Yes you lied to me all these years
You told me to wash and clean my ears
And talk real fine just like a lady
And you’d stop calling me Sister Sadie

Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

— Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddam”

***

A few weeks ago, Barack Obama had “transcended race.” A few weeks ago, conservative pundits were licking his fundament (whether in earnest or simply to boost the chances of the presumably beatable Democrat one will never know). A few weeks ago, any mention of anything that even suggested that Barack Obama was black got blasted by his camp and his supporters as inherently racist.

But Barack Obama adopted Afro-American culture (that of the American descendants of African slaves) a long time ago. His church and its preacher are very much in the Afro-American cultural tradition. So is his wife. To those of us old enough to have seen our father’s live in fear of being brutally reminded of the weakness of their middle-class purchase, the word “goddamn” slips easily from the lips. The word “America” might even be next to it.

Those of us whose relatives are old enough to have told us stories of long road trips in cars full of food because they knew no restaurant or diner would serve them on the way… for those of us who suffered the damage done to our fathers who grew up knowing that their mothers, their children, could be killed, maimed or just publicly spat upon and there wouldn’t be a goddamned (there’s that word again) thing that they could do about it… for those of us who watched the humiliation of being prey corrode the best parts of men… for us, the words “god damn” are often at hand.

And Obama knows it. That’s what’s been so galling about him to date. Is this the only way a black man can run for President— by pretending not to know what every Afro-American man and woman knows he knows? He knows why his wife made her comment about being proud of America for the first time in her adult life. You see, we don’t divorce America from her crimes. Her triumphs are shoved down our throats from cradle to grave, so we see no need to trumpet them yet again, especially when they so often inherently deny our existence and overtly deny our significance. America saved the world during WWII. Then black veterans returned home and couldn’t live where they wanted to live, couldn’t get work in accordance with their skills, were not treated with the respect due their status as human beings. Pardon me if that taints the glory just a little.

(more…)

This time Obama took discussion of the Wright controversy to Philadelphia and, drawing on his own multi-racial American background, his personal philosophy of politics and his training as a constitutional scholar, unraveled a stunner of a speech on the history of race relations in the United States. It was the kind of distinctly unique speech that, even if it doesn’t win him the nomination, will likely find its way into the digital curriculum of high schools across the nation. It was the kind of speech you got the feeling right from the jump that only Barack Obama could deliver and only at this point in time. The long excerpt in the YouTube above may be taken down soon by CNN, but it will no doubt be plenty sampled and redistributed… will.i.am probably already calling on his peeps to turn it into a mad viral video.

Will it be enough to win over the voters who may now think Obama is just Jeremiah Wright-light? It went a long way toward explaining to the uninitiated what the Wright variety of sermonizing is all about and why and how Obama thinks differently than Wright does on issues of race and America, especially as Wright’s thinking is presented in the YouTubes. Obama touched on black anger and white anger, black bias and white bias, on the recent racially charged politics of distraction that are a symptom of the problem of persistent race resentments in the country. He denounced Wright’s statements but didn’t abandon the man. In fact, to abandon Wright to try to gain voters in working class Pennsylvania and elsewhere, as some analysts suggested was a real option, would have been ridiculous, completely contrary to the reconciliation and understanding he was encouraging us as a nation to embrace.

Granted, Obama was effectively forced to make this incredible speech. He has avoided speaking directly on race in the past. But to rise to the challenge, to make of it an opportunity to be bold, to speak directly to the issue and not backpedal, that’s the kind of thing you hope for from a national leader. John Dickerson, writing on the speech at Slate, asked “Can you give a State of the Union address before you’re president?” to which he answers: “…this [speech] felt like it addressed the actual state of our union more than those dreary January list readings presidents are obligated to perform.”

The state Obama addressed in this speech is a state our union has been wading through and afraid to address in a fashion like this for decades— and never as part of a legitimate full-scale presidential primary campaign. Talking about race is never easy. Talking about it in the wake of a race scandal generated by the actions of a respected friend is another thing altogether. Talking about it on national TV in a deeply personal and informed way at remarkable length and using almost no notes in the middle of a campaign is something we’re not likely to see again anytime soon.

Obama got a hard inside fastball hurled at him this week. It may have been just what his campaign needed.

NOTE: The webnets tell me that people on the ground for the speech have made reference to the use of a teleprompter. Still impressive.