Set aside the politics of Sen. Barack Obama’s speech on race if you can. Leave it to others to discuss how effective he was in quieting the fury around the red-hot words of his ex-pastor.
Focus, instead, on a powerful lesson in writing about race.
Obama’s speech in Philadelphia confronted the controversy over the words of his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose condemnations of U.S. foreign policy and powerful white people have been caught in an endless media loop on talk radio and cable TV.
If you take nothing else from the speech, recognize the essential elements to reporting on race relations — elements generally lost in so much of the pundit- and poll-driven coverage of the presidential nominating process. Like good reporting on race, here’s what the speech did:
- Provided context
- Embraced complexity
- Got past platitudes
It includes the sort of history lesson that places those speeches in a broader context of faith, tradition and race relations. And it extends to the background information Obama provided about himself to help explain how he’s come to his ideas about race and about his former pastor.
“The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through — a part of our union that we have yet to perfect,” Obama said. “… Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point.”
You need only talk to a few friends, no matter their generation, race or ethnicity, to learn how much reminding the public needs about how we arrived at this point in race relations.
“This,” Obama says to finish off the point, “is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up.”
I find that journalists sometimes balk at the idea of including such context when talking about racial conflict, particularly in stories about the explosive things people are wont to say. Reporters fear that by offering this background, they’re providing an explanation for the inexcusable; that they’re opening an escape hatch to bigots.
Give people information. Trust them to sort out what meaning the context gives to the facts before them.
Complexity is closer to reality. There is an almost irresistible pull in journalism toward the simple, but there is hardly ever a time when things are black and white where race is concerned. Few saints are totally saints; few sinners all sinner. In his speech, Obama lays out the complex truths of his former pastor, his church, his racial history and his relationship to it all.
“The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America,” he said of Trinity United Church of Christ.
“And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. … He contains within him the contradictions — the good and the bad — of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.”
It may be that some people would rather that journalists just answer the simple question: Saint or sinner? Most times, inconveniently, the answer is: Yes. Give them the messy, more interesting truth that requires we employ brains, not reflexes.
The deeper truth lies past platitudes. The safe territory in talking — or reporting — about race is to stick to the “I-don’t-see-color” shallows. That’s often the sort of thing people say first, rich with platitudes, rife with ambiguity. The real story comes after the second question. (“What do you mean, Ms. Ferraro, when you say, ‘If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position’?'”)
People wonder why journalists don’t ask the second question. Part of the answer is that some of us are afraid it’ll look like we’re picking at wounds. Part of the answer is that some are afraid they’ll reveal their own incompetence on the topic. Part of the answer is that some of us think we already know the answer.
It’s that second question, though, that plunges us beneath the platitudes to the raw, more revealing truths Obama points to in the speech.
“That anger” of black men like Wright, he said, “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. … to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”
Think what you will about the politics of his speech, but heed the lessons. Hear the stories in the context, the complexity, the sub-platitude opinions. They are about our secret struggles over the family, friends and neighbors we embrace who also harbor, even espouse, prejudices that would embarrass us and offend others. Journalists could tell stories about wrestling sometimes to get out even a sentence, even the word “black” or “white” or “Latino” [or is it Hispanic?] when the person sitting across from us is not from our group.
We could climb down into what immigration reporter Elizabeth Llorente calls the “phantom dialogue” underway across the back fence or in the beauty salon that “we” frequently have about “them.” Demand that kind of depth and breadth in your everyday journalism. You may not be able to close the chasm Obama conjures in his speech, but you can stop making it wider.