Obama’s Speech and the Politics of Race and Religion

By J. Kameron Carter

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Note to Editors:
J. Kameron Carter, associate professor of theology and black church studies at Duke Divinity School, is the author of the forthcoming book Race: A Theological Account.

Durham, NC -- Tuesday’s speech by Barack Obama was inevitable because a collision of race, religion and politics in America was always inevitable.

Race as a religious matter and race as a political matter are written into America’s inner architecture. But until now it has been written there under the terms of a more or less unstated pact: speak not about race in American politics, and certainly speak not about it explicitly.

Now one may speak of it under the auspices of the problem of the welfare state. Or in terms of the problem of illegal immigration. Or in terms of the problem of inner city and gang violence. But one may not speak a word about the real problem, the real question of race, and of the ways in which it is woven into the political fabric of the nation as its original sin.

To speak of such unsavory matters in the context of politics is to be deemed a "race man." And once deemed a race man, a candidate is dismissed, his political aspirations dashed against the stones.

The significance of the Obama speech is that he took on this issue in such a way as to resist reduction to a race man.

In it he drew together several realities: the pain that his former pastor, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, voiced in his sermons, a pain that must be interpreted inside of the tradition of black prophetic Christianity; the realities that mark Obama himself as an interracial person who is yet racialized as black; the complexities of his family situation, particularly his embrace of a white grandmother despite comments she made about fear of black men; and the realities of struggling common, everyday white and brown middle-class folk in America trying to make it.

Obama sought to narrate race in such a way as to cut to the quick of the matter: the realities of race and how the destructive effects of racism damage everyone. And rather than "transcending" race or denying the effects of racism, he called us to cast our eyes in hope toward the possibilities of what can be.

The challenge of Obama’s speech is that it advanced a politics of race that says post-racial politics cannot amount to a refusal to remember. It requires memory, even though it is more comfortable not to remember. We remember for the sake of being responsible for the present so that we can chart a new American future.

Obama had no choice but to distance himself from Wright, whose comments, when reduced to a couple of video snippets and 30-second sound bites drawn from his sermons, were racially inflammatory and politically incendiary. The reaction threatened to derail Obama’s presidential bid.

Obama’s speech therefore was arguably the most important of his political career: its immediate objective was to rescue his campaign.

Yet the significance of Obama’s Philadelphia speech should not be measured ultimately by how it affected his run at the presidency. Rather, it should be viewed as Obama’s effort to take the American public to a new place in engaging the fraught intersection of race, religion and politics.

It is worth noting that in disavowing his former pastor’s remarks, Obama also held up his former pastor as a symbol of the larger frame of black prophetic Christianity. This Christianity is a voice of the nation’s conscience, calling us to our better lights. Black prophetic Christianity lives from hope and from a memory of America’s less-than-stellar racial past that is oriented toward America’s future possibilities.

This is the more perfect union that Obama imagines. It is a union that reconfigures race and thereby religion and politics. But the reconfiguring requires that we own a difficult history as the pathway to a different and better future.

Is America up for this? I must say, I have my doubts.