A High Stake Show Down: Moment of Truth, Get It “Wright”!

 

“Race On the Line” – FoxNews.com
“A Make or Break Moment for Obama” – Howard Fineman, Newsweek
“If he can’t deliver this speech, it really calls into question whether he can stay in this race” – Jonathan Capehart, The Washington Post
“[The speech] could be a pivotal moment for Mr. Obama” – The New York Times

Everybody is eagerly anticipating Sen. Barack Obama’s speech about race on Tuesday in Philadelphia.

It meant to be a “high-stakes show down”. It was a moment needs to be seized. And it was a masterpiece.

It was “big, big, big” and “sweeping”. It was “an extraordinary moment of truth-telling“, and “brilliant, inspiring, intellectually supple”. It was a modern day version of Franklin D. Roosevelt/Abraham Lincoln/John F. Kennedy’s “Profile of Courage“, as well as “a massive break with conventional political precedent”. It was such a “searing, nuanced, gut-wrenching, and loyal” speech, a speech “we have all been waiting for for a generation.” It was glorious.

In many ways, it was. Just like The New York Times pointed out, there are moments — although increasingly rare in today’s modern political campaigns — when “politicians are called upon to bare their fundamental beliefs”. In the best of these moments, the speaker “does not just salve the current political wound, but also illuminates larger, troubling issues that the nation is wrestling with.” On Tuesday, Mr. Obama was delivering those moments. Facing race and religion, the two most toxic subjects in politics, it is difficult to imagine how Mr. Obama could have handled it better. In such a direct way, he spoke out about the economic legacy of racism, about today’s full texture of ethnic identity and resentment, about the need for genuine discussion on race, and about where to go from there.

Even the most well-know Obamaphiles in the media world, like Chris Matthewses and Andrew Sullivans were impressed with Obama’s speech. However, for a few others, what they heard in the speech can still be interpreted in such horrible ways:

Appearing on the March 18 edition of Fox News’ Your World, Newt Gingrich described Obama’s speech as “intellectually, fundamentally dishonest“. Based on Obama’s statement in the speech:

“I can no more disown [former Trinity United Church of Christ pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright] than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

Gingrich commented, “to reduce a 20-year relationship with a public figure to his grandmother is just wrong. It’s emotionally powerful, but it’s just wrong.” However, he didn’t further explain anything about how and why it was “just wrong”.

On the March 18 edition of MSNBC Live, Pat Buchanan declared that parts of Obama’s speech were very “grating“. He asserted that:

“There are parts of the speech, which, to me, and the community I think I come from, I found very grating, quite frankly. And the constant sense of putting the burden on the society for what’s happened to the African-American community and not enough of the acceptance of responsibility of their own — their own responsibility, frankly, for what’s happened.”

However, Obama specifically emphasized during the speech that African-Americans should not become “victims of our past,” but must instead “take full responsibility for our own lives.”

They just keep going after Mr. Obama, in ridiculous ways.

Ironically, Obama’s speech itself points particularly at the press as a shameful stereotype:

Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism….
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 play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day, and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words.

Indeed, Obama’s statement is a powerful indictment about the way the media have treated the issue of race in the past. (And especially in the past days, weeks and months). It’s also a challenge for the media about how they should treat the problem of race in future. Its implication is about how urgently the media landscape should move from the rhetorical to the real, how significantly it is to shift from those lofty terms we normally use to some more uncomfortable, maybe even painful grassroots personal narratives. Yes, it’s about rising above the country’s legacy of racism; but more importantly, it’s about staying grounded in that legacy, about digging it deeper and deeper to examine it, of course, in a much braver way.

For instance, one of the main reasons for Mr Obama’s speech is to explain his relationship with the controversial figure Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In fact, there’s much more to the former pastor, as Obama noted in his speech:

He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth—by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

Then why most of us hadn’t learned that before? Why the image of Mr. Wright as a serviceman, an intellectual, a community organizer can’t become part of the narrative about him to spread in the mass media? Is it possible for the press to do a better job of portraying Mr. Wright as a full, complex person—with the mix of strengths and weaknesses which normal people all have- rather than demonize him by showing his video clips again and again? Of course, that more humanized picture of Wright wouldn’t have explain away all those controversial comments he’s made, but it would have, at least, started to explain them—and placed them in a much more appropriate context, a context roots in every African-American’s personal experience. The networks had all the time in the world—literally 24/7—to tell Wright’s story, to put his anger in context. But they didn’t.

In an article published on The Nation, John Nichols explored the missing context, which further proved my point:

“At the most basic level, Obama did what the media has failed to do. He presented Wright and Wright’s comments on U.S. domestic and foreign policies in context: the context of the African-American religious experience, the context of the candidate’s connection to the church and, above all, the context of this country’s unresolved experience of what Obama correctly refers to as ‘the original sin’ of the American experiment—human bondage—and its legacy. The speech was masterful in this regard.”

However, does it really take Obama to do the networks’ job? Does it really take a politician to fulfill the duties of the press? Does it really take a news-maker to step in and tell the news-gatherers how to frame their stories?

In his speech “The More Perfect Union”, Mr. Obama was talking to the country, talking to the citizens. But even more importantly, he was also talking to the press – the people who are in charge of guiding the national conversation about race, who should be transforming the country, in that sense, into a “more perfect union”.