Exec. Dir. of New York Civil Rights Coalition: Obama Blew It
Michael Meyers is the executive director of the New York Civil Rights coalition and former assistant national director of the NAACP. In short: a man who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to race and civil rights issues. He wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in which he criticizes Obama for his race-speech. “Obama blew it,” Meyers writes.
Why did Obama “blew it”? After all, aren’t so many newspapers, pundits and liberals – mostly – telling us that his speech was great; not just with regards to Obama’s style, but also with regards to its content? Well yes, but Meyes disagrees with them.
In fact, I’d say that considering the nation’s undivided attention to this all-important speech, which gave him an unrivaled opportunity to lift us out of racial and racist thinking, Obama blew it.
I waited in vain for our hybrid presidential candidate to speak the simple truth that there is no such thing as “race,” that we all belong to the same race — the human race. I waited for him to mesmerize us with a singular and focused appeal to hold all candidates to the same standards no matter their race or their sex or their age. But instead Obama gave us a full measure of racial rhetoric about how some of us with an “untrained ear” — meaning whites and Asians and Latinos — don’t understand and can’t relate to the so-called black experience.
Well, I am black, and I can’t relate to a “black experience” that shields and explains old-style black ministers who rant and rave about supposed racial differences and about how America ought to be damned. I long ago broke away from all associations and churches that preached the gospel of hate and ethnic divisiveness — including canceling my membership in 100 Black Men of America Inc., when they refused my motion to admit women and whites. They still don’t. I was not going to stay in any group that assigned status or privileges of membership based solely on race or gender.
We and our leaders — especially our candidates for the highest office in the land — must repudiate all forms of racial idiocy and sexism, and be judged by whether we still belong to exclusionary or hateful groups. I don’t know any church that respects, much less reflects, my personal beliefs in the absolute equality of all people, so I choose not to belong to any of them. And I would never — as have some presidential candidates — accept the endorsement of preachers of the gospel according to the most racist and sexist of doctrines…
I expected Obama, who up to now had been steering a perfect course away from the racial boxes of the past, to challenge racial labels and so-called black experiences. We’re all mixed up, and if we haven’t yet been by the process of miscegenation, trans-racial adoptions and interracial marriage, we sure ought to get used to how things will be in short order…
We can’t be united as a nation if we continue to think racially and give credence to racial experiences and differences based on ethnicity, past victim status and stereotypical categories. All of these prejudices surrounding tribe-against-tribe are old-hat and dysfunctional — especially the rants of ministers, of whatever skin color or religion, who appeal to our base prejudices and to superstitions about our supposed racial differences. The man or woman who talks plainly about our commonality as a race of human beings, about our future as one nation indivisible, rather than about our discredited and disunited past, is, I predict, likely to finish ahead of the pack and do us a great public service.
I think that this is perhaps the best take on Obama’s speech. Meyers analyzes Obama’s speech from a different perspective than most have done thus far, which is why it’s incredibly valuable (even if you don’t agree with it). Having said that, I’m obviously biased, because I was nodding my head in agreement constantly while reading this op-ed. The problem is that people constantly focus on skin color. They shouldn’t. They should be colorblind (which is also why affirmative action isn’t a good thing).
And real leaders on this issue, should say so time and again.
Also important to point out is this paragraph:
That would have been the forward-looking message of a visionary candidate. But Obama erred by looking backward — as far back as slavery. What does slavery have to do with the price of milk at the grocery store? He referenced continuing segregation, especially segregated public schools, but stopped short. What is he going to do about them? How does he feel about public schools for black boys or single-sex public schools and classes? What does the gospel according to Wright say about such race-based and gender-specific schemes for getting around our civil rights laws?
Michael, as much as you surf the web looking for people who reinforce your own view on Obama or his speech, I’m sure you’re aware that there are at least as many people (actually my impression is that there are many more) who think he did great?
I know that it doesn’t really matter what Obama said, he was already damned in your book long before, but the fact is that as much as you would wish it away, plenty of thoughtful and non-partisan people actually did like his speech and really did take away from it an actual positive message.
I know that it doesn’t really matter what Obama said, he was already damned in your book long before, but the fact is that as much as you would wish it away, plenty of thoughtful and non-partisan people actually did like his speech and really did take away from it an actual positive message.
Actually, the people who think he answered the relevant questions are his supporters and pundits in the liberal media. The rest of the people think that:
1. The speech was good, but he didn’t answer the questions, thus he still has to answer them.
2. The speech sounded great, but when you look at it he didn’t say anything that truly changes the scene.
3. The speech didn’t sound good, and its content wasn’t great either.
And feel free to publish a post praising the speech and its content
I don’t think it was all that, but if you’re impressed, well, share your thoughts!
I keep thinking people must be reading a damn different speech.
"He should have depicted his minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., as a symbol of the dysfunctional angry men who are stuck in the past and who must yield to a new generation of color-blind, hopeful Americans and to a new global economy in which we will look on our neighbors’ skin color no differently than how we look on their eye color."
yet from the speech
"But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam. As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all….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. 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. And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. 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….I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union."It’s rare that every single criticism of a speech has actually been delt with if one bothers to read and think about the speech. You might disagree with some of his answers, but there is just about nothing which he didn’t touch on in this speech.
An incredibly important response to Obama’s inability to see the forest for the trees. I’m hopeful you’re the person able to transcend the racial divide.
The speech is irrelevant, those against Obama would see nothing good in it, those for would. It does not matter if he gave a speech at all, the outcome is preconceived.