CounterPunch
March 20, 2008
New Challenges for Obama, the Democrats and the Left
Obama's Race Speech
By DAN La BOTZ
Barack Obama's speech on race, the greatest speech by a major American political figure in decades, elevates the discussion of race in America to a new level. What makes this speech so powerful is not only what he said, but also what it requires us to ask and what it demands that we reply. With this speech Obama has challenged himself, the Democratic Party, and the country to pursue a discussion of racial justice which leads us inevitably into equally challenging issues of economic and political power. The social and cultural questions of race are entwined with economic issues and political problems in this country in such a complicated way that one cannot be tackled without also handling the other. And they can only all be solved for all of us by taking on corporate power.
The problem of race in America is also an economic issue that will require a change in the balance of forces between capital and labor. Racial issues are not only matters of communication, understanding and mutual respect-though those are important-they are also questions of economic wealth and political power whose resolution will require a reconstruction of America. Obama said in his speech, this is not a zero sum game. But it is a contest in which working people, black and white, in order to win the game, will have to build a movement that can take wealth and power away from corporate interests at the top of this society.
A Common Fight for a Better Future
Obama encouraged black and white Americans to turn away from the nation's troubled racial past, and to work together fight for their common economic and social interests such as health care. He even suggested that this would be to some degree a fight against corporate power: "corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many." Such an aside, however, hardly begins to probe the issue of entrenched corporate power and altogether avoids its direct relationship to institutional racism. Obama's brilliant popular elucidation of our country's race issues was not matched with an equally frank examination of the nature of corporate economic power, and that is where he and we must go next.
Obama, the Democrats, the System and the Crisis
Obama's speech leads us to these reconsiderations of American history and of the contemporary situation of black and white which suggest that he and his party cannot solve the racial issues he has so brilliantly begun to elucidate. We need a new social movement to create and drive forward a new American politics. American working people black and white need to join together to fight not only for health care, but also to take on the corporations whose power and wealth impede a solution of racial problems. The greatness of Obama's speech may ultimately lie in the fact that it led Americans to reconsider the problems he has addressed and led us, black and white, native born and immigrant, to begin to solve them by ourselves and from below.
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