While Barack Obama's speech on race last Tuesday was widely hailed, even by some conservatives, it was hardly flawless, nor will it put an end to race playing a role in this election. To the contrary, it will almost certainly come to be seen as an inflection point, a place at which the nature of the racial discourse changed, not where it ended or began.
The right's continued racism has been noted this weekend by both David Neiwart and Glenn Greenwald. While Greenwald treats it more tentatively, reflecting his lawyerly background and temperament, he sticks to his guns against "balanced" tut-tutting that would characterize what he's doing as "guilt-by-association" no different than that practiced on the right. Neiwert, however, quite literarly, wrote the book (Rush, Newspeak and Fascism [PDF]) on the orchestrated transmission of hard right (typically, but not always racist or anti-semetic) memes from the fringes into the mainstream, though that isn't his focus in this weekend's post. It's just something that everyone should be thoroughly familiar with by now. Trust me, we're going to need it.
I'll have something to say about both posts on the flip, but first, there's this, from Mel Reeves at Black Agenda Report:
When did Black liberation theology and the prophetic tradition of the black church become "hate speech"? When did asserting that racism was and remains foundational to the nation's settlement, development and culture become itself "racist" and "anti-American"? When did advocacy on a wide range of fronts and issues begin to take a back seat to the advancement of political figures who build careers and multiracial electoral coalitions by convincing whites that they have repudiated what Barack Obama famously called the "excesses of the sixties and seventies."
And, indeed, if one looks at the paragraph of Obama's speech in which he distances himself from Wright, it is clearly troubling from a reality-base perspective...
