It was a stirring bit of oratory. It was a remarkable speech. I am a cynic, and I wept. If, as seems likely, our choice will be between Obama and McCain in November, for the first time in my life I will pull the lever to vote for a Presidential candidate rather than against one.
And yet I said, in email to a friend this morning, that I felt as though this call for reconciliation, for discussion and for unity, was based on the exclusion of a whole subset of society, a group of people with which I identify myself. She asked me to explain.
It was that rarest of things: a speech that was both stirring and largely honest, written on the assumption that its audience consisted of reasoning adults. It did not avoid complexity overmuch, nor did it pander to the worst in us. Perhaps that bar is unnecessarily low. It could have been a much lower bar. The right is outraged that a politician would have the temerity to speak in measured tones of historic grievances, of current injustices. That in itself is a measure of the speech’s worth. No political statement can be both useful and honest if it does not provoke incoherent outrage from The Corner.
This useful, moving, honest speech is still a tool of division.
It may be that most of the people the speech quietly deems not to count will forgive the speaker. I do. There are political realities to consider. A national election is a process of rough consensus. When the vast majority of citizens believe in lies, deflating the lies too forcefully will lose you the race. When the truth hurts, people turn their backs on the truth tellers. Do we want to be right, or do we want to get work done? My answer flits, from day to day, around the gray area between the two.
It would not do, for instance, to point out that the whole bitter, complex, intransigent conflict between Black and White has taken place, for centuries, on land stolen from people neither Black nor White. I do not wish to risk comparison of atrocity. It may be that there is someone qualified to rank Slavery and Manifest Destiny on a scale to indicate which was the greater evil. I am not that person. I suspect all such comparisons would be spurious. Still, the phrase “stained by the Original Sin of Slavery” is apt. There is not a thread of American life that is not still tinged with the blood of slaves. And yet Obama is right to imply that America could have existed if slavery had not. It would have been a very different country. The Constitution might have been stronger from the outset. Civil rights for US citizens would have followed a different path. I will leave it to the writers of speculative fiction to guess, for instance, whether the cause of women’s rights would have been advanced by a more universal context of freedom or delayed by the absence of an abolitionist movement to provide the social networks the suffragists then used. It would have been a different United States, but it would have been a United States.
Imagining a United States without the displacement, swindling, and murder of millions of Native people is harder. It would have been harder to argue against intemperate sermons if that subject had been included. To point out that Americans live on land acquired at best by guile, at worst by torture and mass murder, would have been… what is the phrase I’m looking for?
not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.
They are a problem neither black nor white nor Latino nor Asian, those Natives. They are the apparent exception to American Exceptionalism. One cannot, of course, mention every person’s pet issue in a campaign speech. To insist on inclusion of the entire laundry list of sins is, clearly, to pose the perfect in opposition to the good. It is nit-picking, I know. What can I say? Nits make lice.
Still, let’s leave this side issue aside. More important examples of the people who are divisive and wrong, examples actually important enough to have been mentioned in the speech:
Those who see white racism as endemic.
Those who fail to blame radical Islam for the military excesses of our stalwart Middle Eastern ally.
Those who look at America honestly and in good faith, and come to the conclusion that America causes more harm than good.
I have done well in this country, you might point out, and you would be right. I have been well educated, despite obstacles internal and external. I am comfortable enough. I have a voice. I am not one of those people the speech tolerantly excused, who arrived at their divisive and unpleasant political opinions as a result of personal suffering and the subsequent and understandable and pitiable resentment that results. Life may not have been uniformly good to me, but America has, by and large.
Women go blind in Saipan sewing my clothing, armed guards enforcing bathroom break policies. A farmer made seven cents on the two weeks’ supply of coffee I just bought, the remaining several dollars feeding a diversified firm that dumps subsidized corn in Mexico. Mexican farmers would mow my lawn, had I a lawn. I dutifully put a plastic bottle in the recycling bin, and it ends up on a Chinese riverbank sheltering Anopheles mosquitoes.
The world pays for our comforts against its will.
To call it imperialism would be divisive in a time when we need unity. To suggest the US border is no gated community, that our ethical responsibility is not fully contained within it, would be to elevate what is wrong with America above all we know that is right with America. What is right with America? A promise of future justice expressed in ringing tones, and a beleaguered Constitution whose scant protections would be baseline assumptions in a sane society rather than unrealistic ideals. Those of us who appreciate those laws, those promises, and merely wish to see them implemented somewhere other than on the backs of the rest of the world? We are the divisive, the hateful, the counterproductive.
It is, still, a welcome change merely to be patronized rather than vilified. And to be spoken to as an adult — that is precious. That is far too rare.
but on the plus side he’s not hillary fucking clinton and he hasn’t committed nearly as many (i.e. zero) atrocities against the vietnamese people as John Kerry or McCain have so…
Obama is a centrist tool, and by those low ass standards it was a good speech.
