Published: March 22, 2008 04:44 pm            

Will speech bridge divide?

Barack Obama last week delivered what was likely the most important speech of his presidential campaign.

Even his critics described the speech as stirring. Some have called it the most important speech on the topic of race in four decades.

The address was prompted by public reaction to widely circulated sermons delivered by Obama’s longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama sought to explain the anger that prompted the minister’s remarks.

“We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country,” Obama said. “But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.”

He said anger over those injustices often found voice in black churches on Sunday mornings.

“The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning,” Obama said.

Obama rejected Wright’s remarks, but he refused to reject the man who has been his spiritual guide for nearly 20 years.

“I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” Obama said. “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.”

Obama urged Americans to break “a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years,” and he called on whites to acknowledge that what ailed the African-American community did not exist simply in the minds of black people.

“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,” he said.

At the same time, Obama acknowledged that such anger stood in the way of progress. He urged blacks to lay aside their grievances and to acknowledge that whites had some basis for their own feelings of resentment.

In many ways, Obama had no choice but to deliver the speech he delivered on Tuesday. He is seeking to become the nation’s first black president, and in recent primaries, the racial divide has grown more pronounced. Exit polls in Mississippi indicated that Obama drew more than 90 percent of black votes while winning the support of only about one in four white voters.

The candidate deserves credit for confronting the issue of race head-on. Whether his political courage will pay off at the ballot box remains to be seen.

Obama is right, though, when he says that the racial divide cannot linger forever. Eventually, whites and blacks have to come out of their corners and face their differences.

Perhaps this speech will be a step in that direction.

– Pharos-Tribune, Logansport, and Kokomo Tribune

        

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