Great Speech but was it Great Politics? [View All]

[kennetha]

Obama gave an amazing and amazingly courageous speech. It definitely increased my admiration for the man as I said in an earlier post. But I don't know whether it was smart POLITICS. That's mainly because I very much doubt that Americans are going to overcome their racial divisions by talking through them or about them at the level of national politics.

Moreover, the president isn't really a seminar leader or the leader of an encounter group. The body politic is much too complicated to be led through an ongoing "conversation about race" by a presidential candidate or even by a president. I'm not saying that politics is irrelevant to racial reconciliation. Not at all. But the way politics can help achieve racial conciliation is twofold. On the negative side, politicians can simply stop exploiting racial divisions for their own temporary political gain. And on the more positive side, they can help us reach consensus on solutions to concrete, shared problems around which people can rally across racial and other divides. We don't have to have a conversation about race in order to agree that our schools are inadequate in an age of global competition or to agree that access to quality healthcare should be a right of all citizens. We don't need to obsess endlessly about racial grievances to agree that our decaying infrastructure is an impediment to a 21st century economy. We don't need to talk about race to agree that our economic future and the future of the planet can be secured only by our going massively green,

There is so much that we can do and agree upon without our having to engage in an extended conversation about race. And if we focus on achieving certain concrete and specific things like this life will be measurably better for many. A rising tide of prosperity shared across racial, ethnic and gender divides will do much to bridge racial divides without our ever having to make race itself an explicit subject.

Again, I don't mean to deny that racial reconciliation is important and desirable. I just doubt the ability of politics and politicians to be the explicit leading edge of a helpful or constructive conversation that is explicitly about race.

There probably do need to be explicit foreground conversations about race. But I suspect that they belong in more "local" less top-down settings, in more people to people settings. The explicit conversation is more a matter for civil society rather than the formal structures of government at this point in our history. If that's right (and I'm not insisting that it is right. I'm just trying out a thought really) then qua politician Obama really doesn't have much to gain and a great deal to lose by presenting himself as the guy who will show us how to talk to each other about race. Making race the explicit text of our political conversations with one another seems bound to divide more than unite.

I read somewhere that his advisers didn't really want him to give this speech. I think something like what I am thinking may be the reason. But again let me make it clear that I'm not criticizing his speech as such. It was amazing and courageous. And I greatly admired it and greatly admired the man that gave it.