Obama dares to speak the truth about race

Barack Obama's keynote address in Philadelphia last week was "the most honest speech about race in America that any leading politician has given in my lifetime", according to Andrew Sullivan, political commentator for the Sunday Times and TheAtlantic.com. "It was a shockingly brave speech – the first real test of what this man does under pressure and under fire."

Obama made the speech in an effort to quell the furore caused by remarks made in sermons by his old friend from the United Church of Christ, the Rev Jeremiah Wright. The Chicago pastor has said, among other things, that "Hillary Clinton ain't never been called a nigger", and he has asked African-Americans to sing "God damn America".

For Sullivan, Obama was not offering sound-bites; instead he was trying to start a conversation - "a perilous conversation that might either kill his candidacy or make it more significant than any since Ronald Reagan's.... He spoke to the American public as if they were adults, aware of their country's tortured racial history."

This meant that Obama had to tread a complicated path in his speech, "decrying Wright's apparent disbelief in the self-correction of the American experiment while also trying to explain where that argument comes from: slavery, Jim Crow, centuries of cruelty and humiliation.

"He [Obama] invoked the self-confessed racism of his white grandmother and spoke of the sometimes bigoted discourse in African-America's barbershop subculture. He was not merely being white and black; he was being ghetto black and Ivy League black, upscale black and downscale black, middle-class black and underclass black.

"This is the core of Obama's relationship to his own race. He understands that the ease of pure victimology is as phoney as the release of complete assimilation."

Sullivan concluded: "Few politicians have been as dedicated to racial integration as Obama, and to tie him to racial separatists because of a few sermons at his church is simply unfair."

There is one advantage to Obama from the Jeremiah Wright saga: the rumours that the Illinois senator is a Muslim may at last die down.

FIRST POSTED MARCH 23, 2008