Wednesday, March 19, 2008
OBAMA, RACE and WRIGHT
So Obama gave his big "race speech" to deal with the "crazy uncle" problem. I've read the speech, and it's brilliant and, from the snippets I've heard, it was delivered very well. As a professional rhetorician and public speaker (i.e. lawyer), my admiration for Barak Obama is undiminished: He's among the very best speakers (probably tied for second place with Ronald Reagan, behind MLK) we've had in in public life in this country in my lifetime.
But his speech certainly didn't "win me over" -- I'm still deeply troubled by the fundamentally leftist stance of his overall positions. On its own, the speech engaged in tropes of moral equivalence across inappropriate scales, and was definitely premised on a one-sided condemnation of problematic capitalist institutions, glossing over to a great extent the lengths to which individuals who belong to "victim groups" are given a moral pass.
In this regard, this article in this morning's Houston Chronicle about how pastors of black churches have reacted to the Wright controversy is emblematic of the real problem that Wright stands for. Yes, the traditional black Protestant clergy served a very valuable service to black Americans during the times of the worst racism in America. But they have also become an institutional source of "identity politics" that have come to hold back black Americans. Maybe you can see this message in Obama's speech, if you really want to. But it seems more like wishful thinking to me to think that Obama is really saying that the rhetoric of the 1960s has outlived its usefulness. Instead, I think it's more likely that what he's doing is cleverly repackaging it.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 5:38 AM
|
|
