(The folks at The Guardian had me write a 2008-retrospective piece on what I thought the most significant event of 2008 was. It was to run this week, but they’ve posted all their retrospectives, didn’t include it, and my editor hasn’t told me whether or not its just been tossed or not.
I’m guessing at this point that it has been dumped, so I’m posting it here instead.)
2008 was the year of Obama, and even in light of the worldwide financial collapse, it is the image of the young African American President Elect that personifies the year. But as much as the November election itself, the hurdle Obama needed to overcome to reach this historic milestone was the most intractable hurdle in American culture.
Reverend Jeremiah Wright was never supposed to be a household name. The fiery rhetoric that came from the pulpit of Obama’s former minister was not unique, but it’s unique proximity to the candidate made it problematic – possibly fatally so. When that rhetoric was brought to light at the height of the Democratic Party primary season by his political opponents and amplified by an eager media, Obama was forced to act quickly and decisively – and he did so in March through what will likely be proven to be the speech of his life. A speech that was a turning point, not only for his own campaign, but for the turbulent history of race relations in America – one that will continue to resonate for years after the Obama Administration has come and gone.
The discussion on race in America had atrophied badly since the civil rights era, devolving into crude, purely emotional debates on particular policies (such as affirmative action and hate crimes) or on crime statistics and police behavior; affirmative action couched exclusively in terms of African Americans’ history of suffering, stories of white students supposedly passed over for scholarships, etc. Discussions of crime patterns and police profiling also quickly polarized into yelling matches between angry camps.
In rejecting these terms, Obama recast the discussion of race in America as a dialectic, rather than a simplistic bipolarity. White supporters hoping he would distance himself from the generation-bound, liberational rhetoric of aging civil rights leaders such as Jesse Jackson found themselves as surprised as many of his black supporters who had hoped he would tell American whites to stop whining, as to both camps of the racial divide he delivered the same, two-pronged message.
First, that your experience, your feelings and your frustrations around race are real. whatever they are, and whoever you may be. Perhaps those feelings are justified, perhaps not, but they are to be acknowledged and respected regardless.
Second, that moving forward in concrete ways would sometimes mean moving on, even without the emotionally satisfying catharsis we might crave as individuals.
Obama came right out and told America that the simplistic, adversarial templates for racial debate left over from the civil rights era had become obsolete.
It should be clear to all that the cultural problems associated with racism – both immediate and legacy-driven – are still significant, but have become more nuanced than they were in the days of Reverend King. That new nuance required new tools. And in the absence of such tools, an increasing number of people were simply choosing not to have those much-needed conversations. For these people – largely white and upper-middle class, but both educated and uneducated, conservative and liberal – the myth of a post-racial America was appealing. Post-racialism would absolve them of their need to engage with these issues at all, and in fact would make it easy to tar those that would engage in such debate as throwbacks.
When Barack Obama stepped forward to address the American people on race, it was within this context, and it was not without risk to this base of support. To many of his white supporters, Obama was the “post-racial” candidate, and in confronting Wright’s comments publicly, Obama had to shatter the myth of a supposedly “post racial” era. In doing so, he was betting against the charge of an anonymous Clinton adviser in January; that Obama’s supporters were simply drawn to him as their “imaginary hip black friend.” By looking racism in the eye and sharing what he saw with the public, he implicitly trusted that his support was more than just the liberal pavlovianism this adviser had suggested.
And he was right.
Obama did something none in his generation and of his stature have done on the issue of race in America; he spoke to us as grown-ups. More than that, he stepped outside the orthodoxy of how race is to be discussed and what the terms of debate are, and he did so with a profound combination of seriousness, clarity, and casual ease. In the process, Obama gave us permission as a nation to grow up on issues of race, and he did so in a way that only a biracial fortysomething, so comfortable in his own multicultural identity, could do. He cast the nation as a rising adult with unresolved childhood issues who needed to begin moving on – even when moving on means not finding closure for every childhood trauma, as justified and righteous as the lingering anger towards such trauma might be.
Obama couldn’t win under the old rules of racial debate, under which he simply would’ve been “the black candidate.” But neither was he able to win without being “the black candidate.” In the end, his path to victory was to ride the same dialectic that he opened up for the country at large in that one historic speech, encompassing and embodying the many contradictions of the nation.
And his victory in November is only the first, clearest sign of how much things have already changed.