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The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's 'A More Perfect Union', by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
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After Senator Barack Obama delivered his celebrated speech, "A More Perfect Union," on March 18, 2008, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd noted that only Barack Obama "could alchemize a nuanced 40-minute speech on race into must-see YouTube viewing for 20-year-olds." Pundits established the speech's historical eminence with comparisons to Abraham Lincoln's "A House Divided" and Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have a Dream." The future president had addressed one of the biggest issues facing his campaign-and our country-with an eloquence and honesty rarely before heard on a national stage.
The Speech brings together a distinguished lineup of writers and thinkers-among them Adam Mansbach, Alice Randall, Connie Schultz, and William Julius Wilson -in a multifaceted exploration of Obama's address. Their original essays examine every aspect of the speech-literary, political, social, and cultural-and are punctuated by Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson's reportage on the issue of race in the now historic 2008 campaign. The Speech memorializes and gives full due to a speech that propelled Obama toward the White House, and prompted a nation to evaluate our imperfect but hopeful union.
- Sales Rank: #778309 in eBooks
- Published on: 2010-07-23
- Released on: 2010-07-23
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
A team of scholars and journalists explore the implications of Barack Obama's speech A More Perfect Union, given in the heat of the 2008 primary campaign, in this volume edited by Sharpley-Whiting (Pimps Up, Hos Down). Written by Obama in response to the media frenzy over statements by his pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, A More Perfect Union addressed the enduring legacy of slavery and racism and instantly entered the canon of great American oratory. The contributors use the speech as a starting point to examine the divide between civil rights–era activism (and activists) and the politics of a younger generation that has grown up in its shadow, as well as the development of black oratory, the meaning of a postracial society, the immigrant experience and divisions between the descendants of American slaves and postcolonial immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa and Latin America. Scholarly without being dry, the book offers a way forward from what has become a stalemate between a color-blind white America that sees racism as a problem solved in the 1960s and a nation of ethnic minorities that experiences daily its structural inequities. (Aug.)
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“[The Speech] offers answers that are a lot more complex than the unvarnished praise Obama's oration has gotten so far…A rich landscape of opinion on the state of race and Obama's singular relationship to it. Last year, we simply couldn't see these arguments in the heat of the campaign; now they're coming into focus.” -- Los Angeles Times
"The time is right for [this] reconsideration... If we are to take the idea of a national racial discussion seriously, then it's especially urgent for a general readership to encounter eye-opening arguments like theologian Obery M. Hendricks Jr.'s articulate defense of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright... The book's tour de force is language scholar Geneva Smitherman's brilliant close reading of Obama's rhetoric, cadence and tone with reference to the "Black jeremiad tradition." She establishes the speech as a unique expression of Obama's biracial, bicultural identity, grounded in Aristotelian rhetoric and touching deep cultural nerves with both white and black audiences." - Salon, Critic's Pick
About the Author
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting is the director of Vanderbilt University's Program in African American and Diaspora Studies and the W. T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies. She is the author of four books, including the award-winning Pimps Up, Ho's Down, and the editor or coeditor of five others, most recently The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A Fair, Wise And Balanced Critique Of An Important Period During President Obama's Initial Presidential Campaign
By The Careful Observer
This book shows the power of the media to misrepresent and how, through manipulation, it can bring unnecessary misery to a person's life, in this case, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Reverend Jeremiah Wright had been doing great Church work for many years, with a stellar reputation as a Pastor coming from all sides, a man known for being balanced and tempered. Then, the media got ahold of a sound bite, played it over and over out of its larger context, and did everything that it could to ruin him. President Obama, caught in the crossfire of what was going on, decided to make a speech. In that speech, President Obama balanced a number of very difficult things, remaining loyal to his Pastor, and at the same time, not giving into the character assassination he saw going on. He was honest, diplomatic and wise to a fault in dealing with the issue of race head-on. His speech was simply brilliant and will go down in History as such. This book is a collection of critiques of what happened surrounding that situation. It's fair. It's wise. It's balanced and for all of these