WASHINGTON--How should we think about racism in the age of President Barack Obama? In his first speech as president to the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization, President Obama’s answer to that question was a rich mixture of his presidential agenda, Bill Cosby’s self-help spiel, Rev. Jesse Jackson’s political push and rapper Jay-Z’s oratorical flow.
Yet, as a historical turning point, what he said was less important than who was saying it.
America’s first president of African descent takes office in the same year as the 100th anniversary of a group that helped make it possible, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The irony of that happy coincidence is how much it haunted conversations at the convention with a nagging question: As Civil Rights Era protests have declined and blacks participate at all levels of politics, is the NAACP still relevant?
President Obama chose to answer that question by refraining it. Regardless of how relevant it may or may not be at the end of the first century, he offered ways for it become more relevant in the next.
After his obligatory salute to the debt that he and other successful Blacks owe to the NAACP’s past leaders, he left no doubt that he believes “the pain” of prejudice and discrimination against Blacks, Latinos, homosexuals, Muslims and others is real and “still felt.”
Nevertheless, he pointed out, they are not “even the steepest barriers to opportunity today.”
More difficult, he said, are the often-neglected “structural inequalities that our nation’s legacy of discrimination has left behind.”
This led into a list of Obama policies and programs that, while color-blind in their application, have particular importance to black Americans who have disproportionately been left behind.
Yet, the most notable portion of the speech came with his self-help message, the same message that last year Rev. Jackson was caught by an open television network microphone bitterly deriding as “talking down to Black people.”
At the NAACP gathering, Obama received rousing “amens” as he said, “Government programs alone won’t get our children to the Promised Land.”
He called for “a new mind-set, a new set of attitudes” against an internalized sense of limitation in which “so many in our community have come to expect so little of ourselves.”
His Cosbyesque message to put away the Xbox and put your kids to bed at a reasonable hour, like so many of his other messages, transcends racial lines.
Yet, it has special meaning to Black Americans who, polls show, vote liberal but hold conservative moral values.
It is also a message that would be hard to imagine coming with much moral credibility from any president except one who grew up as Obama did, as a mixed-race son of a father who abandoned him in his early childhood.
The speech was classic Obama.
He found ways to address issues related to race in terms and values that are not limited to any one racial or ethnic community.
It fleshed out in many ways the issues raised in his only other major address on race, his Philadelphia campaign speech to explain his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Ironically the victory of America’s first Black president came partly because he chose to avoid the subject of race, no matter how much he was taunted to address it by the likes of Rush Limbaugh on the right or Ralph Nader on the left.
It is politically safer for him to show us models of racial harmony than to tell us about them.
Like the Huxtables on “The Cosby Show,” President Obama and family visibly redeem the old 1950’s American middle-class family ideal from the clutches of irony and dare the chattering classes to make fun of it.
Watching his speech, I was reminded of a lingering question among his skeptics:
How could he have spent 20 years in the church of a racial firebrand like Rev. Wright?
One reason, I have long theorized, is that along with his religious lessons, he was learning the depths of America’s racial divide so that someday he could bridge it.
His sermon to the NAACP reveals how well he learned his lessons.
It remains to be seen how the NAACP uses those lessons. Other organizations like the National Urban League or 100 Black Men already emphasize economic development and family-mentoring programs.
Today’s NAACP sees their goal as “social justice,” not “social service,” as Julian Bond, the group’s chairman, has put it.
But the families left behind by the civil rights revolution need both.
