Double consciousness in a new era: Why Obama's speech mattered
By Tom Baxter
Southern Political Report
March 18, 2008 — Whether the speech Barack Obama gave Tuesday will repair the political problem it was meant to address will take a while to know. His campaign shouldn’t expect it to, entirely. Careful tending will be needed over the next several weeks, or the furor over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s remarks could cost Obama the Democratic nomination. And like the swift boat controversy in 2004, the toll his pastor’s remarks have taken on his campaign may not be known until November. But no matter what happens this year, Obama’s speech will probably live up to the extraordinary praise it received Tuesday and take its place in future anthologies – however they anthologize in the future – of notable speeches in our history. It’s important, after that much breathlessness, to mention briefly what the speech wasn’t. It wasn’t the Big Speech he gave at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, full of rhetorical flourishes. He was flatter in his delivery, actually, than on the average campaign stop. For what it’s worth, he was also 40 minutes late getting to the podium. What made the speech important was nothing particularly of the moment, but what it meant as a marker for who we think we are -- a constantly shifting question in American history. It’s the first speech in quite a while for which we already have reports of someone – no less than Charles Murray, author of “The Bell Curve” -- waxing enthusiastic after reading it. When W.E.B. Dubois introduced the concept of double consciousness, on the eve of the 20th Century, he was talking about the dilemma of African-Americans in his own time, of “measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Those aren’t words Obama or those of his generation would use to describe their inner selves today. But in an ever more hyphenated world, Dubois’ idea of seeing things through different lenses in the same set of eyes has proven to be intellectually elastic, and useful for talking about many aspects of modern life. The Obama speech could be read as a new – and to those used to thinking of a fundamentally divided America, surprising – twist on the concept of double consciousness. Its critical section is the one in which he relates his divided feelings about the black minister who baptized his children and the white grandmother who helped raise him, and who both expressed racial sentiments he rejected. To understand its importance fully, we have to think of this in a generational perspective. When Martin Luther King Jr. talked about a future America in which “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaves owners” would get together, he was trying to imagine an HDTV world with a black-and-white television set for a model. These days, you’ll find no sharper divide between young and old in America than the opinions they express in surveys about interracial dating and marriage, which in many ways is characterized by their embrace of Obama as a presidential candidate. Racism hasn’t died, but how race is defined and what it means is changing, in flow with an increasingly diverse society. In the future, when politicians address the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners, they will increasingly be talking to the same voters. And chances are they will look back at the speech Obama gave Tuesday as the benchmark for how to do that. |
