Finally, the dust is settling over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy, thanks to Sen. Barack Obama’s forthright speech on race in America. In the mainstream media, pundits have generally given the presentation a positive spin.
Obama condemned “in unequivocal terms” the statements of Rev. Wright that have caused widespread consternation. But Obama refused to disassociate himself from his mentor and friend. “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” he declared. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me … but a woman … who, on more than one occasion, has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
Pundits picked up on this paralleling of Rev. Wright and his grandmother. They liked the honesty of his personal story. Indeed, the story was powerful: It connected Obama to black as well as white America.
But pundits and their sound-bite news media missed Obama’s most significant point: The problem of the racial divide is not simply one of negative attitudes and feelings, which is the conventional and easy way to think about the issue of race in America. Obama was asking: What lies beneath Rev. Wright’s outrage and his grandmother’s anti-black stereotypes?
He was also asking all of us to think: Why are African Americans angry, often directing their hostility toward white society? Why are white workers frequently resentful toward blacks, bashing them for their dependency on welfare and reliance on affirmative action?
In his answer, he presented not a speech, but a complicated academic lecture. Obama traced black rage to the economic “disparities” stemming not only from the “brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow,” but also from discrimination in home ownership and exclusion from unions. He also pointed out the plant closings that have led to the economic hollowing out of our inner cities and to disproportionate black unemployment, accompanied by high welfare rates for black families and intolerable incarceration rates for young black men.
Expressing empathy for white workers, Obama analyzed their economic anxieties. “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.” Often they have directed their fears and frustration toward blacks. “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 … resentment builds.”
What does Obama think we should do about this racial divide? We should not think that the problem is only one of racial attitudes, and that the solution is only one of education, cross-racial gatherings in churches and elsewhere, and a national conversation on race in America.
Instead, he insisted, we should become aware of the economic underpinnings beneath the racial divide — “the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race.” The real fear “is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.”
Obama’s analysis of our predicament can be captured and conveyed by a political slogan from an earlier presidential election: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Of course, Obama did not put it in such a blunt way. But this was the complex lesson he sought to teach us about the current racial tensions in our society.
Now, in order to bring all of us together as a diverse American people, candidate Obama needs to spell out how we can confront the problem of the de-industrialization of America. What concrete changes does he propose to rebuild our manufacturing base and also to build a more creative U.S. economy in the era of globalization?
Ronald Takaki, professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is author of A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, a study that stresses the significance of the economy in the making of our nation’s diversity.
E-mail: rtakaki@berkeley.edu