing the hell out of them," or making their country "into a parking lot." What would a bit of trying to understand suffering bring to us? Certainly more than attack and defensive dismissal will.

Obama took time to do just that -- taking the moment to call us to a conversation, to a deeper understanding of each other's suffering -- when he could have gone on a political "bender." He might not have been as successful as he could have been. It might all still be grand political theater. But the effort appeared sincerely done, and beyond the life of the campaign somebody (Obama) rang a bell truly calling us to the better angels of our nature. Trying to twist that into chicanery, and trying to exploit it politically to attack him is invidious, insidious, so damaging. Why not instead pick up the thread that Obama has identified, the opening he might have given us, and carry it forward.

Comments

[donna]

Because they have no interest in going forward, only in desperately clinging to the ideas of the past and the belief that they are so personally relevant to the nation.

Obama talks about the future, about getting beyond where we are, and the idiot talking heads can only trash him because they have no place in that future. They are the dead ideas of the past -- and they know it. Obama does more than frighten them -- he makes them irrelevant.

[Nacho]

Hi Donna, yes, I agree with you. Tragic.

Hugs,

N

[Behzod]

I agree as well. I think what too many politicians are focusing on in the current election (as well as in all political races) is trying to bring a candidate down based upon holes in a campaign when they should be instead looking at the whole campaign.

While Senator Obama has been extremely successful campaigning based upon the notions of unity and hope, he uses those as motifs in his argument and plan for fixing our country, rather than simple buzzwords in a speech. He is acting upon what he believes and is trying to enact the best path that will spread peace and hope.

Conservatives are bashing him for lack of experience and being an idealist, but what they are ignoring is that he is a breath of fresh air, a semi progressive thinker, something that conservatives don't often value (being conservative). I would love to see Senator Obama in the White House because I believe that he does care about us and sees that America can be a better place, but it will not be easy. Too many of the other candidates will simply get into office and keep us on a similar track of where we've been. We don't need to stay going the same direction. Obama will flip us around.

[Nacho]

Hey Behzod,good to see you around and posting! Thanks for your thoughts!

Best,

N

[Enji]

I think the speech will go down in history. It should go down in history. It wasn't just about race, it was about changing the way we converse on political matters. He was refusing to do the cutting up and tearing down that political/pundit speech has become. Now that those pundits try to cut it up, it just doesn't work. They aren't just missing the point...they're trying to make it irrelevant, and they can't.

I disagree that his delivery was weak at points. As I say in my own post, it reminding me of the sermons of my childhood ministers, straight out of the heartland. I like the way you characterize HRC...I think most people are so over that kind of politicking. They are ready for somebody real.

And I think Obama is real, that is, sincere, someone not hardened by the political game. A co-worker of mine went to see him today, took time off work. The first thing I asked her, was he plastic or was he real? She said he was very real, you could see that. He went out among the audience, no teleprompter. He talked about not seeing our enemies as our enemies.

He is reviving the language of diplomacy, and the language of peaceful conflict management.