Obama calls for end to US racial 'stalemate'
Rejects, offers context for minister's sermons
PHILADELPHIA - In response to calls to condemn provocative sermons by his former pastor, Barack Obama yesterday delivered one of his own: a frank reflection on the problems of race in America that rejected the minister's words but also drew a broader personal and historical context in which to read them.
"Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now," Obama declared in a speech his advisers said would be among his campaign's most important. "We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality."
Offering nuanced lessons of his own biography, Obama presented himself as a figure uniquely able to communicate across lines of race and religion. As he has often during the campaign, Obama suggested that the crucial cleavage in American life is instead the generational one: the 66-year-old Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. and his peers, he said, had let "questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview."
"The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society," Obama said. "It's that he spoke as if our society was static, as if no progress has been made."
In a 37-minute speech delivered before a presidential-style backdrop at the National Constitution Center here, Obama presented his candidacy as evidence of that progress - he has become the country's first viable black presidential contender on the basis of white as well as black support.
Eliciting laughs and mumbles of assent more frequently than cheers and applause from a racially mixed audience of prominent local supporters, a low-key Obama renewed his call for national unity, saying that breaking the nation's "racial stalemate" would be necessary for the country to deal with its vexing policy concerns.
Yet, Obama had avoided directly addressing the subject of race for much of his yearlong campaign until forced in the past week to respond to recently unearthed sermons by Wright, the recently retired pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, which Obama has attended for two decades.
In videos of the sermons, given over a number of years and widely viewed in recent days on television and the Internet, Wright referred to the United States as the "US of KKK A" and said the country had been built on ideas of "white supremacy and black inferiority." In another repeatedly played clip, he preached just after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that "America's chickens are coming home to roost."
On Monday, Obama said the controversy over Wright had been "a distraction from the core message of our campaign." A national Rasmussen Reports tracking poll conducted since the videos surfaced late last week indicated that Obama's favorable rating had fallen 5 percentage points, to 47 percent. A majority of voters polled over the weekend said that they were less likely to vote for Obama because of Wright.
Obama acknowledged in his speech that Wright had made "controversial" comments while in his presence, but a spokeswoman said later that Obama had not been in the pews for the "remarks that have caused this recent firestorm," as he put it in the speech.
Even as he condemned Wright's rhetoric, Obama refused to disavow the man who performed his wedding and baptized his two daughters.
"I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community," said Obama, comparing Wright to his white grandmother, "a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."
"These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love," Obama went on.
Analysts said that Obama's speech, while politically necessary, was also politically risky, challenging both blacks and whites to help bridge the racial divide while airing resentments often only heard within each group.
"I don't know that I've ever seen a politician lay things out there like that - and talk about it in that way," said Ken Lawrence, a Democratic consultant in suburban Philadelphia who is not working for a presidential candidate. "My sense is that what he said is not good enough for some people. But I don't know what more he could have said."
Obama took an unconventional approach to the issue of race for a national political figure, said Vanessa Beasley, a communications professor at Vanderbilt University who has written about race and presidential rhetoric.
"That's not part of the genre of presidential campaign speech or presidential discourse generally," she said, "Usually in that genre, you talk about 'the American dream,' the usual tropes of American nationalism. . . . The risk is in where he puts emphasis and if it offers too much balance."
Despite some comparisons beforehand to the circumstances surrounding John F. Kennedy's 1960 address to Baptist ministers about his Catholic faith, Obama did not distance himself from his denomination - and instead introduced new complexities to the debate over Wright's remarks. Obama praised Wright's public service, community involvement, and emphasis on a "quintessentially American - and yes, conservative - notion of self-help."
"I think it was harder and bigger than the Kennedy speech. Race is a deeper, darker divide than discrimination against Roman Catholics," said former US senator Harris Wofford of Pennsylvania. In introducing Obama, Wofford praised his "deep, serious, and civil search for the common ground" and appeared to compare the Illinois senator to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
Obama - the child of a white mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya who described a family representing "every race and every hue" - spoke of black America in the first person and white America in the third. He assumed an anthropologist's distance when he offered a primer on the rituals and practices of the black church tradition.
But much of the speech was self-referential, as Obama recounted "a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts."
Speaking hours later and just blocks away in Philadelphia, Obama's rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, said: "I did not have the chance to see or read yet Senator Obama's speech, but I'm very glad that he gave it. It's a very important topic. Issues of race and gender have been complicated throughout our history and they're complicated throughout this primary campaign."
Yet Clinton avoided further discussion, turning quickly to the more prosaic challenges of governing. She noted the local closure of a stretch of Interstate 95 "because of our failure to deal with our infrastructure."
"It's not the speeches a president delivers," Clinton said later. "It's whether a president delivers on the speeches."
Sasha Issenberg can be reached at sissenberg@globe.com. 