things, it becomes a great book for reviewing what happened. For all of those who are Barack Obama fans, there is another book that can add to your store of information about him and complement this one. In Thomas D. Rush's “Reality's Pen: Reflections On Family, History & Culture,” you will find a 1989 account of two private conversations between Rush and Obama. In those conversations, Barack reflects on what he envisions in his romantic future, long before he met Michelle. The account is special, in part, because it contains substance that only Rush and Obama heard. It is also special because the comments were made before Obama became famous between he and another guy who were just normal, everyday guys. The interaction is detailed on page 95 of Rush's book in a piece called “You Never Know Who God Wants You To Meet.” Rush's book can be found right here on Amazon, and the Obama story is just one of the many rich stories from the book.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Powerful Words - 3.5 Stars
By Karie Hoskins
I like very much the idea behind "The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's `A More Perfect Union'". Edited by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, this book brings together 15 very different people with very differing views on then Senator Obama's speech of March 18th, 2008. As Omar H. Ali puts it, "The fact is that there are at least as many ways to interpret the words contained within this or any other speech as there are people listening to or reading such words. No single interpretation can capture the entirety of what a particular speaker intends, or all the ways in which their speech is received."
As I read each person's thoughts on that momentous speech, I compared it to my own view. There is a nice balance in this book ranging from extremely favorable opinions to disappointment over a chance missed. The essays are generally written in a very scholarly manner (prompting me to look up a few words) and include a great deal of historical context. I found myself trying to look at the speech through different eyes than my own (which saw the speech as yet another example of our President's intelligence and talent) - which I suppose, was really the point of his words that day.
Was I editing the book, I might have made a few changes, though. First off - I would have let the writers know that the historical context of the speech would be provided at the beginning of the book. Many of them laid the groundwork of what was happening in the country and in the election at that time, and the repetition got tiresome by the third essay or so. Also, I would have either placed the text of the speech at the beginning, so that it was fresh in the reader's mind prior to reading the essays or would have broken the speech up - then grouping the essays that touched on each of those aspects together. (And then put the full text at the end of the book.) I found myself reading some parts of the speech over and over again when quoted in the essays, without having the text as a whole in the background of my thoughts.
It is fascinating, though, to share the same experience with other people whose lives are so different from mine. To know that others - like Alice Randall (as I did) "...first heard The Speech on a car radio. And so it came to me initially as words in air. It came to me as songs often come to me, as disembodied sound that reaches the body with a kind of anonymity that entices one to believe that the voice one hears in one's own."
To see pointed out very important elements that I missed: "At the center of The Speech are three words separating then from now: Not this time. These three words are Obama's victory. Not this time. Repeating this phrase twice and repeating the phrase "This time" six times, Obama begins to break with the past."
For me, the most important there of the speech was that "It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper." In our country, where "A recent study conducted at Princeton University revealed that a white felon stands an equal chance of being granted a job interview as a black applicant with no criminal record,". Because we finally have a black president does not mean that all the inequalities have been swept away. But it also does NOT mean, as pointed out by Obama, that the fulfillment of his dream to become president means that whites have lost their chance to succeed as he has.
This speech, this man, is a game changer for our country...in I believe, a wonderful way. Because of who he is, because of what he has done, because of what he will lead this country to become. Closing with an anecdote from Obama's senior adviser, David Axelrod:
"Obama wrote in the middle of the night for the two nights before this speech. At two A.M on the day of the speech, Axelrod woke up to see that Obama had sent it to him on his BlackBerry. Axelrod read it and e-mailed Obama back to say, "This is why you should be president."
Should be and is.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Rhetorical Trope with feelings, But not a solution to the Race Problem
By Herbert L Calhoun
These pieces in this edited volume, cover the Obama speech on race, its motivations, its intent, its value as a political document, as a model for framing poverty, and as the introduction or a gateway to a post racial America, etc. What I was hoping for was a thorough paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of it. But that probably would have resulted in dull reading. As a result, I decided to perform my own analysis to place along side that of these very talented authors.
