Reactions to Barack Obama’s Address on Race Relations

On Tuesday, March 18, Senator Barack Obama gave a speech in Philadelphia addressing inflammatory anti-American comments made by Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, a church that Obama has attended for 20 years.

Senator Obama used the occasion not only to distance himself from Pastor Wright’s remarks but also to give a wide-ranging analysis of the current state of race relations in this country and how we arrived where we are today.

The Obama oratory received almost universal acclaim as one of the most important speeches on race relations ever made by a candidate for president of the United States. But also there were critics who said that Obama did not go far enough in condemning his pastor’s remarks.

Here is a sample of commentary following the Obama speech:

• Barack Obama’s speech on race was monumentous and edifying. Overriding aides who objected to putting race center stage, he addressed a painful, difficult subject straightforwardly with a subtlety and decency rare in American politics. (Maureen Dowd, The New York Times)

• In what may be remembered as a landmark speech regardless of who becomes the next president, Obama established new parameters for a dialogue on race in America that might actually lead somewhere, that might break out of the sour stasis of grievance and counter-grievance, of insensitivity and hypersensitivity, of mutual mistrust. (Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post)

• The speech was the most extensive discussion of race ever made by a presidential candidate. (Roger Wilkins, USA Today)

• The speech failed to address head-on Wright’s damning of America or any of his other remarks about 9/11 or AIDS. Obama asked for points for political courage for not abandoning Wright, and he should get them. But Obama’s courage didn’t extend to directly taking on the words that have caused such controversy. (John Dickerson, Slate.com)

• It was an amazing speech, a brilliant speech. It was brilliant both in substance and in delivery. He told a convincing, moving story about his own racial history. He was able to paint a truly hopeful, but pragmatic, picture of why people should come together across races. (Michael C. Dawson, TheRoot.com)

• There are moments, increasingly rare in risk-abhorrent modern campaigns, when politicians are called upon to bare their fundamental beliefs. In the best of these moments, the speaker does not just salve the current political wound but also illuminates larger, troubling issues that the nation is wrestling with.
  Senator Barack Obama, who has not faced such tests of character this year, faced one on Tuesday. It is hard to imagine how he could have handled it better.
(editorial in The New York Times)

• With his brilliant speech on race relations, Barack Obama showed why his campaign for president has the aura of a mission. And he showed the leadership necessary to take this country on a more productive path. (editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer)

• No candidate for national office has ever spoken so candidly or realistically about race as it is lived as a fact of life in America. (Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times)

• The Obama speech drew upon the best traditions of American oratory. It was stunning. As political rhetoric, it was designed to do far more than damage control and, in the end, distilled the essence of his candidacy. (editorial in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

• That was the most sophisticated speech on race and politics I’ve ever heard.
(Bill Schneider, CNN)

• Obama attempted to explain Wright’s anger as typical of the civil rights generation, with its “memories of humiliation and doubt and fear.” But Wright’s problem is exactly the opposite. He ignored the message of Martin Luther King Jr. and introduced a new generation to the politics of hatred. Barack Obama is not a man who hates. But he chose to walk with a man who does. (Michael Gerson, Council on Foreign Relations)

• The supposed divide between blacks and whites is not the issue here. Obama’s longtime association with Jeremiah Wright is. Reacting to being linked with a bigoted conspiracy theorist by lecturing the nation on race is like Eliot Spitzer responding to getting caught patronizing a prostitute by giving a speech on the female physique. (editorial in Investor’s Business Daily)