(also you missed the whole “and Wright said what exactly to make Obama do the sister soulja moment that’s buried in the middle of the speech? The hell?” which is sort of more to the point; Obama’s not going to mention the latin@s, the chincan@s, the amerindians, the overlap or for that matter pretty much anything of a complex intersectionalist nature, and expecting such is expecting far too much from him really. He’s not Cynthia “Best. Democrat. Evr.” Mckinney or Dennis “cunninglingus gnome” Kuchinichinich either, and the DLC wouldn’t have let him be a serious contender if he was. He’s where he is because he’s a tool, just like Hillary is where she is because she’s a complete fuck-the-poor ratbastard sonofabitch. C’est l’vie mon cheri *shrugs*)
i thought this was a wonderful speech. amazing. healing. motivating.
and no, it didn’t address all evils. but it embraced some of the powerful feelings of division that have allowed the right to prey on fear and the left to eat its own.
i’m sick to death of the fear-mongering and “trust us or you are a traitor” and nitpicking. we are in a hell of a bad place, and it is a huge relief to me to hear someone who can give a good, thoughtful speech instead of releasing some new kind of crap in advertising.
no one speech will solve all our ills. ever. at least this man has a brain. that’s gotta count. gives me some hope, anyway.
Yes, he definitely has a brain, and that counts for a whole lot, but the ability to say categorically that “in no other country on Earth is my story even possible” shows that the brain in question could still use a little more international awareness.
Yeah, kind of a shrugger.
I didn’t find it nearly as inspirational as I did this, but maybe that’s just me.
look, the immediate challenge was that obama’s pastor said things that spread like wildfire, and he was under pressure to disown the man altogether.
and he didn’t. instead, he provided context and used this blast against him as a platform to talk about race, from a personal and rational point of view, and to provide *context* to the views of completely different people—both extremes being subject to condemnation by the other.
that is just extraordinary. no, it was not complete, nor particularly scholarly—but how often has a major politician acknowledged that people have reasons for their views, talked about the fears and put them in context, and tried to reconcile those disparate experiences on an issue as big as race?
reconciliation and moving forward just has not been part of our political dialog on a big scale in as long as i can remember. it is what works on small, local scales, very often. but really, since i reached voting age in 1975, there are not very many examples that readily come to mind on a national scale.
i used the term “context” a couple times too many in that last post. what impressed me so much was obama’s effort to persuade people to think about what was influencing others of opposing views: history, their personal experiences, fears that come from something in their own lives. he is asking for listeners to imagine being in another’s shoes, and then to re-think their own perspectives.
i agree with that approach, always have. it is too absent from public discourse and political life. i know that it is echoed in religious places, and i am not religious, but that is probably where i learned and embraced it.
None that I can think of at all, Kathy. which is why I persist in finding it a welcome and inspiring speech.
And maybe with this precedent-setting speech, there will come another, someday, that does not unnecessarily throw the unacceptables under the bus for cred points with the conservatives.
I think white racism is endemic. I think Israel’s current policies are a problem. I think stressing what’s right with American over what’s wrong is to whitewash a multitude of evils, and to disavow responsibility to make those things better.
I think it ought to be acceptable for me to ask whether the speech might not have been every bit as effective without that stuff.
Rev. Wright has mentioned Native Americans many times in his sermons—in one of the main ones quoted on TV 24/7 during the past week, he states unequivocally that America was stolen. I saw several clips in which that was repeated, and Sean Hannity nearly had a stroke over it.
True, Obama did not mention Native Americans, but the person who Started All This sure did.
Regarding the speech: I had pretty much decided beforehand, if he throws the Reverend under the bus, fuck him.
And he didn’t! ... and I was just so proud of him.
Guts, he has guts.
Anyone who gives Hannity a stoke is OK by me.
i hope this is a starting point. and yes, it is perfectly acceptable to question what wasn’t addressed well, or was thrown out without much thought or development. he wrote the speech himself, in a short time—and he is running for president. it is not perfect.
i so dearly hope that this speech can help elevate discussions above the level of “you’re associated with this fiend, disown him now on all the news channels or you are dead meat.”
Chris, I agree with you completely. I too feel “outside” this speech, dismayed as I am with the politicians’ need to praise “this great country” instead of naming the evils for what they are, and what they have wrought. I’m grateful for Obama’s efforts to raise the debate to a higher level, and with you that it’s not yet high enough - but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that this is a starting place rather than a point from which he’ll have to retreat. He didn’t wait, and he showed courage and insight in giving the very good speech he did; we’ll have to wait and see what comes next.
Unpacking our Middle East policy so that the population can understand what’s really happening and who’s behind it would be the best gift to world peace he could make. I’d be astounded if that actually happened, as astounded as if an American president ever tried to begin a process of apology, atonement, and reparations for the destruction of our Native population.
Thanks for saying these things, Chris. I couldn’t agree with you more. I think Obama did two important things: he showed no fear in speaking in a complex way about things most people have been taught to avoid, and he did not repudiate his friend. The first made me weep with relief that an adult level of political discourse might be possible in this country again. The second made me consider him a person of integrity.
