By 11 BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board Members
Senator Barack Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia on March 18 was notworthy. What follows is the commentary and analysis of members of the BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board.
Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Senator Obama offered a brilliant and inspiring address which was, nevertheless, a bit problematic. On the one hand, he spoke to the people of the United States about race in a manner that has only occasionally taken place (such as during the Jesse Jackson campaigns). He spoke as someone from both inside and outside the African American experience and was completely unapologetic about the rage that we feel, as a people, for the injustices that we have suffered over the centuries.
Yet Senator Obama, at one and the same time, attributes much of the anger of Rev. Wright to the past, as if Rev. Wright is stuck in a time warp, rather than the fact that Rev. Wright’s anger about the domestic and foreign policies of the USA are well rooted–and documented–in the current reality of the USA.
Senator Obama’s address offers the vision of hope and change, which are critical for all those engaged in the struggle for social justice. He correctly identifies that this is not the same country that it was 50 or 100 years ago. He also correctly identifies that race still matters in the conditions of African Americans. He also insists that the issues facing African Americans must be joined with the issues facing other oppressed people, including but not limited to white working people, and not reserved for us alone. In that sense he suggests the importance of the links among those who have found themselves under the heal of this system.
For a mainstream politician running for the Presidency, and particularly for an African American running for the Presidency, this was a critical speech to give. It was essential that he not walk away from, or disown Rev. Wright. At the same time, when we live in a society that is so much in denial of the actual conditions of the oppressed both inside and outside our borders; that has come to accept torture; that often cannot comprehend the tragedy facing the Palestinians; that was angry about, yet threw up its hands in the face of the Katrina disaster (and the government’s lack of response); that witnesses major banks and corporations disembowel communities and face few consequences, the anger that was displayed by Rev. Wright should not have surprised anyone. It is both anger AND hope that are critical for a genuine movement that wishes to transform this country. The anger of a Rev. Wright is not a throw-back, but is a reality check.
BlackCommentator Editorial Board Member Bill Fletcher, Jr. is Executive Editor of The Black Commentator. He is also a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies and the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum.
William L. (Bill) Strickland
My first reaction to the smear campaign against Barack Obama kicked off by Fox News’s guilt-by-association tarring of Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was smugly racial. After all, they had attacked Reverend Wright for being “unpatriotic” and “un-American,” but they had not dared to say that what Wright had said was untrue, that America is run by rich white people, that Hillary Clinton didn’t know what it meant to be black and that America was founded on racism.
But after reading Obama’s speech, two time-distant recollections triggered another thought about America’s problem which goes far deeper than right-wing race-mongering.