Obama's Gambit

For those who take the time to read Barack Obama’s speech of Tuesday, March 18, they might find a few things to surprise them. Certainly they will find much more than the headlines suggest, which uniformly focus on Obama’s “repudiation” of Rev. Wright, or his “continued relationship” with him. They will find more than a treatise on “anger,” as Amanda Carpenter has insinuated in her townhall article on the subject.

What people who care to look into his speech will find is something of the truth once articulated by Walt Whitman. In a poem reflecting on what it meant to be American, he wrote “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” Obama’s gambit is that his speech will speak to audiences that contradict each other. And that they might, then, begin speaking to him, and to each other.

This would, of course, be no mean feat. Traditionally there has been very little honest discussion of race in America, especially at the political or constitutional level. Obama understands this history better than most politicians. He said that our Constitution was “stained” with the original sin of slavery, a sin committed by our venerable founding fathers that has forever been visited upon their descendents.

This is not a statement characteristic of politicians, who usually do not like to suggest our founding fathers got anything wrong in the Constitution. Compare it, for instance, with George W. Bush’s halting and inept invocation of the infamous Dred Scott v. Sanford during a 2004 debate with John Kerry. Slavery (said our highest executive officer charged with defending the U.S. Constitution) wasn’t in the Constitution. Wrong, Mr. President. Even schoolchildren know better.

So does Obama. One gathers he also has a much better sense of why race has historically been such a difficult subject. The great sin of slavery was embarrassing enough that the generations that followed Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and Washington found it difficult to negotiate. By the 1830s, slaveholders faced an increasingly vocal and self-righteous abolitionist enemy, determined to judge not just the sin of slavery, but the sins of slaveholders. Abolitionists denounced them from the pulpit, in their newspapers and pamphlets, and in petitions that they shipped off to the U.S. Congress.

Slaveholders demanded that abolitionists shut up. They won a gag order in Congress that prevented the national legislature from ever discussing petitions touching on slavery, and each of the slaveholding states prohibited the publication or circulation of abolitionist tracts. Some demanded that northern states take similar steps. Free states declined, and abolitionists refused to quit.

It is easy for us historically to admire the abolitionists and despise the slaveholders. It is much more difficult to coolly assess the net effect of this simultaneous bedlam and silence: a real dysfunction in racial discourse, one in which radicals shouted past one another and the vast majority of Americans could not participate. The resultant coalition-building into sectional parties split America politically, constitutionally, and militarily. The result was more than half a million dead and a generation scarred. Slavery was done away with. So too was the Constitution that protected slavery.

When Obama referenced this struggle in his speech, he did not do so to excoriate the Constitution. Sure it was stained with sin. But the same document offered redemption in its sweeping assumptions of equal citizenship under the law, and its promise of liberty and justice that would be perfected over time. In short, said Obama, the means to change even the Constitution’s meaning—to redeem the sinner and advance the cause of liberty—was embedded in the Constitution itself.

Intellectually, this makes Obama the heir of Thomas Jefferson and, perhaps more fittingly, Frederick Douglass. Both these colossal figures believed the Constitution to be a blueprint for democratic action and change. Both believed that it was really only “the people themselves” who could change the meaning of the Constitution. Both envisioned a country full of agitators who would never give up the struggle.

This call for struggle marks Obama as a constitutional aspirationalist. Nothing new here—this has been his message for some time. What makes his voice refreshing is his promise that our current, poisoned racial discourse might be healed through real dialogue. He referenced that oh-so-American problem of silence. We feel uncomfortable bringing up race precisely when it is most important. Should it be any surprise, then, that blacks speak differently in the barbershop or in the church than when in mixed company? Or that whites don’t feel able to speak about race openly? Here the racial current and “privilege” do not run in the same stream. Obama referenced the frustration felt by many of the white working class, none of whom really feel that they have gained much by happening to be white.

And most importantly, he made room for them all. Where politicians usually spend their time being sunny and asking us to be “kinder, gentler” or “uniters” or whatever, Obama freely embraced the need to speak openly about such anger. About missed opportunities. And he warned everyone that to overlook the multiple realities that make up “America,” to ignore the anger that comes from it, is to repudiate America itself. America is large. It contains multitudes.

This is Obama’s gambit: his faith in the decency of Americans to come together despite internal divisions. Contrary to what many pundits are declaring, he is not walking a tightrope or trying to thread a needle. This was not a case of a politician saying one thing to one crowd and one thing to another. This was aimed at all of us. He has pointed out to us, as a nation, our own internal contradictions. Will we look away, or within?