The AP offers another in a long list of terrible angles on Barack Obama's speech last night, the notion that he "avoided race" in his speech. Tavis Smiley and Cornel West are cited as chief witnesses to this terrible transgression.
"It looks like he's running from history," Dr. Cornel West, a professor of African-American studies and religion at Princeton University, said after the speech. "He couldn't mention Martin, he couldn't mention the civil rights movement, he couldn't mention those who sacrificed and gave so much. It's very, very difficult to actually create a new world if you don't acknowledge the world from which you are emerging."Talk show host Tavis Smiley said that the deeper significance of King's "Dream" speech and life's work, which included aggressive demands to end poverty, inequality and the Vietnam War, had been pulled out of context.
"If we were being true to King's dream, we'd be talking about poverty, how to eradicate it, and the long list of things that mattered to him," Smiley said. "I just fear that his legacy will get glossed over."
First off, the idea that Obama didn't mention MLK or "inequality" and the notion that he did so "racelessly" are equally incorrect. Let's revisit the emotional ending to Obama's speech, in which King is alluded to as "the young preacher from Georgia," as he describes "America's Promise."
And it is that promise that 45 years ago today, brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a mall in Washington, before Lincoln's memorial, and hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream.I can't think of another presidential candidate who has referred to Langston Hughes in times past, as Barack Obama does with the phrase "so many dreams deferred." In doing so he also invokes Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun, a play, based on the experience her family had attempting to integrate a white neighborhood in Obama's home state of Illinois when she was a child, that borrows from Hughes' poem for its title. In real life the subsequent litigation outlawed racially restrictive covenants in neighborhoods. The phrase "dream deferred" has become a shorthand for black frustration with persistent inequality -- so popular that Talib Kweli uses it.The men and women who gathered there could've heard many things. They could've heard words of anger and discord. They could've been told to succumb to the fear and frustration of so many dreams deferred.
But what the people heard instead - people of every creed and colour, from every walk of life - is that in America, our destiny is inextricably linked. That together, our dreams can be one.
"We cannot walk alone," the preacher cried. "And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back."
Now I know everyone didn't hear all that. But I know that Cornel West, author of several books and rap albums specifically devoted to race, must have. I simply don't believe that people capable of carefully parsing the racial subtexts of American life would be completely blind to such subtlety when it is invoked in the name of unity rather than ignorance or hatred.
Obama's nameless invocation of MLK is at once both intimate and in keeping with the theme of his campaign, that heroes are "ordinary people doing extraordinary things." To have invoked St. Martin, the Martin of Michael Gershon Op-Eds and thinly veiled racist screeds at The Corner, the Martin who is used to sell everything from fast food to cellphones, would have not done justice to what he did because Martin was merely a man. Obama's point is that, without the courage of black folks in the '60s, MLK would have just been another preacher and, without the American people, Barack Obama would be a skinny lawyer from Chicago.
It is MLK's vision which Obama then refers to, that "people of every creed and color, from every walk of life," are "inextricably linked." It is no accident that this vision has become the central theme of Obama's policy vision, that he says we should approach "black problems" as American problems. Whether this will work or not is subject to discussion, but the idea that it "runs from history" or "doesn't acknowledge" MLK or the Civil Rights Movement is just plain wrong.
--A. Serwer
