Obama's Race Speech & Moments of Seeing the Other as Part of Us

[yurbud]

Obama gave a speech on race today that is only partly about the flap over his pastor. The rest is about what his presidency could represent for all of us in terms of race and our history.

One thing he does here that is especially impressive is showing the parallel between white and black anger about race and how it misses the real cause of economic hardship, our corporation and wealthy first politics.

I only found one paragraph a bit off, but the rest represents the best of what most of us want America to be.

We have had so much stoking of fear and hatred in our society that when moments come when former enemies or those we thought of as other are recognized as us, it is truly a surprise but recognized as one of the most transcendent moments in life. They don't even give us the words for these moments that are equal to their significance, so the few we have sound like empty Hallmark platitudes.

I have felt this a couple of times.

One was the fall of the Berlin Wall and when the Russians stormed the White Palace after Soviet hardliners tried to undo Gorbachev's reforms. Suddenly instead of being the people who could kill us in a split second, they were us, people struggling for democracy and a better life.

I felt the same way when I watched the lack of action to help Hurricane Katrina victims. Those people in the squalid Superdome, scrambling on their roofs to escape the water, or floating face down dead were not poor, black refugees; they were us.



Past generations must have felt this when we had our first Catholic president or after the Holocaust when what was done to the Jews was so horrific that their otherness went up the smokestacks of the crematoriums.

Ironically, though the media and our politicians try to stoke that fear to the point of violence that those who commit it try the rest of their lives to forget even as it haunts their dreams and tears their families apart, when these moments of feeling a part of others passes, we wonder where it went and when it will come again.

This is what the Obama moment represents to a lot of us. The rift between black and white people in America has lasted longer than the "War on Terror," the Cold War, and the existence of the United States as a country. I suppose it is only natural a self-inflicted wound so great can only be closed stages: freeing the slaves in the 1860s, guaranteeing the rights of citizenship in the 1960s, and perhaps now seeing an African American as our best hope for a leader after the most divisive and destructive president in our history.

Whatever quality of president he would be, it will be a little harder for the next merchant of fear and death to divide us after him.

[polichick]

1. Seeing The Other as part of us is the only way to peace...

Thanks for your thoughtful post!