[Talking Points memo]Noted economist and Brown University professor Glenn Loury published a highly nuanced and fascinating essay on Obama’s race speech on March 31 that has been ignored by the mainstream media.
Loury, for example, takes issue with what he calls the “superficial and overtly, unreflectively partisan” nature of the press commentary on Obama’s speech:
“Yet, as editorial writers rush to call it "the greatest speech on race since King's 1963 oration...," I can't help but notice how they blithely overlook LBJ's 1965 commencement speech at Howard University which, to my mind and by any serious historical standard, was easily a more important and historic statement.”
Loury accuses Obama’s speech of “desperately (if on occasion disingenuously) trying to reassure the American mainstream” that the black community has moved on from the racial wounds of the past, and questions Obama’s standing to renegotiate the “implicit American racial contract":
"I can’t get past the fact that Obama was negotiating with the American public on behalf of MY people in Philadelphia last week. In the process, he presumed to instruct a generation of angry black men as to how they ought to construe their lives. I am not really sure that Barack Obama as earned the right to do either of those things. How the Senator’s negotiations will ultimately shake out – in terms of American attitudes about the nation’s responsibility to act so as to reduce racial inequality -- is something I'm not very confident that anyone can predict. Advocates of the interest of black people have to consider what hand we’ll be left to play, should he be defeated in November. The narrative-defining moves that Obama is making now, in the heat of a political campaign and in the service of his own ambitions, must be critically examined as to what impact they will have on the deep structures of American civic obligation, for generations to come...My fear is that, should Obama succeed with his effort to renegotiate the implicit American racial contract, then the prophetic African American voice – which is occasionally strident and necessarily a dissident, outsider's voice – could be lost to us forever."We particularly found the following paragraph of Loury’s essay to be fascinating, all the more so because it resembles precisely what Geraldine Ferraro was pilloried for saying, albeit expressed in a more nuanced manner:
“Finally, one could argue, with good reason, that the purportedly post-racial Obama candidacy has been hypocritical in its exploitation of a simple-minded racial voting reflex among black Americans. This central fact of the current campaign is only spoken of guardedly, and often goes unnoticed altogether. It is supposed to be an insult to him -- and, by extension to blacks as a whole – that he might be seen as a 'black' candidate. And yet, it is the fact that so many blacks see him precisely in that way – viewing him through the lens of a politically infantile narcissism – that has allowed him to obtain a winning hand in the delegate count. (This, by the way, is the same narcissistic reflex that installed Clarence Thomas on the US Supreme Court a decade and a half ago. These are very different cases, to be sure; but, it’s the same reflex.) Here we have the ‘post-racial’ candidate who is favored to win the crucial North Carolina primary because he can confidently rely on drawing 90% of the black vote. Can I be the only observer who sees a profound irony in that?”
Professor Loury concludes by stating:
“Obama, an African American from the south side of Chicago (sort of), has become the embodiment of this call. The question is, will the deep structures of American power accept a stealthy revolutionary's ascent to the pinnacle? I doubt it, very seriously. As his life experience and his current political strategy would seem to suggest, he can only succeed by abandoning the critical, skeptical, dissident's voice which is the truest political expression of the lessons learned by black people over the long centuries of being America's 'niggers.' So, anyway, is how I'm seeing things at the moment.”We would urge you to read professor Loury's entire essay here. It is long and nuanced, but thoughtful and well worth the read.
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