Obama's Speech and the Black Man's Burden
Paul T. Zeleza while recognizing the historic nature and importance of the Obama speech argues that the circumstances that made the speech necessary reveal the extent to which the United States remains an arrogantly racist society
It finally came out, the predictable ogre of race and racism that has been stalking the US 2008 elections ever since Senator Barack Obama declared his candidacy and became a serious contender for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination following a string of overwhelming victories in the bulk of the 40 primaries and caucuses that have been held thus far.
For more than a week the gullible media and giddy pundits have deliriously played and pontificated on speciously spliced and decontextualized sermons from Senator Obama's former pastor, the recently retired Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and the Illinois Senator has tried to douse the manufactured flames.
In the end Senator Obama was compelled to give a much anticipated speech, a defining speech of his candidacy according to many of the white pundits who hog the media. And it is being called a great speech, delivered with brilliant calmness and inspiring courage. Many already regard it as historic in its searing honesty, eloquence, and fearlessness in addressing America's original and enduring sin of racism and its bitter fruits of anger and resentment among blacks and whites. I was deeply moved by this exceptionally well-crafted speech in ways that I am usually not by political speeches with their predictable banality, although I was troubled by the gratuitous obeisance to Israel and the quetionable moral equivalence of centuries old white anti-black racism and decades old white anti-black resentment.
As perhaps only a person of his complex biography could, he may have forced the nation to face up to, have a conversation about, its ugly racial past if it seeks to forge a brighter post-racial future. Senator Obama is not only biracial, but also the offspring of a recent African immigrant and an old European immigrant. Unlike many biracials of African American origin, he has no ancestry among the enslaved Africans. So he simultaneously has his feet in the intimate solitudes of the black and white worlds, of the old and recent immigrants, of Africans and Europeans who have created this complex, troubled, and fascinating country. He is a transnational biracial, a member of the new African diaspora with peculiar insights into America's racial soul and position in the world.
Only the future will tell what impact the speech itself will have on America's tortured silences and stilted conversations on race and the trajectory of Senator Obama's own candidacy. What is clear, however, is that the very fact that Senator Obama, not the white candidates, not Senator Clinton or Senator McCain, was required to address the issue of race is a disheartening testimony to the racism of America's racial discourse. Much as Africa is carelessly homogenized, stripped of the splendid diversities of its countries, conditions and contexts, and Europe is carefully differentiated, blacks in America often bear the homogenizing burdens of their race in a way the presumably unraced whites rarely do. Also, the same insidious Euroamerican racial ideologies that cast doubts on the full humanity of Africans on the continent, questions the full citizenship of African Americans in the diaspora. This partly explains why Senator Obama became answerable for Rev. Wright, for his patriotism, for his Americanness.
The racialized burden of race is also expressed in the very expectation of blacks and biracials to speak out on race, to be experts on race, to own race, to be raced in a way whites routinely are not. Typically in American public discourse, black commentators are often confined to racial commentary; rarely are they called upon to voice their opinions on the burning public issues of the day from the state of the domestic economy and international finance to foreign policy and war to pressing technological, health, and environmental matters, except where black people are victims or perpetrators. Even in this election, as James Thindwa has noted on The Zeleza Post, black commentators are notable for their limited presence among the chattering media pundits.
In this context, Senator Obama's race speech, notwithstanding its seminal significance and intervention in American racial discourse, falls into a predictable pattern. It demonstrates white America's failure to come to term with race and racism, that the enslaved Africans who were forced to come to these shores did not create racism, and their descendants do not benefit from it, and still do not, by and large, control the material and ideological apparatuses that sustain and reproduce it, that indeed the black identity imposed on, and adopted by, by a transnational biracial individual such as Senator Obama is the result of a long history of Euroamerican racialization and racism.
American can only transcend the cruel legacies of race and racism when blacks no longer bear the burden of speaking out on race and racism, when whites bear their own historic racial crosses. The fact that Senator Obama was forced to repudiate and explain his former pastor, reveal the vibrant and secluded world of the black church with its complex social gospel that is hidden from whites during Christian America's most segregated Sunday morning, and remind his nation of its imperfect union, shows America has a long way to go to build a more convivial multiracial, let alone, postracial nation worthy of all its citizens and the world's respect.
* Paul T Zeleza is editor of The Zeleza Post. This article was first published at
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