I also agree with you, Chris, that if we were having a longer conversation with him, we’d want to ask him about the points you raise, because it is our job to press our leaders on those issues. But I do think that he had to measure how many hot buttons he was going to push in this event, so I cut him some slack on not covering all the bases. I have not read his second book, but in his first, he talks about his youth in Indonesia. I imagine he has a take on colonialism, but I don’t think we’ve heard it yet.
Thank you for mentioning this. It’s amazing how many Americans not only ignore, but actively try to excuse, minimize or justify what white settlers did to the Native Americans.
I still remember a discussion on Jim Henley’s blog where Mona, his co-blogger, declared that it didn’t matter because the American Indians weren’t “saintly” and would have done the same to white folks anyway.
Yes, Obama raised the bar to about shin level. Someone’s going to get a nasty bark.
R. Mildred, doesn’t Kerry get brownie points for recognizing what he and his fellow soldiers did, when it was (shit, still is) very unfashionable to do so?
R. Mildred, doesn’t Kerry get brownie points for recognizing what he and his fellow soldiers did, when it was (shit, still is) very unfashionable to do so?
Yeah but Niemoller went to Dachau for doing more than Kerry’s piss poor and quickly forgotten acknowledgement of reality managed, and Kerry’s statement didn’t really cost him anything.
You don’t get cookies for smiling.
And Niemoller didn’t then vote for the iraq war either.
That’s cold, R. You’ve set the bar somewhere in the stratosphere, relatively speaking.
Here in Australia, we have just had the refreshing experience of hearing the new government say “sorry” to the Aboriginals. But everyone was very clear that the “sorry” was not for having taken their land, but specifically for paternalistic policies toward them in the early 20c. An apology for earlier crimes against natives, such as the original invasion and conquest, could only seem insincere, since those crimes are so fundamental to who Australians are today—even to who the Aboriginals are. Nobody, not even the Aboriginals, really wanted to go that far back.
If Middle East history is so painful, it’s because it’s all about competing efforts to reverse past acts of conquest, effectively rolling back the clock to different points in history.
I do think Obama was courageous to be so direct about the fact that the problems of historic grievance have no political solution. The most we can hope for is a kind of scarred healing that comes from each citizen’s struggle to free herself from the categorical grievances of whatever groups she belongs to, to honor that history without being boxed in by it. And yes, the discussion Obama intends to start can facilitate that healing, but it has to be millions of personal events before it can be a political one.
That’s cold, R. You’ve set the bar somewhere in the stratosphere, relatively speaking.
Not really, I just grade on a curve.
An apology for earlier crimes against natives, such as the original invasion and conquest, could only seem insincere, since those crimes are so fundamental to who Australians are today
The majority of times when words seem insincere, the cause is that the words don’t match the actions of the speaker - current australian politicians are declaring that when white folks rape aboriginal women, it’s the aboriginal communities’ fault, they’ve recently been arguing about whether or not massacres even happened (which comes under my “white people talking among other whtie people about whether or not POC experiences of oppression are truly valid” rule of Shut The Fuck Up Crazy White People), so if they then turned around and said:
“I admit it, this land I’m standing on was stolen from the natives, but I’m not ging to give any of it back, I’m not going to really do anything to help the natives live in the communities they’ve been forced into by that theft, and I’m going to continue pushing policies that open up new wounds on their body politic, but I feel They should put all the past stabbings we’ve given them behind them and shut up and be quiet about the new ones as well.”
...Well yes, that’s going to sound insincere, and racist and part of the problem not the solution. And the reason why it sounds like that, is becuase it Is.
No body wants sincere words, they want sincere actions, and there are political solutions to some of the present problems facing all these fucked over groups - and while they won’t be able to solve all the problems, you gotta ask the main question of; but if they can solve some problems why shouldn’t they when their failure to solve those few problems is the thign that’s holding up the entire healing process?
I’d forgive, or at least, overlook, The Omission, if I felt the speaker’s record indicated he would in fact pursue a Progressive agenda if elected. Unfortunately, I see evidence of just the contrary. Thus, it makes the words even more empty, and worse, contrived to suck in good people, people who have been waiting for just these words.
I said to Eric the other day that Obama is the black/liberal white version of the Indian/liberal white Ward Churchill experience, or any genealogically-uncovered Indian who out-Indians the lowly rank-and-file born-to-its. The oratory is more palatable as the orator has willingly adopted the mantle, viewing it as a means to an end; that it might have societal benefits as well makes it easier to overlook its contrived nature.
I agree that I, and millions of other non-AA people of color, were omitted from a purported discussion of race for political expediency, which, frankly, is no different than nearly every other previous discussion of race in the past fifty years. And yet, I feel even more alienated, and frankly more vulnerable to cries of “identity politics”, than I ever did after speeches by King or Jackson.