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Page: Obama speech frames new racial doctrine
How should we think about racism in the age of President Barack Obama? In his first speech as president to the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization, Obama's answer to that question was a rich mixture of his presidential agenda, Bill Cosby's self-help spiel, the Rev. Jesse Jackson's political push and rapper Jay-Z's oratorical flow.
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Yet, as a historical turning point, what he said was less important than who was saying it. America's first president of African descent takes office in the same year as the 100th anniversary of a group that helped make it possible, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The irony of that happy coincidence is how much it haunted conversations at the convention with a nagging question: As civil rights-era protests have declined and blacks participate at all levels of politics, is the NAACP still relevant?
Obama chose to answer that question by reframing it. Regardless of how relevant it may or may not be at the end of its first century, he offered ways for it to become more relevant in the next.
After his obligatory salute to the debt that he and other successful African Americans owe to the NAACP's past leaders, he left no doubt that he believes "the pain" of prejudice and discrimination against blacks, Latinos, gays, lesbians, Muslims and others is real and "still felt." Nevertheless, he pointed out, they are not "even the steepest barriers to opportunity today."
More difficult, he said, are the often-neglected "structural inequalities that our nation's legacy of discrimination has left behind." This led into a list of Obama policies and programs that, while color-blind in their application, have particular importance to black Americans who have been disproportionately left behind.
Yet, the most notable portion of the speech came with his self-help message, the same message that last year the Rev. Jackson was caught by an open TV network microphone bitterly deriding as "talking down to black people." At the NAACP gathering, Obama received rousing "amen"s as he said, "Government programs alone won't get our children to the Promised Land."
He called for "a new mindset, a new set of attitudes" against an internalized sense of limitation in which "so many in our community have come to expect so little of ourselves."
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