Tension in the Obama campaign

The conversations, debates and introspection on race in America continue, and though they encompass the nation and its leaders, they center on Barack Obama.

After he gave his speech to address the Jeremiah Wright controversy and the racial tension it produced, he was compared by some to leaders ranging from Presidents Lincoln or Kennedy, and Wright to Dr. Martin Luther King. Political analyst Juan Williams explains well why neither analogy is apt, and he offers compelling insights about the candidacy of Barack Obama.

Among his white supporters, race is coincidental, not central, to his political identity. Mr. Obama is to them the candidate who personifies the promise of equal opportunity for all. But as black support has become central to his victories, this idealistic view has been increasingly at war with the portrayal, crafted by the senator to win black support, of him as the black candidate. The terrible tension between these racially distinct views now surrounds and threatens his campaign.

So far, Mr. Obama has been content to let black people have their vision of him while white people hold to a separate, segregated reality. He is a politician and, unlike King, his goal is winning votes, not changing hearts. Still, it is a key break from the King tradition to sell different messages to different audiences based on race, and to fail to challenge racial divisions in the nation.

Juan Williams (for those unfamiliar with him) is a thoughtful, intellectual African American journalist who works for NPR, serves as a Fox News contributor, writes articles like the one here for other publications, and has authored several books, the latest an excellent one called Enough with this subtitle: The Phony Leaders, Dead-end Movements, and Culture of Failure that are Undermining Black America – And What We Can Do About It. He is, as one review says, bold and perceptive.

The WSJ article continues…

Mr. Obama’s major speech on race last month was forced from him only after a political crisis erupted: It became widely known that he’d sat for 20 years in the pews of a church where Rev. Jeremiah Wright lashed out at white people. The minister cursed America as worthy of damnation, made lewd suggestions about the nature of President Clinton’s relationship with black voters, and embraced the paranoid idea that the white government was spreading AIDS among black people. 

Here is where the racial tension at the heart of Mr. Obama’s campaign flared into view. He either shared these beliefs or, lacking good judgment, decided it politically expedient for an ambitious young black politician trying to prove his solidarity with all things black, to be associated with these rants. His judgment and leadership on the critical issue of race is in question.

While speaking to black people, King never condescended to offer Rev. Wright-style diatribes or conspiracy theories. He did not paint black people as victims. To the contrary, he spoke about black people as American patriots who believed in the democratic ideals of the country, in nonviolence and the Judeo-Christian ethic, even as they overcame slavery, discrimination and disadvantage. King challenged white America to do the same, to live up to their ideals and create racial unity. He challenged white Christians, asking them how they could treat their fellow black Christians as anything but brothers in Christ.

Read the whole piece, it’s informative and intellectually honest. Fair, and challenging. What the national debate needs going forward.