Did the conversation about race come and go with The Speech?

No. Some Democratic backers of Barack Obama and some media (backers of Obama) want to believe he gave the country a new and heightened perspective on the issue of race in America, and put the controversy of Pastor Jeremiah Wright to rest. They are wishing it away.

The analyses and commentaries are all over the place, folks are still trying to figure out how much of a problem we still have with race in a country that largely thought we had moved beyond those divisions, especially with the candidacy of Barack Obama. There are a lot of interesting essays out there, but this one by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus is particularly good for its respectful scrutiny and keen insights.

Obama’s Philadelphia speech in response to the furor generated by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s preaching was in many ways brilliant and admirable…Is there any other national politician today capable of offering in public such a candid and personal reflection on an issue of such great moment?

But, let’s take a closer look at that speech, says RJN.

Slavery is, politically speaking, the “original sin” of our national founding, just as Obama says. And he is surely right in forthrightly condemning the “incendiary” words of his pastor. The great offense is not in the Reverend Wright’s “God damn America.” Biblical prophets called down the judgment of God on their people. But they invoked such judgment in order to call the people to repentance. They spoke so harshly because they had such a high and loving estimate of a divine election betrayed. The Reverend Wright—in starkest contrast to, for instance, Martin Luther King Jr., whose death we mark next week—was not calling for America to live up to its high promise. He was pronouncing God’s judgment on a nation whose original and actual sins of racism are beyond compassion, repentance, or forgiveness. He apparently relishes the prospect of America’s damnation.

Which focuses the lens of this scrutiny more sharply.

Perhaps the single most telling statement in the Philadelphia speech is this: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.” The most reasonable interpretation of that statement, maybe the only reasonable interpretation, is that the Reverend Wright represents “the black community.” This ignores the great majority of blacks in America, who are in the working and middle classes and participate fully in the opportunities and responsibilities of the American experience.

The senator lends his prestige to the claim promoted by sundry race hustlers that Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, and Bill Cosby, along with millions of other black Americans, are not black enough to be part of “the black community.” One can understand why a Harvard law-school graduate born in Hawaii with a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas would, for political and perhaps personal reasons, seek the street credential of having “roots” in a militantly black sector of the intensely race-conscious city of Chicago. But complicity in the explicit slander of America and the implicit slander of most blacks in America is a very high price to pay for a ticket of admission to “the black community.”

Parsing down the speech even further, Neuhaus takes up the jarring point about how alegedly ordinary pastor Wright’s rhetoric and tirades are in the black experience in America, still.

In his speech, Obama reminded us that eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week in America. He might have done something about that by joining one of the racially integrated churches in his New Hyde Park neighborhood. But of course that would not have given him the “black street creds” that he needed for political, and perhaps personal, reasons. In saying he could not disown the black community represented by the Reverend Wright and his church, Obama, however inadvertently, invited his supporters to join in giving new respectability to old stereotypes. The message was and is: This is how those black folk are. Get used to it.

There’s a lot of squirming still going on over this eruption, this revelation to white America that some simmering (festering, may be more like it) resentment lingers.

It’s true that white folk have spent decades learning the protocols of respect, sensitivity, and fair-mindedness in dealing with race. But you expect black folk to reciprocate by “acting white”? You’re forgetting who was the victimizer and who the victim.

It’s not even that white America is asking black America to ‘forget’. It’s that we all painfully worked through some wrenching decades of reconciliation with our divided past, and so much of white and black America had moved on, together.

By reviving historic stereotypes, Senator Obama’s speech and the uses to which it is being put has dealt a severe blow to race relations in America.