The audacity of progress without struggle: analyzing the speech we've all been waiting Obama to make

In light of the ‘incendiary’ remarks by Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama seemed to have no other choice but to finally come out with his ‘race’ speech. After the speech, commentators seemed to all share a similar prognosis/analysis: This is way too hot for me to handle, let’s see how it plays out electorally with white Americans. The sound bites taken from his 35 minute speech is not doing justice at all to his speech and I think in the end, it is going to be the sound bites that do him in. Before I get into my analysis of his speech, I do have give him props for putting it out there the way he did. He could have easily pulled a Romney. (i.e. When Romney gave his speech about being Mormon, he averted the controversy and basically just equated Mormonism with the rest of Christianity) But Obama didn’t. He took this opportunity to integrate his analysis of race/racism into his broader project of unity and what I have termed the politics of transcendence. Also, I need to commend how his comments about transcending the politics of fear that has pervaded the current state of politics as well as resituating the zero-sum game that has been a incessant feature of working-class politics and put it back on the corporations. Kudos. But even with these glimmers of inspiration, I am nevertheless left with wide swaths of unsatisfaction and a bunch of questions.

After reading and listening to his speech twice, I am reminded of something Frederick Douglass once said:

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.”

I am hesitant to label him as the 21st century Booker T. Washington, because this lends itself to a crude caricature that doesn’t do justice to the complexity and contextuality of both Washington and Obama, but it is a concern that runs throughout my analysis.

Let me take a step back though and get into what he actually said.

So he starts off by talking about slavery. For a presidential candidate to talk about slavery, that was shocking. He didn’t mince words, he didn’t beat around the bush; he went straight to the heart of the matter. I give him much kudos for that.

Slavery represents one of the bleakest chapters of American history. And it is also one of the most divisive chapters of American history. White people acknowledge the evil of slavery, but many are tired of hearing about it, particularly as it relates, if at all, to the present. Blacks acknowledge the evil of slavery and many are all too ready and willing to bring it up and tired of other people being tired of it. For many white Americans, their relation to American history is akin to Forrest Gump. They regard the evils of slavery as belonging to a distant past that has no substantive connection to the present. There is a degree of cognitive dissonance between their love/patriotism for this country and their engagement with the sordid details that make up much of American history. And this is all to say that Obama has set the stakes high. His introductory remarks about slavery make it clear that this speech will make or break his campaign.

His account of slavery is pretty good. He ends his discussion on slavery with this: “What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part- through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk – to narrow the gap between the promise of our ieals and the reality of the future.”

What I find so puzzling about his account of slavery is his segue. After talking about slavery, he then goes to talk about his run for the presidency and how “we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together” and “how we hold common hopes.” What???? How exactly does that connect with slavery? Didn’t you just mention the fact that this country went to war to get rid of slavery? Isn’t the fact that a war had to be waged proof that we don’t have common hopes and that some problems are so urgent that we can’t wait for everybody to get on board. Most white Southerners did not want to get rid of slavery. There was no common hope between white southerners and their slaves. White southerners were forced to do the right thing. So to talk about common hopes and coming together makes absolutely no sense in regards to American slavery.

It would seem to be the case that Obama wants to acknowledge the deep-seated historical basis of racism without necessarily giving proper due to how that racism was overcome. Yes, he mentions protests and struggle, but I would argue he gives it short shrift. He not only downplays the many people who had to sacrifice their lives in order for the rest of America to finally see the light, but he also denigrates the righteous indignation that many people carry knowing that great people had to become martyrs for others to see the light.

Obama depicts Rev. Wright as understandable but distorted. Obama sympathetically situates Wright’s indignation as a product of a particular generation, a generation that grew up with Jim Crow, but nonetheless regards this kind of indignation as unproductive and distracting.

If I had the opportunity to ask Obama a question, I would ask, “is what Rev. Wright said any more indignant than what William Lloyd Garrison said?” In 1845, William Lloyd Garrison said in a speech that “the American states are united by a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell.” Garrison refers to the Constitution as “an instrument of oppression unsurpassed in the criminal history of the world” and goes on to say that “to call government thus constituted a democracy, is to insult the understanding of mankind.” It was these indignant speeches that helped pushed the U.S. into abolishing slavery. It was these indignant words that helped expose the hypocrisy and establish freedom for millions of slaves.

If Obama’s depiction of history is correct, then we shouldn’t have needed Garrison. All we would have needed to do is come together, dismiss any sort of indignation because it necessarily leads to ‘despair or cynicism’, and find a common stake. But my understanding of history leaves me to believe that if you want to get rid of something like slavery, you can’t wait on everybody. Fact is, most didn’t want to get rid of slavery. Most either were at worse supportive of slavery, at best, indifferent to it. The elimination of slavery required indignation. It required a degree of impatience. People kept telling the abolitionists to wait. The electoral process will eventually phase slavery out. The elimination of slavery required the acknowledgement that not only are there bad people in this country but there is a lot of apathy in this country. And sometimes that apathy needs to be rocked. That to line up ideals with reality, people have to die. Martin Luther King understood this. He knowingly encouraged women and kids to march in Selma, even though he knew they would most likely get harassed, beaten, and killed. Progress comes with a price. It shouldn’t have to, but it does. And when Obama gets indignant over Wright’s indignation, then Obama can’t help but give short shrift to the struggle that progress entails. You got to rage against the machine if you want to change the machine.

It is this retelling of American history that makes me draw on the Booker T. Washington analogy. Both didn’t shy away from the dark corridors of American history, but their prescription was to nevertheless dehistoricize the present. Basic premise is this: We got this far through struggle, but what we need now is to stop struggling and start focusing on the “conservative notion of self-help.” Struggle is what got us through the past, but self-help is what will get us to the future. We need to stop being angry and start being productive. So what Obama is saying isn’t anything new. He wants us to forsake struggle, forsake indignation, forsake the politics of opposition and embrace democracy, embrace consensus decision-making, embrace our commonalities, and embrace the politics of transcendence. By doing so, we will get change.

But what he fails to mention is that democracy is what brought on slavery. Consensus decision-making is exactly the excuse the framers of the constitution gave when they made allowances for slavery. It was their embracing of the commonality that they were all white men, that encouraged a toleration for slavery. It was the politics of transcendence that overshadowed the politics of brutal dehumanization.

Now one can say, Obama is different. And of course he is. But when he vilifies the kind of righteous indignation professed by Rev.Wright, then I can’t help but see Obama as more of an apologist of how things are, as Booker T. Washington was in his day, then an agent of progress. To harken back to the words of Douglass, to want the rain without the thunder and lightning is audacity at its finest.