Obama: Challenging America on Race
By Ron Walters
NNPA Columnist

Barack Obama made one of the best speeches on race by a public official in the past several years, blending the personal, the academic and the inspirational into one text.

But it was also courageous in that it was given in the teeth of the winds of the Pennsylvania campaign. And it therefore, constituted a risk that his base, a large swath of the American people, would understand his message and add racial reconciliation to the pantheon of issues that he has offered for change.

I must admit that I expected a speech that would briefly say that he has already dealt with the issue, that the actions of his pastor should not be linked to his campaign and that we should all move on. But rather than do this, he and his campaign must have conceived of this as an opportunity – with enormous risk – to place before the American people a real challenge, to move past racial division and the resentment of Blacks and Whites about their relative advantages and status in society and form a coalition for change.

In fact, he argued that it will be necessary to form such a coalition to make the big changes needed in areas such as: the war in Iraq, but also in achieving universal health care, re-aligning the economy and the other big ticket issues that he has established.

Obama turned professor in helping Americans to understand the differences between the Black and White church, born of different experiences in America and therefore, where the ministers reflect a prophetic approach to the discussion of public events. He looked back to slavery, to racism as to the everyday racial slights as the nexus within which Rev. Jeremiah Wright was groomed, an environment which shaped his attitude and those his generation and which gave them – and continues to give them the belief that American will always harbor racism. Obama’s big gamble is that America can change, and he can help to lead it to turn away from the resentment that feeds the racial sensitivity of the low income Whites who voted strongly for Hillary Clinton in Ohio and are poised to do so in Western Pennsylvania.

His campaign was not naive in attempt to run a race neutral campaign, because it was the only way a Black man could win the nomination and possibly the presidency. But you could also prophesy that race would be his major stumbling block and that at some point, he would have to deal with it.

That is the Black man’s burden. No matter how credentialed, no matter how skillful, no matter how visionary, he or she will always have to pass the gauntlet of race. But un this case, how and why the issue arose in the face of the Obama campaign’s attempt to run a race-neutral campaign has been of less interest to the media than the persistent presentation of Rev. Jeremiah Wrights video showing him damning America.

That seems to be what the media wants, to do the bidding of the Clinton campaign by wrapping the cloak of race tightly around him until he suffocates. It is what it looks like.

I believe that the speech was also courageous because it obviously was calculated not to “throw Rev. Jeremiah Wright under the bus” but to explain who he was and to provide a portrait of his works at Trinity, thus explaining the differences in culture between the Black and White church. He must have known that not to disassociate himself from Rev. Wright and his church would be fodder for additional criticism that he do so. So, in a courageous way, he has tied his own future as a presidential candidate to the act of maintaining his linkage to his pastor, his church and to the Black community.

In this sense, the ultimate test of America in this instance is whether the distortion of the role of the Black church as interpreted to the public through the dominant White perspective will result in the downfall of his campaign.

He is correct that for those in my generation who came of age in the struggle for civil rights, it be asking too much of America, but for the youth of his campaign it is precisely the question that America should answer. The issue here as it becomes an issue that defines Obama’s theme of change is not to “move beyond race” because that is impossible, but to move with it in enlightened and progressive ways to forge a new future for America.

Dr. Ron Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar, Director of the African American Leadership Center and Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. One of his latest books is: Freedom Is Not Enough: Black Voters, Black Candidate and American Presidential Politics (Rowman and Littlefield Press).