by CKR
We’ve tried to minimize our commentary on the Democratic primary race here at WhirledView. There are a number of reasons for that, perhaps foremost that we feel we can contribute more to the discussion through analysis and our various expertises than through partisanship.
So I’ve thought long and hard about saying something about Barack Obama’s speech on race in America. I’ve waited a bit because it seems to me that the response to it will be more important than the speech itself.
Lyndon Johnson took a big gamble in signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Not so much a gamble in one sense; he knew that it would lose the South’s support for the Democratic Party. He was right. In another sense, it was indeed a gamble, and he was on the right side there: most of us now recognize that it was the right thing to do.
It was an enormous change, and the Republican Party’s willingness to politicize racial differences in the service of increasing its power (Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”) contributed to the exploding tensions of the late sixties and early seventies. Perhaps even without that politicization, dreadful things would have happened, as they happened before in changes between the races in America.
But no society can endure continuing open strife between internal groups, and we found the way to a ceasefire. We would not discuss such matters openly, except in extremely structured venues. Like any ceasefire, it was unstable and occasionally breached. As Obama noted, the discussion went on in segregated forums. That tended to harden views into patterns.
The occasional breaches resulted in brittle addenda to the ceasefire which allayed the tensions of the moment but became stilted and even foolish in extended application. This was called political correctness by its detractors. Predominantly, those detractors would allow free speech for those who would keep to the old racial expectations; perhaps not quite Jim Crow, but, well, you know about those people. Others were uncomfortable with the awkwardness occasioned by these addenda but didn’t see a way to go beyond the ceasefire. Still others used them as revenge for all the wrongs that had gone before.
Mutual agreements not to discuss difficult issues can produce dysfunctional behaviors, even outside their immediate vicinity. I’m wondering if this ceasefire and its addenda have been instrumental in the dysfunctional politics of the past couple of decades.
After the Democrats lost the South, they seemed also to lose their way. The “Reagan Democrats” was a coded reference to the triumph of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, along with Reagan’s populism. But other currents were operating. The young people who participated in the civil rights marches and the hippie communes and CORE and the Black Panthers and the marches against the war were having children. Many of those children were interracial. Parents adopted children by other criteria than skin match. And, whatever their colors, many of those children grew up with very different expectations and playmates than those who grew up in the forties and fifties.
In fact, it now appears that some large numbers of those under forty simply don’t see the world the way those of us above that age do. For them, color and gender have faded. I’m not convinced they’re completely gone, but those factors are not as high a priority as they were for their elders.
We don’t know how Obama’s gamble will play out. It may yet turn out that Americans aren’t ready to move forward from that ceasefire. But YouTube viewing of the speech is high, over three million at this writing. The sheer volume of coverage impresses. And Chris Wallace admonished his colleagues to move away from the superficial while he continued to disagree with Obama.
Here are some reactions that are worth reading. More are arriving every day.
David Broder
Jonetta Rose Barras – “He’s Preaching to a Choir I’ve Left”
New York Times on Easter Sermons
A bit of history from the New York Times
On “mixed marriages” (I can recall when this phrase could be applied to someone of Dutch ancestry marrying someone of German ancestry)
LA Times talks to people talking about race
Boston Globe – Bringing Race to the Forefront
History Unfolding – A Turning Point
Just to remind you how times have changed – and not – Sara Jane Olsen again
And I’ll let Glenn Greenwald wade into some of the muck that’s coming out too.