After he delivered his speech, Obama found his wife Michelle backstage. She was weeping. He shared a quiet, emotional moment with her. Then Obama was all business again. "What's next?" he asked, as if anyone knew the answer.
As if.
This is the first of a number of posts I'll begin with this strangely revelatory paragraph. It was, for me, the very moving last sentences of a piece (March 20, Time Magazine) following up on Barack Obama's historic Philadelphia speech on race. Yes, less than two months later, it is safe to say 'historic', because, like the Gettysburg Address and other landmarks of American political address to which it was compared, the full import will clearly take a generation just to fully appreciate, and many more to venerate.
Could Michelle Obama see this day through her tears?
How do I know? Because I watched (nearly paralyzed for some reason) as everyone in the pundit class (and that is literally everyone these days) was initially floored by the force of that speech. Then I kept watching as they got back to their feet and (mostly) proceeded to keep on talking about race and 'the race' as if nothing had changed. Or at least they tried real hard, often at ear-spitting decibels, given the traditional whispering on the role of race at the core of our political process.
The problem, of course, is that the official discourse on race has a code that was shred by the Philadelphia speech. The chattering class is still trying, mostly in vain, to get piece the old race code back together. But even as it struggles to get its awkward mumbling on, the people and some politicians (named Hillary) and some political blowhards (named Wright, Limbaugh and the RNC) have been inserting--sometimes shouting--uncoded race messages into the political ether at a furious (no pun intended) clip.
And, through the magic of YouTube, blogs, podcasts and other streaming media, this thing is taking a life of its own. There are so many places worth entering this stream, but let's start here, with this clip from a Brian Lehrer show segment two days after the West Virginia primary.
I know it makes you want to cringe, just like the recent Daily Show clip montage of what appeared to be straight up ignorant and racist comments by selected West Virginia voters last week. But I say rejoice, because, I believe, this is finally one race conversation that will not only be definitive, but will refuse to be swept under the rug.
Note the fumble with which the normally very sure footed Bob Hennely attempted to put the disturbing quote in context. The best he could do was suggest there is a "challenge of otherness in America" and then liken it to the burden of Al Smith's Catholicism that doomed him in the 1928 election against Herbert Hoover. As if the 400 year old cross of race —black versus white, that is— was anything like that which slavery etched into our DNA.
As Times columnist Roger Cohen eloquently put it, "A racial divide, once lived, dwells in the deepest parts of the psyche."
And so I say rejoice, because what's going on today is reaching into the deepest parts of our socio-political American psyche. To the place where African-American could be misunderstood to be a religion. Or mistaken, like 'white' for a working definition of a race or a nation. The truth, like the crowd of 75,000 in Portland, is getting ahead of journalistic facts. Don't expect them to catch up any time soon.
Comments