Obama Turns the Mirror on Us
I’m still digesting Barack Obama’s amazing speech and also digesting the reactions to it, so my comments here are the off-the-cuff reactions that come from reading the expected “buts” from those whom I’d expect to reject the challenge of his remarks in favor of the more banal and simple knee-jerk responses.
There’s one theme that I keep seeing from the TV pundits (who must be beside themselves with frustration that they cannot simply spin this one back to a Jeremiah Wright sermon and be done), the intellectually dishonest, and the outright racists that I just can’t resist responding to. Their question: Why didn’t he reject, repudiate, leave, resign, challenge, insert-your-verb-of-choice-here Trinity Church and Jeremiah Wright?
Here’s the answer, right in the text of Obama’s speech:
As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding and baptized my children.
Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect.
He contains within him the contradictions — the good and the bad — of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can disown 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 her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are part of America, this country that I love.
Got that? It’s about family. You remember family, right? Family that farts in the living room during a particularly tense scene on the TV, family that has the most annoying habit of saying the stupid things in front of a client, just like the time that I informed a potential insurance client of my father’s that “Daddy says Mommy eats like a steam shovel.”, family that demands children only speak when spoken to (a sin that some parents would equate to child abuse today), and family that all the high-and-mighty folks claim to “value” so highly.
When I hear folks say that he ‘had to be influenced’ by Rev. Wright’s sermons, I say YES, Yes he was. He was influenced to try a DIFFERENT approach to the issue of race, the biblical approach of reconciliation rather than division.
Those who refuse to acknowledge the challenge Barack Obama laid before us choose the same approach as Jeremiah Wright — incendiary, divisive, primal anger. Those who answer the challenge and begin to sort through these issues in the context of building up our nation through joint concerns and joint efforts, choose the path of reconciliation.
Barack Obama allowed that there was certainly a pathway for either approach, but also warned that one would leave us with the status quo and the other would lead to progress.
The real question laid bare was this: Do you REALLY want change, or are you all just paying lipservice to it?
Do you REALLY have family values, or is that just a convenient way to smugly slap down people who are different, either by race or sexual orientation or one of the myriad other manufactured divisions in this country? Those who really want change will be challenged to do the hard thing, to come before this nation’s people and speak plainly, with honesty and with a strong sense of the ultimate goal.
That speech was not about Jeremiah Wright. It was about us. He asked us to put our actions in place of our words, in place of pretty speeches, placards, punditry, politics and platitudes. He asked us the hard question: Do we REALLY want change or do we just want to talk about it?
I say this was Barack Obama’s way of saying “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” The man had the courage to put his political future on the line because he believes that reconciliation is more important than election. But when we look in the mirror, do we have the courage to lay ourselves bare and climb onto the high road?
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