^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Photo: William Thomas Cain / Getty Images.

The most significant problem the punditocracy faces in analyzing Obama's speech is that it analyzes itself. Like his writing, it's blunt, introspective, and at times painfully honest. Like so much of what Barack Obama has said, it sounds too direct, too decent, to have come out of the mouth of a politician.

Pam Spaulding of Pam's House Blend put it best for me:

When I read it I wept. The tears were of sheer relief ...

People who know me well are quite aware that I'm not one prone to great waves of emotion; I'm Ms. Even Keel to most. The emotion was because there I sat, reading elements of wisdom about our desperate need for engagement on the topic of race that I have written about on this blog for years. At times I have almost pleaded with readers to feel safe to open up to discuss the difficult issues of difference -- putting up posts with a dearth of comments because few were willing to put themselves out there ...

Because of that, in Obama's speech I was reading the words of a man that gets it, regardless of the fact that he is a candidate for President of the United States of America that resonate with me on this issue. That he is thisclose to becoming president of this country -- and to risk it all by cracking open this door on a painful area of this country -- is something I thought I would never see. He is giving voice to a healthier view on race relations that needs to be embraced from a stage where it's hard to argue that it is not an issue worth tackling.

The topic of this site, race relations, is so often used as a vehicle and a vessel for condemnation, and we should condemn remarks such as those made in recent months by Don Imus, Duane "Dog" Chapman, and so forth. But the remarks are not proof of anything except that we live in a culture that is tragically afflicted by this ridiculous pseudoscientific concept that we call race, and the relentlessly evil racial hierarchy that comes packaged with it. Don Imus did not invent racism or misogyny. Duane Chapman did not invent the N-word. Behavior like theirs explodes like bubbles in a pot of boiling water--but all of the water is boiling, not just the bubbles. In a non-racist society, there would be no reason to care whether or not people made racist remarks because those remarks would have no power to cause damage or inflict pain.

If you have not already read or heard the speech on race that Obama delivered Tuesday, please do so now. Whether you like Barack Obama or not, he has said some things that badly needed to be said. He's lancing the boil--and, as Pam Spaulding likes to say, touching the third rail--of race politics in America.

Here are a few remarks that especially stood out for me:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. 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 ...

We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now ...

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect.

Note that he refuses to condemn Jeremiah Wright. Note that he refuses to condemn Geraldine Ferraro. Note that he places the focus not on the bubbles that occasionally rise to the surface of the boiling water, but on the fact that the water is boiling in the first place. We live in a racist culture. Our culture has a racist history. With apologies to Billy Joel, we--Geraldine Ferraro, Jeremiah Wright, Duane Chapman, Don Imus, all of us--didn't start the fire. It was already burning. He didn't pretend the remarks weren't offensive, but he also didn't pretend that they came out of nowhere.

Politicians who comment on race almost never get this. They seem scared to. They're afraid of touching the third rail. They're afraid of saying the wrong thing and being thought of as racists. So they step back. Obama, in the middle of a heated presidential campaign, isn't stepping back. Make no mistake: He is taking a huge risk by making a speech about race at this point in the campaign, when nearly all of the remaining Democratic primary voters are white. For whatever reason--maybe personal integrity, maybe to prepare for the long march to November--he has chosen to take on this issue directly and settle it now.

I suspect that every white American has at some point or another wondered: Why haven't black folks achieved demographic parity with whites? You won't run into very many whites who answer this question by saying that whites are genetically superior to blacks, but my experience is that most whites don't have a direct answer to this question at all, which is almost worse.

Some will say "culture," but culture always comes from somewhere. It doesn't just arise out of a vacuum. Some will say "poverty," but poverty always comes from somewhere, too. In the end, explaining racial disparities means either asserting that some people deserve to have more social power than others on account of their race, or asserting that they don't and that their disproportionate level of social power is unjust. Because who we are ultimately boils down to biology and environment, addressing racial disparities means either asserting philosophical racism or confronting institutional racism. The disparities have to come from somewhere. Either they're within us, or they're imposed on us. Either they're just, or they're unjust.

Obama explains the root causes of these disparities as concisely as anyone ever has:

... [W]e 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.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

And my experience has also been that many black folks look at these disparities and ask themselves: Why don't white folks get it? Why are they complicit in this system? Do they think this is how things are supposed to be? Obama has an answer for this, too:

Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze ... And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.

And immediately after he says this, Obama puts his own candidacy in context:

Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

In his race speech, Obama didn't sell his candidacy as a snake oil solution to American racism. He didn't excoriate Geraldine Ferraro or throw his former pastor under the bus. He didn't sugarcoat the reality of institutional racism. And he categorically refused to use his racial identity as a weapon against either of his opponents:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

Obama's speech powerfully defied expectations. He isn't interested in being a racial candidate, but he obviously isn't interested in being a post-racial candidate--in "transcending race"--either. He's simply being Barack Obama, and whether he becomes the 44th President of the United States or not, this speech will be remembered long after we have forgotten about the gaffes of Ferraro and Wright.

See also:

• Transcript: Barack Obama's Speech on Race and Faith (Deborah White / About.com: U.S. Liberal Politics)