The politics of race in America

I did not watch or listen to Barack Obama's "more perfect union" speech. Instead, I took a page from my friend Bookworm and read it, after having seen today's Wall Street Journal and thought about Shelby Steele's provocative essay there. Steele provided context for answering the question "why did Obama have to make this speech?" It's not because he has a better tan than Hillary Clinton or John McCain ever will.

The answer (per Steele): "nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable."

Why the sermons in that church make some people (especially "people of pallor") uncomfortable has already been widely discussed elsewhere, including by Stanley Kurtz, who may or may not have been writing tongue in cheek when he suggested that conservatives especially need to cut Reverend Wright more slack and stop accepting his words at face value, as though he actually meant what he preached. You can't take all of that literally, Kurtz advised. Cassandra picked up on his remarks. You think maybe "adamantine literalism" is a genetic marker of some kind, or is it that outside academia, most of us in any hue are just not down with "authentic local radicalisms"?

I'd give Obama's speech as written a B-, which is probably a better grade than Emily Zanotti would have given it, but a much harsher assessment than what Obama got from the New York Times. The Times went to its Rolodex of historians and activists for comment (they loved the speech), while I went to the blogosphere (mixed reviews there). I understand Zanotti's exasperation, because Obama's pretense of evenhanded high-mindedness tends to wear thin, and his defense of Reverend Jeremiah Wright boils down to "my friend was over the top and wrong, but I know the type, and it is a type, and his biggest mistake was addressing a crowd and recording himself for posterity instead of saying the same thing at his kitchen table over a beer."

Against that one significant shortcoming and a stubborn unwillingness to abandon some sense of victimization, Obama still wins points for effort. He tried to take his theme to the hoop; he really did. But I think he spent too much time on his own personal history and not enough on a big-picture look at where and why this country is where it is. Alan Keyes, the black man whom Obama defeated for an Illinois Senate seat a few years ago, would not have made that mistake.

So then, today's speech. If you care to know more about what I think, I'd say Tom Maguire's reaction to it is a lot like my own. I'm convinced that Obama loves this country, and that his pastor does not. "Guilt by association?" says Obama. "The company you keep," says I. That a patriot like Obama looked for spiritual advice from a pastor with a fondness for redlining the hate meter implies either worrisome lack of judgment or skill in "compartmentalization" that trumps Bill Clinton on his best day.

As an intriguing aside, I wonder what Thabiti Anyabwile thinks of Jeremiah Wright? Anyabwile is himself an African-American pastor in a Baptist church. He's also the author of a book called "The Decline of African American Theology," and he appears to fault people like Wright for making many of the same errors once made by proponents of "liberation theology."

(modified for improved clarity since the original post)

More good stuff on the same subject can be found at Villainous Company.