Moving Beyond Black and White- Obama and Race

Yesterday, Barack Obama gave one of the most important and articulate speeches about race that I think our country has ever seen. I've been waffling between Clinton and Obama, unable and unwilling to decide which I really, really preferred. Yesterday's speech--all thirty-eight minutes of it--convinced me, unequivocally that Obama needs to be our candidate, our president.

The speech was an exercise in rhetorical brilliance. And yet, it was a dangerous speech for him to give. Responding to recently uncovered footage of his pastor giving what might be called "un-American" or "racist" sermons, he refused to disown the pastor even while he condemned what he said:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him 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.

In this speech, he put in articulate and bluntly honest terms the racial problems that our country still faces, the problems that underlie the tensions we still feel. He quoted Faulkner, reminding us that "The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past." And he's right. For all of our reluctance to use the "N" word, racism is still a fundamental part of our national consciousness. It is ingrained in our American psyche. We still speak in the terms of "us" and "them," even those of us whose fore bearers were no more considered "white" when they first stepped off of a boat than illegal immigrants are now.

What I found powerful about Obama's speech was that he refused to turn race into an issue easily dichotomized. Instead, he uncovered and made explicit the underlying issues that still haunt us. He openly discussed the residual anger in the African American community for slavery, for discrimination, for being kept in the position of second-class citizens for hundreds of years:

That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

But he also exposed the residual anger of white Americans--

Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

It's an anger that underlies the fear of "the race card"--as though race can be quantified and contained in such simple terms. It's the anger that underlies my own family's racism-- the discussions of "those welfare mothers" who refuse to work and buy Cadillacs and expensive clothing for their ever-increasing number of children, the anger over affirmative action, the fear of losing some privilege or position to someone who couldn't possibly deserve it.

But Obama's speech was a dangerous one for him to make. When he could have just as easily distanced himself from the entire issue, could have continued to ignore the rhetoric about race and racism that continues to build around this campaign, he addressed it head on. By exposing the black community's anger--and by arguing that this anger can be unproductive--he risked angering the black community, being seen as a traitor. By calling out the often unspoken anger of certain segments of white America, he risked distancing those voters as well. By moving beyond simplistic divisions between black and white, he exposed the gray area--he exposed the ways that these divisive ways of thinking, talking, and acting about race keep us all at a standstill and keep the entire country stagnant. He challenged Americans of all colors to see that the only way to begin healing a wound that began when the first slave ship alighted on our shores is to deal with the complexities of the issue:

It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

But to do this it means that all Americans need to re-examine their own preconceived notions, develop a deep understanding of the historical traumas of those not like themselves, and to practice a form of empathy unlike any we have ever experienced in the more than two hundred years of the Union. It means letting go of angers and fears that define our very existence. It means recognizing that what your parents and friends taught you about how to look at and judge others may not be right. It means understanding that humanity overrides any skin color and that we are all in the same, sinking ship.

It's a job that seems monumental and impossible, but Obama gives us a first step:

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

His speech was elegant, articulate, dangerous, and beautiful in its complexity. It will not go over well. It was too long. It lacked the absolutes that Americans like from their politicians. It quoted an author that I'm sure our current president can't even read without Cliff's Notes and a cheat sheet. The signs are already there--on the NY Times Opinion Page, some readers seem angry that he refused to outright reject his pastor. They think it a grave sin that anyone (especially a black man) should speak so vehemently against white Americans, and that anyone who associates with such a man must be just like him. It's an understandable argument, but I find it odd that no one suggested that all Catholics were pedophiles when certain priests were outed and when the Church continued to cover up the issue. It seems that racism is the bigger, harder to erase and more contaminating sin.

And that, to me, is sad. Our country deserves someone who can think so complexly, who can articulate those complexities so articulately, who is willing to put a campaign in jeopardy in order to say something that needs to be said. Who is willing to call us all out in order to help us move on. I don't know if our country is or will ever be ready for it.

Dear, Dear Students

The title of the poem is The Waste Land. Not, as many of you seem to think, the Wasteland.

Will the Humanities Save Us?

In a recent NY Times piece, Prof. Stanley Fish writes that the arguments for the humanities' purpose or usefulness are all unnecessary. It is not, he writes, necessary for the humanities to fill some sort of role that university accountants can tick off to rationalize their continued funding. In part, I whole-heartedly agree. The humanities do not have to be "useful" in order to be valuable. They do not need to fill some role that the general, anti-intellectual American public can point to and say, "Yes, I see now why it important to keep paying those people to read silly books and plays."

What I do not agree with, however, is the idea that the humanities can't fill an important role in our society. Just because they should need to be "practical" doesn't mean that they don't have the potential to be useful. They are, after all, what humanizes us--what separates us from other animals. They need not always have transformative properties, but the can at times transform us.

Case in point-- literature has made me who I am now in many ways, not the least of which is my outlook about social justice and equality:

I grew up with parents who joked that today should really be called "James Earl Ray Day," with a family who believed that while Martin Luther King never did anything bad himself, he "got all the other ones riled up to cause problems," with a family culture where the word "nigger" was a normal term thrown about in conversations. I remember, when I was very, very young, my grandpa taught me a song about a "Nigger in the Woodpile." I must have known it was bad, that I shouldn't be singing it, because I went and hid on our steps by myself to sing it, where I was promptly caught and punished by my mother. But things were never straight forward; the same mother who punished me for singing that song also told me once that interracial marriage was, basically, against the bible--the different tribes of Israel or some such thing.

The way my family dealt with race always bothered me, but I never understood how to deal with it. I also believed much of it-- bought into it, because it was all I really knew.

And then I read Beloved. I hated it the first time through--I didn't understand it at all. It made me angry, so I read it again. And I understood. And in understanding, finally, the story of a mother who would rather kill her own children than see them slaves, I began to understand where I stood. In the telling of that story, I was fascinated by the radical departures of traditional European narrative to tell what was a radical and subversive story. For the story wasn't only that the mother would rather see her children dead than slaves, it was that slavery stripped her of her very ability to understand that she was the best part of herself, that her very humanity had been taken away.

I fell in love with African American literature, which caused my mother no small bit of anxiety. I could tell that she was uncomfortable with my original decision to study ethnic literatures and mostly relieved when my dissertation turned out to be about of dead white men. But it's still a dissertation about race-- about how whiteness and masculinity became the most important aspects of American literature.

And it wasn't until I studied rhetoric that I began to understand Dr. King's utter, dazzling brilliance and power.

Studying these texts transformed me, changed me. They allowed me to become the person who visited that hotel turned museum in Memphis and could understand what the country truly lost on that day when one racist white man took away yet another soul dedicated to equality, freedom, peace, and hope.

It's not that literature should be held accountable to perform these transformations, but there is that possibility there. And that possibility for positive transformation is important. Dr. King understood the possibility inherent in language to change the world. He used it brilliantly, even if his time with us was all too short.