My main concern was how Mr. Obama would address the responsibilities for racism in America. And in this regard, in the fourth paragraph of the speech, he clearly seems to place the responsibility for making the nation a more perfect union entirely on the backs of the victims of injustice. He appears to be blind to the fact that an even greater responsibility should lie on the backs of those, who by resisting social changes they don't like, actually violate the laws of the land and thus are undoubtedly and are incontrovertibly the cause of racial injustice in America.
Those who have suffered injustices through overt violations of U.S. laws, by the majority population, according to Mr. Obama's formulation, must go into the streets to demonstrate, protest and struggle to secure rights that have already been granted them by the U.S. Constitution, but which are then willfully and illegally denied them through resistance by those who choose not to obey the laws of the land against racial discrimination? Obama's one-sided appeal for responsibility strikes me as being, at the very least, "bass ackwards? Especially since in paragraph six he also places an "unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people (meaning of course the majority white population) ." Indeed if these people are as decent as he imagines them to be, why then are they given a "free pass" from their own civic responsibility of not having a right to actively and passively resist laws and social arrangements designed to break down the barriers of racial discriminationn and that are otherwise protected by the U.S. Constitution? And furthermore, since we are a law abiding nation, why are those who resist laws they happen to disagree with (such as laws that call for racial fairness), not also called upon to cease and desist their unlawful behavior? Why indeed are laws which prohibit such resistance, rarely invoke on the side of the victims of injustice and against the perpetrators? Were this to be done, would the need for demonstrations, protests and struggles simply disappear?
Without addressing the underlying cause of injustice, by a majority that willfully chooses to disobey the laws of the land, can the U.S. really call itself a true law abiding nation? The point being, is there really an objective basis for Mr. Obama's "unyielding faith," in the goodness of the American people when it comes to the issue of race? Or is this, as one of the author's has suggested, just a convenient rhetoric trope of an idealized "racially fair America" that does not (and has never) existed except in our own collective imagination?
In paragraph 15-18, Mr. Obama dismisses Reverend Wright's alternative view of America as being endemically racist by suggesting that Wright elevates what is wrong with America above what is right about it. Yet, a careful analysis of Wright's ranting seems to be an attempt to shift at least some of the blame and responsibility back where it belongs: to those who illegally resist respecting the laws of the land. It is after all this resistance that is the very cause of injustice and inequality.
Mr. Obama spends an inordinate amount of space rebuking and "distancing" himself from Reverend Wright and Reverend Wright's comments, but he never attempts to address the underlying cause of Wright's (and most blacks in America), vitriol: "white racism from sea to shining sea." In paragraphs 28 and following, he talks about the history of racism as if it were an abstraction from a bygone era? There is no identification of the racial group or return address of perpetrators: Jim Crow, segregation, and the brutality of slavery just happened? And its cross-generational legacy is just a cruel historical fait accompli for the victims and an enduring passive but illicit windfall for the perpetrators.
In fairness, Obama does end his review of the history of racism by finally calling the white community to account in paragraph 43. He asks them to acknowledge that blacks who cry racism, may not all be crazy, but are most likely reacting to objective conditions of discrimination extant in U.S. culture and society. But the way he proposes to impose responsibilities on these whites, the perpetrators of, or passive recipients of, cross-generational illicit race-based bounties, is not by appealing to the racial hatred in their hearts, or for having them give up their acquired advantages and illicit loot, but by calling on them to help fix and invest in (mostly still segregated) schools, by enforcing civil rights laws (that are acted and re-enacted every generation with the same results) and by ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system (which is a world-class embarrassment and continues to get worse).
In the end everything is resolved by the perennial call for unity. For obvious reasons, it can only be of the "papered-over" kind, since in a nation that is already Balkanized to the maximum, the hope for real unity is very nearly an impossibility. And the reason real unity can never happen in America is that "passive white racism" remains below the radar, yet it is much more insidious than Reverend Wright's incendiary rhetoric. Three stars.
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