While I agree that Obama handled the Jeremiah Wright
situation masterfully, and that his speech was eloquent, inspirational and
reminiscent of the Gettysbury address, I don't agree that with it he has
"transcended" race or unified African Americans, Hispanics, women,
gays, middle-class whites, immigrants, and so on.
When I look at the substance of the speech, I'm afraid that
I see a candidate who is very solicitous of the needs of African-Americans, and
as to those other groups? Not so
much.
Take, for example, women.
There's just one reference to women in his speech. Here's the quote: "But it also means binding our
particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better
jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling
to break the glass ceiling, the white man who's been laid off, the immigrant
trying to feed his family."
"The white woman struggling to break the glass
ceiling." This is a cliche, first
of all. And compared with all the
references to the struggles of the black community, this one phrase is pale and
bloodless. It sounds canned, rather than
lived, like the product of a speech writer's playbook, especially when set
against all the richness and liveliness of Obama's discussions of the black
community. You can tell right away that
one experience has been lived, and dreamed, and mulled over during the entire
course of a life, while the other is known only at second hand, and a very
distant second hand at that.
Note also how this phrase describes the white woman as being
engaged in a struggle that's airy, academic, and theoretical -- a struggle that
sounds like a matter of personal dignity and achieving equality in the
abstract, merely to achieve an intangible ideal -- while the "white [read
middle-class] man" and "immigrant" are dealing with matters of
feet-on-the-ground survival (being laid off, and trying to feed a family).
What about the single mom trying to feed her family? What about the single mom who's fired because
she can't keep up with married fathers supported 24/7 by the unpaid labor of
stay-at-home moms?
And note how our woman is specifically identified as "white," as if black women aren't
engaged in the same struggle with gender discrimination.
Then there's Obama's rendition of the history of the black
community in America, which includes this step:
"A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and
frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family,
contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies
for many years may have worsened."
This is a highly gendered, highly conservative, highly
tendentious view of this history. The
problem was ONLY a lack of economic opportunity for MEN? The problem was "the shame and
frustration" these MEN felt "from not being able to provide for one's
family"? And welfare -- which
allowed the women to survive while staying home to raise young children without
their father -- may have contributed to the erosion of black families? This not only assumes that it is the
"natural" role of men to "provide for their families," it
is an extremely sympathetic view of men who abandoned their families, who
brought children into this world and failed to take care of them in any way, or
even have a relationship with them. Who
just disappeared. This is all seen as
understandable, because of the "shame" that came from a lack of
economic opportunity. As if an inability
to provide monetary support bore any logical relationship to a decision to
abandon one's children entirely. Has
Obama never heard of the phrase "personal responsibility"?
The
way Obama turns deadbeat dads into sympathetic victims of racism might
seem an example of the worst side of liberalism, but his view that it
is only men whose "lack of economic opportunity" and "inability to
provide" is extremely conservative. The kind of thing we'd expect from
a Clarence Thomas.
To be sure, the topic of the speech was race, and the Wright
controversy that prompted the speech made that focus natural and
necessary. And the way that Obama
handled the sensitive topic -- forthrightly, honestly, and without caving in to
political expedient and taking the easy way out by disowning Reverend Wright --
can only be described as a triumph. But
if Obama's ultimate point was that his presidency would "transcend"
race and the "zero-sum game" of competition among various ethnic,
gender and class groups, I don't think he succeeded.
I
mean, next week we can expect his speech on discrimination against
gays, right? And after that, a speech devoted entirely to
discrimination against the working class?
I'm sure some will write off this post as merely divisive, and an
effort to push a wedge between those Obama seeks to unite. I'm reminded
of Stanley Fish's NYT blog entry of a few weeks ago, "When ‘Identity
Politics’ Is Rational"
(http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/when-identity-poli
tics-is-rational/ ), and I really recommend that everyone read and
think about that piece. If voters want to elect a candidate who will be
particularly sensitive to, and solicitous of, the black community in
America, then that's perfectly fine, and I see nothing wrong with it.
But if they think they're electing a
candidate who transcends race, I think they should "think again."
