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Mar 20, 2008 7:54 am US/Eastern
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A Familiar Road
Jim DeFede Is A Commentator For CBS4 News
MIAMI (CBS4) ―
"Have a nice day," the police officer said with a smirk as he handed me a speeding ticket Tuesday morning.
I said nothing, quietly fuming at being caught in an operation whose primary purpose is to raise revenue for the tiny town of Biscayne Park. It was my own stupidity that annoyed me most of all because I knew that stretch of road along N.E. 6th Avenue is a notorious speed trap. I knew it because I have been caught there before – by the same cop – and I went ahead and sped through there anyway.
Some lessons are hard to learn.
After accepting the ticket and watching the officer drive off, I continued on my way, still seething. Flipping to various radio stations, I stumbled upon Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia.
"I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas," Obama was saying. "I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
"It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one."
This was a speech Obama never wanted to deliver. His was supposed to be a candidate that transcended race.
"At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either 'too black' or 'not black enough,'" Obama maintained. "We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well."
"And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn. On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we've heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike."
Obama had a precarious task before him in explaining his relationship to Rev. Wright, a man he has known for 20 years, a man who performed his marriage and baptized his children. Since Obama has always maintained that words matter, how do you repudiate the Reverend's words without being seen as sacrificing an old friend for political gain?
And perhaps just as important, how do address the larger issue of whether you somehow share, or at the very least have been influenced, by the Reverend's anger?
"Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask?" Obama said. "Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way
"But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS."
Without excusing Rev. Wright's angry words, Obama tried to place them in context. Speaking of the Reverend's generation, he said: "They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them. "
"For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years," he added. "That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings."
"But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races. "
Was Obama influenced by Rev. Wright's words? Obviously, he was.
But, according to Obama, the Reverend's views provided a warning rather than indoctrination.
Obama said something else that caught my ear, as I am sure it caught the attention of many of those who were watching and listening to him, as well.
"I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community," he said. "I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."
And when he said that, I thought of my father, a man I knew to be kind and loving, and a man far smarter than the limited schooling he received would ever suggest. But he was a man who, when I was a child, referred to blacks the same way the other Italian men in my Brooklyn neighborhood referred to them. He called them melanzana, which is Italian for eggplant. Likening a man's skin color to the color of a vegetable, wasn't merely being descriptive, it was being mean and mindlessly bigoted.
I believe I was seven or eight, when I finally asked my father what melanzana meant, and I can recall the pained look on both his and my mother's face. They changed the subject and I never recall hearing my father use that word during the remainder of his life.
The power of Obama's speech was that he examined the issue of race relations – its history and its current state – from both the perspective of blacks and white, offering a view unusual in its frankness.
"Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race," Obama said. "Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
"Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
"Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.
"This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years."
When I reached my destination, I simply sat in my car and listened to the remainder of his speech. On my radio show Tuesday afternoon, callers were mixed on Obama's speech. Some seemed not to hear what he said, others seemed not to care. A few were moved.
But it started a discussion that was long overdue.
And while it may be a road we've been down before, as I said before, some lessons are hard to learn.
You can email Jim DeFede at
jdefede@cbs.com
(© MMVIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)