Barack Obama has given the speech. Like how Mitt Romney was dogged by the media about his Mormonism and eventually had to speak about the state of his religion (a very good speech at that), Senator Obama, the first truly viable black candidate in the history of the United States, has been forced to deliver a speech about race. This is something the media has wanted him to do from the outset, especially since President Clinton's relatively tame statements on race before the South Carolina primary and Geraldine Ferraro's even tamer comments last week. The satutaration coverage of Jeremiah Wright this week provided the media with the means to force the senator into giving this speech. My views on the speech are simple, I would rather Barack Obama give a speech like this and lose than win and capitulate to what people wanted him to say. We need to get to a point where we can discuss race without Rush Limbaugh providing a sermon of his own on how we need to merely move on and forget about the past or Al Sharpton boycotting anyone who says something that the reverend himself deems inapprporiate. The scrubbing of America's checkered past prevents those growing up today to learn about those mistakes and make a better future. Does it mean that I hate America or am racist against white people if I merely acknowledge the existence of racial strife in American history? This is not the distant past. Are there not people alive today who knew Jim Crow personally? It was only 54 years ago (the year after before my mother was born) that the Supreme Court declared that school's should be integrated and it took decades for this to be put into practice. It was only 44 and 45 years ago respectively that blacks were granted full protection under law and ensured the right to vote. On the historical timeline, 50 years is the blink of an eye. And this country has made sizable gains with regard to race in that single blink, this is what makes this country great. While social change is always slow, this country has always responded to social injustice in time. But to say that there are not residual effects on society from the old structure today is ignorant. I cannot do the speech justice by describing it here, it is best to read it (here) or watch it in its entirety before media outlets dice it up into five second sound bytes to meet their respective agendas.
