To call it “Checkersesque” wouldn’t be fair to Barack Obama’s recent, riveting speech on race, although the results could be pragmatically similar: saving a candidacy. In “Checkers,” it was Richard Nixon’s1952 vice presidential slot on the Eisenhower ticket that hung in the balance. At stake last week was Obama’s viability as a presidential candidate uniquely positioned to transcend race and the familiar chasms of politics as usual.
Arguably he reclaimed it – although certain inflammatory footage will be recycled should he capture the Democratic Party’s nomination. That Obama talk in Philadelphia was a tour de force on race, the likes of which we’ve not heard before in this country.
Sure, it was imperfect – not unlike this Union. Such as analogizing his white grandmother’s racial stereotyping with his black pastor’s hateful, racist screeds. Or equating anything that the seething, separatist, the Irreverent Jeremiah Wright, shrieked with the politically incorrect comments uttered by Geraldine Ferraro. Or going easy on black Americans’ complicity — by countenancing dysfunctional culture in their midst — in America’s racial disparities.
And yet, for the first time we heard a person of such prominence and uncommon eloquence actually put race into a context that could resonate on both sides of the color divide.
In a speech he crafted himself, Obama reminded us what the stakes are, why anger in those of both hues is real and why “retreat into our respective corners” is a counterproductive non-option. He underscored the unique role and dynamic of the black church and why members of an older black generation that came of age under Jim Crow might be less than sanguine about prospects in America. And he referenced the dichotomies that are the racially private and public lives we all lead in a society too often polarized by pigment and over-corrected by political correctness.
The usual partisans had the usual takes, but there is this irony. It took the venomous, “God damn America” rhetoric of the race-baiting Rev. Wright – and its potential to bring down his parishioner-presidential candidate – to put this critically important speech into play.
It’s been long overdue – and deserves better than the context of damage control. Anything even approaching it – since Martin Luther King Jr. – typically has been delivered by racial hucksters and opportunists, two of whom also ran for president.
One other irony. What are the odds that those who truly undermine America by living down to all its worst racial stereotypes – actually watched and learned anything?