Yaicha

A couple of days ago I let all of the negative bloggers and commenters get me discouraged about how Barack Obama’s stunning speech on race had been received. There was such a gulf between the message those negativists took from the speech and the inspiring message that I found in it that I wondered about this country’s capacity to heal our racial divide.

Personally, I found Obama’s speech to be an excellent articulation of many ideas I have long felt and always struggled to explain. I had a sense of recognition as I read and listened to his words: “yes, that’s it, that’s it, exactly!” As a former teacher, myself, I appreciate what an amazing teacher Obama is.

There are two op-ed pieces in the NYT this morning that are inspiring in their own right, and exhibit the kind of intelligent and thoughtful response that Obama’s speech on race merits. Nicolas Kristof’s “Obama and Race” digs into the speech directly, while Roger Cohen’s “Beyond America’s Original Sin” is a deeply personal account that connects with Obama’s speech on a different level.

Kristof starts off with a nifty insight on Obama’s speech: “It was not a sound bite, but a symphony.” His column explores the negative reactions that so discouraged me, and I like his analysis of them:

What’s happening, I think, is that the Obama campaign has led many white Americans to listen in for the first time to some of the black conversation — and they are thunderstruck.

Exactly. I consider myself, perhaps mistakenly, to be pretty enlightened, but I’ve been shocked, too.

To whites, for example, it has been shocking to hear Mr. Wright suggest that the AIDS virus was released as a deliberate government plot to kill black people. That may be an absurd view in white circles, but a 1990 survey found that 30 percent of African-Americans believed this was at least plausible.

News to me! Yet, not entirely surprising.

“That’s a real standard belief,” noted Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a political scientist at Princeton (and former member of Trinity church, when she lived in Chicago). “One of the things fascinating to me watching these responses to Jeremiah Wright is that white Americans find his beliefs so fringe or so extreme. When if you’ve spent time in black communities, they are not shared by everyone, but they are pretty common beliefs.”

When you have your eyes suddenly opened wide and see things you never knew before, it’s a shock. Different people deal with shocking developments differently. Some of us react with amazement, curiosity or acceptance, but some can’t accept what does not fit into their own world view and label as abominations perspectives that they perceive as extreme. The controversy over Rev. Wright is provoking these different reactions.

Cohen’s column seems at first to be only a personal account, a confession, in fact.

There are things you come to believe and things you carry in your blood. In my case, having spent part of my childhood in apartheid South Africa, I bear my measure of shame.

He goes on to describe the fear he felt of blacks as a child in South Africa, and the confusing humiliation he felt, as well. It’s an enlightening account that offers insight from a structurally divided society in the much more recent past than America’s own officially sanctioned version of apartheid, slavery and the segregation that followed. And South Africa’s story offers hope.

The unimaginable South African transition that Nelson Mandela made possible is a reminder that leadership matters. Words matter. . . . Mandela walked out of prison and sought reconciliation, not revenge. Later Mandela would say: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

Cohen “gets it” in a way that those of who have not lived through such a transition have trouble imagining.

It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual black-white vantage point, to navigate these places where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule, just as it takes courage to say, as Obama did, that black “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.” Progress, since the Civil Rights Movement, or since apartheid, has assuaged the wounds of race but not closed them. To carry my part of shame is also to carry a clue to the vortexes of rancor for which Obama has uncovered words.

I know this has been a long post, and certainly has turned into more of an essay than I intended. I like blog postings to be short and concise, but this subject is complex and I found the juxtaposition of Kristof’s and Cohen’s columns intrgiuing. Here’s one more quote from Cohen:

Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas of Bush’s menial mind, with the result that the nuanced exploration of America’s hardest subject is almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like Wright, or like Obama’s grandmother, is actually inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind actually explore the half-shades of truth?

I’ll end with Cohen’s answer to his own question: “Yes. It. Can.” And I agree.
obama race speech