These pieces in this edited volume, cover the Obama speech on race, its motivations, its intent, its value as a political document, as a model for framing poverty, and as the introduction or a gateway to a post racial America, etc. What I was hoping for was a thorough paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of it. But that probably would have resulted in dull reading. As a result, I decided to perform my own analysis to place along side that of these very talented authors.
My main concern was how Mr. Obama would address the responsibilities for racism in America. And in this regard, in the fourth paragraph of the speech, he clearly seems to place the responsibility for making the nation a more perfect union entirely on the backs of the victims of injustice. He appears to be blind to the fact that an even greater responsibility should lie on the backs of those, who by resisting social changes they don't like, actually violate the laws of the land and thus are undoubtedly and are incontrovertibly the cause of racial injustice in America.
Those who have suffered injustices through overt violations of U.S. laws, by the majority population, according to Mr. Obama's formulation, must go into the streets to demonstrate, protest and struggle to secure rights that have already been granted them by the U.S. Constitution, but which are then willfully and illegally denied them through resistance by those who choose not to obey the laws of the land against racial discrimination? Obama's one-sided appeal for responsibility strikes me as being, at the very least, "bass ackwards? Especially since in paragraph six he also places an "unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people (meaning of course the majority white population) ." Indeed if these people are as decent as he imagines them to be, why then are they given a "free pass" from their own civic responsibility of not having a right to actively and passively resist laws and social arrangements designed to break down the barriers of racial discriminationn and that are otherwise protected by the U.S. Constitution? And furthermore, since we are a law abiding nation, why are those who resist laws they happen to disagree with (such as laws that call for racial fairness), not also called upon to cease and desist their unlawful behavior? Why indeed are laws which prohibit such resistance, rarely invoke on the side of the victims of injustice and against the perpetrators? Were this to be done, would the need for demonstrations, protests and struggles simply disappear?
Without addressing the underlying cause of injustice, by a majority that willfully chooses to disobey the laws of the land, can the U.S. really call itself a true law abiding nation? The point being, is there really an objective basis for Mr. Obama's "unyielding faith," in the goodness of the American people when it comes to the issue of race? Or is this, as one of the author's has suggested, just a convenient rhetoric trope of an idealized "racially fair America" that does not (and has never) existed except in our own collective imagination?
In paragraph 15-18, Mr. Obama dismisses Reverend Wright's alternative view of America as being endemically racist by suggesting that Wright elevates what is wrong with America above what is right about it. Yet, a careful analysis of Wright's ranting seems to be an attempt to shift at least some of the blame and responsibility back where it belongs: to those who illegally resist respecting the laws of the land. It is after all this resistance that is the very cause of injustice and inequality.
Mr. Obama spends an inordinate amount of space rebuking and "distancing" himself from Reverend Wright and Reverend Wright's comments, but he never attempts to address the underlying cause of Wright's (and most blacks in America), vitriol: "white racism from sea to shining sea." In paragraphs 28 and following, he talks about the history of racism as if it were an abstraction from a bygone era? There is no identification of the racial group or return address of perpetrators: Jim Crow, segregation, and the brutality of slavery just happened? And its cross-generational legacy is just a cruel historical fait accompli for the victims and an enduring passive but illicit windfall for the perpetrators.
In fairness, Obama does end his review of the history of racism by finally calling the white community to account in paragraph 43. He asks them to acknowledge that blacks who cry racism, may not all be crazy, but are most likely reacting to objective conditions of discrimination extant in U.S. culture and society. But the way he proposes to impose responsibilities on these whites, the perpetrators of, or passive recipients of, cross-generational illicit race-based bounties, is not by appealing to the racial hatred in their hearts, or for having them give up their acquired advantages and illicit loot, but by calling on them to help fix and invest in (mostly still segregated) schools, by enforcing civil rights laws (that are acted and re-enacted every generation with the same results) and by ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system (which is a world-class embarrassment and continues to get worse).
In the end everything is resolved by the perennial call for unity. For obvious reasons, it can only be of the "papered-over" kind, since in a nation that is already Balkanized to the maximum, the hope for real unity is very nearly an impossibility. And the reason real unity can never happen in America is that "passive white racism" remains below the radar, yet it is much more insidious than Reverend Wright's incendiary rhetoric. Three stars.
