Obama speech brings race to the fore

In some sense, the 2008 presidential competition has always been a battle over race and… In some sense, the 2008 presidential competition has always been a battle over race and gender. However, for the most part people have been afraid to call it that. Sure, there’s been the constant recognition of Barack Obama as a black man and of Hillary Clinton as a white woman. But aside from discussions over how these statuses could affect the chances of each candidate, there hasn’t been too much said about what race and gender mean in politics or society at large.

Or at least, that was the case up until last Tuesday. In response to the comments made by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama gave a speech March 18 that has quickly been labeled his “More Perfect Union” speech, and that has already been watched more than 3 million times on YouTube.

In the speech, Obama addressed several issues fundamental to the discussion of racism in the United States and specifically stated that it is a real issue that time and political correctness have not solved.

I was surprised by the speech in several ways. For one, even though it was largely made up of rhetoric and generalizations across the issue of racism, it was rhetoric like I’d never heard before.

Here was a major politician and presidential candidate stating quite frankly that there are still differences in the ways people of different colors interact and think about each other, and that many of the injuries of the past have not yet healed.

This goes hand in hand with another surprise, which was Obama’s characterization of political correctness as a distraction from the real issues surrounding race. It’s an interesting viewpoint, to think of being politically correct as just a sort of cushy, kumbaya sort of idealism that states that people should avoid any possible way of being offensive to anyone else and taking for granted that we’re all equal. And while equality and civility are certainly good things, enforced political correctness is going about it the wrong way.

It’s like the difference between treating the symptoms of a disease and treating the actual source of it. Just because people aren’t actively shouting racial slurs at each other doesn’t mean that racism has gone away, just like putting an ice pack on someone’s head won’t cure them of a fever. It might help, but it’s not a permanent or effective solution.

And yet, political correctness has really grabbed onto the American psyche in what I would almost call a stranglehold. While even the least instances of racism or any implication that one race is unequal to another in any way are seized upon and lambasted by the media, at the same time, people can be nervous to walk through the “bad” part of town after dark or share a seat on the bus with someone of another color.

But what does this really mean? To Obama, it means that racism is a problem in the United States that is still divisive and painful, even if we refuse to acknowledge that it exists except in specific contexts, like the Rev. Wright spectacle. However, I think it also indicates that not only is racism still an issue, but it is an issue that people are afraid to address exactly because it’s so painful and divisive.

For example, look at Geraldine Ferraro. She slipped up and said something that brought the issue of race to mind in a potentially negative light, and two seconds later she stepped down from the Clinton campaign. The same thing happened with Don Imus just about a year ago, and Bill O’Reilly faced a close call last September when he visited Sylvia’s in Harlem. People immediately jumped on these comments, without bothering to think of the potentially millions of other people in the country who might think the same way but don’t have the chance to speak on national media.

Unfortunately, lambasting racism in isolated celebrity incidents does about as much to change people’s attitudes as poking an anthill with a stick does to make the ants leave your yard.

All it really does is stir things up and make people angry, because everyone holds some sort of racial view. There is no one who is 100 percent not racist. It’s like Stephen Colbert’s joke about “not seeing race” – it’s only funny because everyone sees race.

The problem, of course, is what to do about it. How is it possible to address deep-seated psychological conceptions in a way that makes them less important, without drawing attention to those psychological flaws in a negative way? I don’t think anyone really knows the answer, unfortunately. But what should be clear is that political correctness for the sake of being politically correct is about as far from a solution as possible.

E-mail Richard at rab53@pitt.edu with your ideas on solving a problem that’s been around for thousands of years.