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On Tuesday, I spent a portion of my evening yelling at my mother over the phone, expressing my annoyance at Senator Barack Obama's much ballyhooed speech.
Here is the speech: Obama Race Speech: Read The Full Text, from The Huffington Post.
Here is what caused the speech: Controversial comments made by Rev Jeremiah Wright, by Daniel Nasaw at The Guardian.
Here is the problem with the speech: The Great Conciliator, by manish at Ultrabrown.
Barack Obama’s Great Race Speech yesterday drew plenty of frothy praise and historians’ plaudits. But it was a disappointingly limited speech, projecting a static, black-and-white image of America which has little to do with its real racial makeup today.
Keep in mind that all Obama had to do was walk in, denounce Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s views without sounding like an angry black man, and not drool on himself, and the chattering classes would be rapturous. We’re at a time in political history when a politician who speaks like an adult startles us . . .
. . . there’s some truth to the Saturday Night Live portrayal of a press which fawns over Obama. The pundits are primed. The mere appearance of an adult at the table can send them into orbit. What Obama did not address in any detail: Latinos, who outnumber blacks in America. Asians. The multiracial. How multiculti the music industry and sports teams and many big city neighborhoods already are. America is not just black and white and has not been for a long time . . .
America has never been "just black and white", despite what my history text books insisted throughout my middle and upper school years. Racism didn't begin with slavery and end with the Civil Rights movement. There are countless peoples and events that came before, between and after 1492 and 1960.
Let's take Senator Obama's speech paragraph by paragraph, and ignore the passages that don't my points of view. My comments are in the brackets.
"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union."
Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men [Yes, men. White, landowning men in specific] gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution ["patriots" who then chose to exact the same tyranny and persecution on the native people already living on this continent] finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.
The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery [and by the mass genocide of the Indians], a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law [except for women, nonwhite people, and non-landowning males]; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time. [Or, the founders could have chosen not to demean, enslave, and murder their fellow human beings. Either, or.]
And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time. [No, what we needed was for our country not to be founded by successive groups of hypocritical, self-entitled, homicidal maniacs. Who in their right mind thinks to themselves, "you know what would be a great idea? Let's import some people from Africa, not pay them, and then kill