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A Speech Even Condi Could Love

By Salim Muwakkil

Obama's speech on race was a nuanced masterpiece that initially baffled the pundits unaccustomed to complexity in campaign rhetoric.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently called race-based slavery a “birth defect” that still troubles our nation. Her words were notable — not just for their metaphorical precision, but that she uttered them at all.

Conservatives usually are mute on slavery’s lengthening legacy, but Rice let loose. “Black Americans were a founding population,” Rice said during a March 27 interview with the Washington Times. “Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together — Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That’s not a very pretty reality of our founding.”

Because of this initial inequality, “descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that,” she continued. “That particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today.”

The surprisingly effective presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has amped up the current relevance of race. In fact, a controversy surrounding Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, has placed racial discussion directly on the media frontburner.

The recently retired pastor had delivered a number of fiery sermons, including one in which he suggested the U.S. imperialist past played a possible role in motivating the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He thundered, “God damn America … for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America, for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”

Wright’s recorded histrionics initially inflamed a white public unfamiliar with the kind of performance art that is common to black American religious expression. And, although the pastor was a bit dramatic in his presentation, many other folks have made his point.

In his 2006 book, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, former New York Times foreign correspondent Stephen Kinzer noted that in the last century, the United States has overthrown more regimes than all other nations combined. “No nation in modern history has done this so often, in so many places so far from its own shores,” he wrote. This was Wright’s point as well.

Nevertheless, pundits across the political spectrum denounced the pastor’s remarks. And when placed in context, Wright’s aired comments reveal a cut-and-paste job designed to provoke. This deceitful editing by most major media, particularly Fox News, incited a small backlash from a public increasingly sickened by political gutter sniping.

What’s more, the controversy offered Obama an opportunity to broach the subject of race, a topic his advisers reportedly urged him to shun. Luckily, Obama overruled them.

His March 18 speech on race, “A More Perfect Union,” was a nuanced masterpiece, exquisitely calibrated. Perhaps he should have tackled this subject before he realized the impossibility of running a “post-racial” campaign in a race-scarred nation, but he did a good job of catch up.

Not only did he soothe the racial rancor churned up by the tendentiously edited Wright clips, he also demarked a more panoramic vision of the United States than any candidate has in recent times. His speech opened the public space for Condi’s entry into the conversation.

Obama also pre-empted his critics’ efforts to exploit cultural differences between white and black Americans. He deftly sketched the races’ differing historical trajectories and bemoaned our arrival at a seemingly insoluble stalemate.

But, he noted, we have a choice.

“We can accept a politics that breeds division and conflict and cynicism,” he said in his speech. “We can tackle race only as spectacle, as we did in the O.J. trial — or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina — or as fodder for the nightly news …. We can do that,” he said. “But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.”

Obama’s speech initially baffled pundits unaccustomed to complexity in campaign rhetoric. However, the speech has generated a slow roll of praise, and many commentators now list it as one of this era’s most significant addresses.

At the very least, it has provoked a dialogue about race so serious that it even has Condoleezza Rice talking black.

Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor of In These Times, where he has worked since 1983. He is currently a Crime and Communities Media Fellow of the Open Society Institute, examining the impact of ex-inmates and gang leaders in leadership positions in the black community.

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  • Reader Comments

    What kind of reaction would the Rev. Wright have received from his congregation if rather than, “God damn America!” he had said, “God help America!” ?

    It is evident from their website that his overall approach has been divisive.

    His kind of “performance art” is hardly going to unite or heal opinion for either black or white.

    In his handling of this issue Obama appears to be a master of the William Clintonesque “performance art” of divert rather than confront.

    Posted by whattheheck on Apr 10, 2008 at 9:53 AM

    While what was done to the distant ancestors of some of the black folk living in the Americas today was reprehensible (i.e., being captured by their fellow Africans, sold into slavery and brought against their will, often dying in transit, to the Americas), their descendants have benefited mightily from this atrocity. Nowhere in Africa is the standard of living near even the lower classes in the US. While no justice can be done to those who have long since departed this earth, their descendants can take advantage of their good fortune in living in this land of opportunity. Many Africans would be grateful for the opportunity to have US citizenship but will never have such opportunity.

    Where ever one finds oneself, one must begin there. Being born in the US is a blessing that none of us should take for granted. To those who feel a need for further justice, they should do whatever is in their ability to help those unfortunates left on the continent of Africa (one of the only places in the world today that continues to get worse by leaps and bounds).

    Posted by wolf on Apr 10, 2008 at 2:15 PM

    Wolf,

    To add to your comment on benefitting from the past conditions — My wife and I were in London in 1991 and I couldn’t help noticing the high percentage of minorities in three-piece suits on Fleet Street (their version of Wall st.).

    I must assume this is due in large measure to the centuries of British colonial rule in India, China and Africa. While something few people would want to submit it certainly benefitted a lot of people.

    Hmmm, maybe we were a little hasty splitting away.  :-)

    BTW, I came across a figure people should keep in mind and apply to the Iraq/Afghanistan struggle. The American Revolution lasted eight years and cost 25,000 lives. This was approximately 25% of the colonial population. Current U.S. pop. around 330 million x .25 = 82,500,000! 

    Just something to think about when we hear about the cost of freedom.

    Posted by whattheheck on Apr 10, 2008 at 2:34 PM

    “Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together — Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That’s not a very pretty reality of our founding.”, “That particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today.”

    OMG, she IS Black.  These are by far the most intelligent things I’ve heard of Ms. Rice saying since she came onto the national scene.  I’m actually proud of her for having the guts to say it, especially in light of the emotional responses it would draw from conservatives and the “America can do know wrong” cult.

    Posted by theloneous on Apr 10, 2008 at 3:00 PM

    I also appreciate any straight talk about my country that is based on real evidence. Give a point to Condi, maybe there’s hope for her after the “Bush era” closes. I don’t think that sort of candor should be regarded as unpatriotic (as though Rice is in any way unpatriotic… ridiculous), and in fact every human tribe has blood-soaked hands, even tribe-America (some on the receiving end of American violence or blundering might say, “especially” rather than “even"). No one is immune, no one is above it all, surely not the most powerful nation that has ever existed. So to whitewash US history or pretend that the nation can do no wrong, or has never done anything undebatably wrong, is honestly rather childish as well as being unrealistic, ahistoric.

    I will say that in the 20th century American power caused more good than harm. However, to pretend that we are incapable of doing more harm than good EVER is silly. To pretend that it is impossible for us to do more harm to ourselves than good is also silly (actually a bit stupid). That’s mythological thinking, unsuitable for the 21st century.

    We should all have the guts to look at our own flaws and mistakes and instances of needless harming. It’s the only way to have a chance of not doing wrong things, to others as well as ourselves, in the future. This applies at the individual level as well as the national level, especially since the United States has such vast clout that even when we do nothing more than swing our figurative hips, there’s almost as much chance we’ll smash something up as it is that we’ll begin the dance party.

    Why be afraid of the ugly truth? We should just look at it dead-on and not be such candy-asses. Singing patriotic songs and looking the other way doesn’t mature us as a society.

    Posted by Kuya on Apr 10, 2008 at 11:14 PM

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