In Obama's speech on race yesterday, the comparison between his pastor and his grandmother seems to be a sticking point, at least for Joan Walsh and Mickey Kaus. I even heard Juan Williams on NPR this morning saying that this comparison was weak. I thought it was brilliant.
Here's the passage from the speech:
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.
Here's Walsh:
I don't think Obama's elderly grandmother, who still lives in Hawaii and is reportedly too frail to travel, who was a product of her time and place and yet did her best to raise her half-black grandson, deserved to be compared to Wright, a public figure who's built his career around a particularly divisive analysis of American racial politics. It is easily the most tin-eared thing I've ever heard Obama say.
Here's Kaus:
The most disastrous sentence in the speech. If Obama's saying that those who fear young black men on the street are racists, the equivalents of Rev. Wright in offensiveness, then he's just insulted a whole lot of people. If he loses the votes of everyone who fears young black men, he loses the election. People fear black men on the street--as even Jesse Jackson once momentarily admitted--because they cause a wildly disproportionate share of street crime.
I think these criticisms reveal an inability to appreciate the shift from the objective to the personal that Obama's best speeches manage to accomplish. Obama was trying to describe his pastor as a human being rather than a public figure. He goes on to describe the deep-seated resentment that many African Americans feel towards this country. This resentment breeds bitterness and anger, and a Black man who grew up in a segregated world is not immune from that anger. Wright is someone who can disseminate the healing strengths of spiritual renewal at its best, but who has a blind spot rooted in deep and long-lasting wounds. This puts his angry comments into perspective as understandable, if still wrong and unreasonable.
At the other end of the spectrum, Joan and Mickey seem to see the old woman's fears as relatively trivial. Mickey says straight out what Joan seems to be thinking, that it's reasonable to fear Black men. But I don't think they get the point here. I don't care whether an old woman's fears are more reasonable than an old man's anger. Whether or not our fears or angers are reasonable, they cause racial division nonetheless.
But here's the core of what I want to say, what these critics don't seem to appreciate about how important the grandmother example is: it's HIS OWN GRANDMOTHER, who at some points raised him and loves him, who has said to him that she's afraid of people like him. Can you appreciate that? Have you ever had someone who loves you tell you that they are afraid of your race?
Obama gets that she is still his family, and that she still loves him deeply. And the underlying point is that Black people, with all of their anger, are part of the American family. White people, with all of their resentment about race, are part of the family.
Does Obama have to join a White church to be accepted by these White critics? Because my guess is that there isn't a Black church in this country that doesn't occasionally encompass the kind of anger that Wright has expressed. We have met the enemy, people, and he is us.