Obama confronts America’s racial stalemate

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There have been many good one-liners and a few memorable speeches during this campaign, but Barack Obama’s speech this morning in Philadelphia is in a class of its own. Whatever you think of his candidacy, it is one of the most frank, nuanced speeches on race we’ve heard in a long time:

Trinity [Obama’s church] embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger…. 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 America…. 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 it’s remarkable to hear a black politician speak so frankly and with such understanding about white anger, acknowledging that blacks and whites may harbor “resentments [that] aren’t always expressed in polite company”:

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.

As they say, read the whole thing or watch it here.