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Barack Obama in
Philadelphia zum Rassenproblem Two hundred and twenty one
years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men
gathered and, with these simple words, launched The document they produced
was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original
sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the
convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade
to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution
to future generations. Of course, the answer to the
slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a
Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under
the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a
union that could be and should be perfected over time. And yet words on a parchment
would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women
of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the
This was one of the tasks we
set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of
those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous This belief comes from my
unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.
I am the son of a black man
from It’s a story that hasn’t
made me the most conventional candidate.
But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that
this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are
truly one. Throughout the first year of
this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the
American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy
through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some
of the whitest populations in the country.
In This is not to say that race
has not been an issue in the campaign.
At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me
either “too black” or “not black enough.”
We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before
the And yet, it has only been in
the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has
taken a particularly divisive turn. On one end of the spectrum,
we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in
affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed
liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former
pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views
that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that
denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly
offend white and black alike. I have already condemned, in
unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such
controversy. For some, nagging
questions remain. Did I know him to be
an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course.
Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered
controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his
political views? Absolutely – just as
I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis
with which you strongly disagreed. But the remarks that have
caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s
effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly
distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic,
and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right
with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted
primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating
from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam. As such, Reverend Wright’s
comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need
unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a
set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy,
a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change;
problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather
problems that confront us all. Given my background, my
politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those
for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright
in the first place, they may ask? Why
not join another church? And I confess
that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons
that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if
Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by
some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is
a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me
about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up
the poor. He is a man who served his
country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest
universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led
a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by
housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services
and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering
from HIV/AIDS. In my first book, Dreams
From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity: “People began to shout, to
rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the
reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I
heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of
churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people
merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the
Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom,
and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our
blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day,
seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future
generations and into a larger world. Our
trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than
black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to
reclaim memories tha t we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all
people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.” That has been my experience
at Trinity. Like other predominantly
black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in
its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the
former gang-banger. Like other black
churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy
humor. They are full of dancing,
clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained
ear. The church contains in full the
kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the
struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make
up the black experience in And this helps explain,
perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. 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 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. These people are a part of
me. And they are a part of Some will see this as an
attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would
be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the
woodwork. 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. We would be making the same mistake that
Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about 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. And if we walk away now, if we simply
retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together
and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good
jobs for every American. Understanding this reality
requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past
isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it
isn’t even past.” We do not need to
recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. 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. 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. This is the reality in which
Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and
early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and
opportunity was systematically constricted.
What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of
discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many
were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after
them. But for all those who
scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there
were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way
or another, by discrimination. That
legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and
increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing
in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it,
questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in
fundamental ways. For the men and
women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt
and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and
the bitterness of those years. That
anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white
friends. But it does find voice in the
barbershop or around the kitchen table.
At times, that anger is exploited by politicia ns, to gin up votes
along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings. And occasionally it finds
voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. 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. That anger is not
always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving
real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our
condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the
alliances it needs to bring about real change. But 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. In fact, a similar anger
exists within segments of the white community. 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
committ ed; 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 – a corporate
culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and
short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests;
economic policies that favor the few over the many. 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. 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 is we are to continue on
the path of a more perfect union. For the African-American
community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming
victims of our past. It means continuing
to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular
grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to
the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to
break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant
trying to feed his family. And it
means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our
fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and
teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their
own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always
believe that they can write their own destiny. Ironically, this
quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found
frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed
to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a
belief that society can change. The profound mistake of
Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our
society. It’s that he spoke as if our
society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a
country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the
highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino
and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a
tragic past. But what we know -- what
we have seen – is that In the white community, the
path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the
African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people;
that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination,
while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by
investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights
laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this
generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous
generations. It requires all Americans
to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams;
that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and
white children will ultimately help all of In the end, then, what is
called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great
religions demand – that we do unto others as we
would have them do unto us. Let us be
our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us.
Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let
us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics
reflect that spirit as well. 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. That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we
can come together and say, “Not this time.”
This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are
stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children
and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism
that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look
like us are somebody else’s problem. The
children of This time we want to talk
about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks
and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their
own to overcome the special interests in This time we want to talk
about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women
of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from
every religion, every region, every walk of
life. This time we want to talk about
the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you
might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it
overseas for nothing more than a profit. This time we want to talk
about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and
fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them
home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been
waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for
them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned. I would not be running for
President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast
majority of Americans want for this country.
This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has
shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling
doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is
the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and
openness to change have already made history in this election. There is one story in
particularly that I’d like to leave you with today – a story I told when I
had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church,
Ebenezer Baptist, in There is a young,
twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our
campaign in And Ashley said that when
she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work,
she was let go and lost her health care.
They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that
she had to do something to help her mom. She knew that food was one
of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what
she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard
and relish sandwiches. Because that
was the cheapest way to eat. She did this for a year
until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the
reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of
other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too. Now Ashley might have made a
different choice. Perhaps somebody
told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks
who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into
the country illegally. But she
didn’t. She sought out allies in her
fight against injustice. Anyway, Ashley finishes her
story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re
supporting the campaign. They all have
different stories and reasons. Many
bring up a specific issue. And finally
they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the
entire time. And Ashley asks him why
he’s there. And he does not bring up a
specific issue. He does not say health
care or the economy. He does not say
education or the war. He does not say
that he was there because of Barack Obama.
He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”
“I’m here because of
Ashley.” By itself, that single moment
of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not
enough. It is not enough to give
health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our
children. But it is where we
start. It is where our union grows
stronger. And as so many generations
have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years
since a band of patriots signed that document in |