March 19, 2008

Obama Has A Dream—But Does It Include You?

By Marcus Epstein

Barack Obama’s speech on race relations has been hailed as visionary. Former Senator Harris Wofford (D-Pennsylvania) compared it to the Gettysburg Address and Rep. Jim Moran (D.-VA) compared it to Martin Luther King’s "I Have a Dream" speech. Even conservative author Charles Murray said:

"Has any other major American politician ever made a speech on race that comes even close to this one? As far as I'm concerned, it is just plain flat out brilliant—rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America."

No one can deny that Obama is an orator. (Click here for NRO's Kathleen Parker getting all dreamy over the Obama speech.) But what "nuance" does he actually take up?

To the extent that there is anything new in Obama’s speech, it is that he asks African Americans to take "full responsibility for own lives" and says that "they must always believe that they can write their own destiny".

A great example of blacks not being expected to take responsibility for their own actions is the Jena Six case. The line fed by Al Sharpton and the Main Stream Media is that a group of African Americans who beat and kicked a white student half to death should be let off because a noose was supposedly hung in a tree by a different student three months earlier.

Yet rather than saying these criminals were responsible for their own actions, Obama said on his website that the protesters who converged on Jena were carrying forth

“the legacy of all those who sat at lunch counters and took freedom rides to strike a blow against injustice wherever it may exist. When a noose hangs from a schoolyard tree in the 21st century and young men are treated in a way that is not equal nor just, it is not just an offense to the people of Jena or to the African-American community, it is an offense to the ideals we hold as Americans. I renew my call for the District Attorney to drop the excessive charges filed in this case, and I will continue my decades-long fight against injustice and division as President.”

In his Philadelphia speech, Obama blamed black crime on "reduced economic opportunity" caused by past discrimination. Clearly, he attributes most ills of the African American community to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

In other words, Obama ignores the missing piece of the puzzle. Over the last 50 years, we have not just ended legalized segregation: we have spent billions of dollars and created countless programs to try to make up for the past.

None of this has worked. Some of it has even made the problems worse.

When Obama bemoans that schools haven’t been integrated 50 years after Brown vs. Board of Education, he forgets the court decisions, forced busing, redistricting, and a plethora of federal programs and administrators that have yielded no result. He also omits that the "pervasive achievement gap" between different racial groups exists at schools with all levels of diversity.

Obama is being praised for acknowledging that whites’ unease about busing, urban crime, and affirmative action are not necessarily rooted in "racism".  Yet although he said these were "legitimate concerns", he does not see adopting colorblind education policies or letting police and courts crack down on crime as a solution. Instead he blames conservative talk show hosts for inflaming "resentments" (a word he only uses to describe white frustration) that are fundamentally a distraction from "a corporate culture rife with insider 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".

Despite Obama’s claim that whites should not be considered racists for worrying about urban crime, he did manage to criticize his living white grandmother’s racial insensitivity (as it turns out, for refusing to take the bus after she was harassed by bums). He apparently sees as equivalent to his preacher’s viscerally anti-white racial rantings that forced the need for Obama’s speech in the first place.

Obama agonized about his grandmother’s concern about riding public transportation in his book Dreams From My Father. But he has never criticized Wright’s racial views, let alone "condemned [them] in unequivocal terms", as he claimed in his speech, until the controversy first began to bubble a few months ago.

Beneath the pretty rhetoric about hope and responsibility, the gist of Obama’s speech is the same old left wing view of race relations: The problems facing the African American community, he says, are the result of past and present discrimination. They need to be addressed, he believes, by government regulations and redistribution. At the same time, he thinks, all white concerns about these programs are created by demagogues who persuade the working and middle class that hostile minorities, rather than corporations, could be responsible for some of their problems.

The latter argument is the same left wing talk seen in books like The Redneck Manifesto and to a lesser extent What’s The Matter With Kansas: the only possible reason working and middle class voters would vote Republican is that they’ve been fooled by big business by being concerned about something other than their lack of socialized medicine.

In his latest book, The Audacity of Hope—whose title was coined by Rev. Wright—Obama discusses the limits of the politics of white guilt. In part because of "the success of conservatives in fanning the politics of resentment", white guilt has "largely exhausted itself in America; even the most fair-minded of whites… tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization—or race-specific claims based on the history of race discrimination in this country". Obama suggested that the issues could be addressed in a universal rather than group-based sense.

This is exactly what he did in his speech. He called for the same failed liberal policies on race. But he made the appeals as something we need to do as a country, rather than to the benefit one group at the expense of the other.

Obama may not share Rev. Wright’s racist views—or is at least he may be smart enough not to shout about them.

But if elected, he will enact the same racist policies.