Whether voters buy into Mr. Obama’s analysis and take up his invitation to move on may become apparent in the coming primaries in places like Pennsylvania. It remains to be seen whether he has nudged whites and African-Americans any closer to mutual understanding or simply stoked the anxieties and suspicions that helped close down the conversation before. Shelby Steele, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of “A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win,” called the speech “shallow, beautifully delivered and just disingenuous” — coming from Mr. Obama “who has been blessed with every manner of opportunity in this society.” Mr. Wright’s anger is demagoguery, said Mr. Steele, who like Mr. Obama is biracial. Racism “no longer remotely accounts for the difficulties in black America,” Mr. Steele said. As for the lack of discourse about race, it is a product of political correctness, “the language of white guilt.”
Asked what is needed to break the stalemate, he said, “White bravery.”
What Politicians Say When They Talk About Race
By JANNY SCOTT
Americans and their political leaders have been tongue-tied on the subject of race. We were reminded of that last week when Senator Barack Obama, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, took the almost unimaginable step of going before a national audience at a precarious juncture in a close campaign and speaking explicitly about what race means to blacks and whites. He spoke of black anger and white resentment and the significance of race in American history; his purpose was political but he spoke with seriousness and gravity and at length. Whether the speech helped or hurt him remains to be seen. But the moment was unlike virtually any in the more than 40 years since the triumphs of the civil rights struggle tore up party alignments of the past and tamped down explicit discussion of race by presidents and major-party candidates addressing the American people.
The dynamic had been different once — when African-Americans had begun to vote Democratic as well as Republican and presidential candidates of both parties competed for their votes; in 1948, Harry Truman, courting swing voters in a close election, became the first presidential candidate from a major party to campaign in Harlem (and ordered an end to segregation in the armed services right after he won the Democratic nomination). In the early 1960s, opinion polls found that a majority of Americans saw civil rights as the dominant issue facing the country. And President Lyndon B. Johnson, in one of several memorable 1965 speeches on race, said, speaking before a joint session of Congress after the “Bloody Sunday” voting-rights march from Selma, Ala.: “Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
