There is a very well done, quite substantive article by Jodi Kantor (author of The Obamas) on the front page of today's New York Times.
There is much in the article to digest, and I urge you all to read it in full. Here are a couple of highlights:
Vigilant about not creating racial flash points, the president is private and wary on the subject, and his aides carefully orchestrate White House appearances by black luminaries and displays of black culture. Those close to Mr. Obama say he grows irritated at being misunderstood — not just by opponents who insinuate that he caters to African-Americans, but also by black lawmakers and intellectuals who fault him for not making his presidency an all-out assault on racial disparity.
Kantor then reviews some of those criticisms, quoting from Tavis Smiley and Cornel West.
Kantor rightly (I've done the research for my own book on Obama) recognizes a consistency in Obama's approach to matters of race going back two decades.
As far back as 1995, former colleagues at the University of Chicago remember him talking about moving away from the old politics of grievance and using common economic interests to bind diverse coalitions. “He argued that if political action and political speeches are tailored solely to white audiences, minorities will withdraw, just as whites often recoil when political action and speeches are targeted to racial minority audiences,” recalled William Julius Wilson, now a sociologist at Harvard.
Kantor goes on to argue that Wilson had a profound influence on Obama, who has absorbed the former's argument that, in Kantor's description, "class was becoming more determinative than race in America." I intend to write something more in depth on this matter, building on what I argue in my book, namely that while Obama's approach does reflect this argument, he takes it not only from Wilson, but even more directly from someone else, someone who made it as early as 1967--Martin Luther King, Jr. But I'm not ready to lay that out here.
To return to Kantor, she describes the Obama Administration as being focused on two key principles when it comes to race: inclusion and cross-racial unity. She quotes Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett:
“The president knows that some people may choose to be divided by differences — race, gender, religion — but his focus is on bringing people together.”
That's exactly what I found as well in my analysis of Obama's public rhetoric over twenty years. This is more than a political strategy for the President, it is his passion. His highest priority in public life, Obama
proclaimed in April 2008, is “to insist that we all share common hopes and common dreams as Americans and as human beings.” Obama also emphasized the “need to all recognize each other as Americans, regardless of race, religion, or region of the country.” These goals are in his "DNA," he stated.
For me personally, I was most drawn to Barack Obama specifically because of his understanding of these matters, of the importance of both fighting injustice and encouraging cross-racial unity and strengthening the bonds that connect us as Americans. He recognizes that doing the latter will make it far easier to do the former. It's much harder to ignore inequality or injustice when one recognizes the person suffering from it as a fellow American rather than simply as "the other."
Strengthening American national identity and cross-racial unity can help us achieve justice and equality. That's what Obama gets, and that idea is at the core of his approach to race.
PS-Please check out my new book, where I explore the Obama has spoken about race--and the way the media and his opponents have commented on it--in much greater detail, as part of my larger analysis of his conception of American national identity: Obama's America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity, published last month by Potomac Books. You can read a review by DailyKos's own Greg Dworkin here.