The importance of this speech for Obama’s debut presidential campaign cannot be overstated. He had to strategically respond to the nature of his relationship with the demonized Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In doing so, he tapped into his ability to speak to many different audiences simultaneously. In one sense, the speech is similar to Booker T. Washington’s famous 1895 address. Whereas Washington belittled his militant contemporaries (“the wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly”),46 Obama rejected Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s indictment of (white) America.
Geneva Smitherman and H. Samy Alim have argued that Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech was central to the hip-hop generation’s admiration of him. “In the midst of the racially charged Reverend controversy,” they suggest, “it was Barack’s delivery of the ‘Race Speech’ in Philadelphia that was perhaps the single most important event that captured the heart of Hip Hop.”47 Smitherman and Alim add that members of the hip-hop community respected how Obama faced his critics head on and “rather than backing down, stood up and said the very words that his detractors were hoping to hear” about Wright. Still, Obama carefully calculated his statements and in the tradition of Booker T. Washington, satisfied large constituents of both blacks and whites in America. At one point, Obama “condemned, in unequivocal terms” Wright’s indictments of America’s racist past and present. Embracing his catchy “hope” and “change” slogans, he rejected Wright’s, and many African Americans’, beliefs that America “is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.”48
This goes against what he said on several occasions to black audiences. At the same time, he praised Wright for what he did in his Chicago community and deduced that his former pastor, like all people, “contains within him the contradictions—the good and the bad—of the community that he has served diligently for so many years” and was molded by his coming of age during an era when racial segregation reigned. In not totally disowning Wright but condemning his sentiments and rhetoric, he strategically compared him to his beloved white grandmother who, Obama confessed, adhered to anti-black racial stereotypes from time to time.
On one level, one could argue that from the generic hip-hop perspective—despite the sentiments of elder statesmen emcees who praised the “Race Speech” like David Banner, Common, and Jay-Z—Obama did not “keep it real.” Obama’s portrayal of African American history in his speech is multilayered and complex. This is similar to how many emcees rap about black history in passing, verses that simply rhyme well and are not necessarily linked to the other messages within the song.
Early in this long speech (approximately forty minutes in length), Obama deemed slavery “this nation’s original sin,” a description that he used years earlier and repeatedly later. He then gave kudos to “Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part” to “deliver slaves from bondage.”49 Unlike when addressing black audiences, he did not, by choice, offer a roll call of enslaved African Americans who themselves contributed to the destruction of slavery. He did not mention any of the countless slave revolts of the Nat Turner type. He did not empower African Americans with agency and did not position the abolition of slavery as a part of the enduring black freedom struggle. Instead, echoing Washington in his famous 1895 Atlanta oration, he understandably talked about all Americans “working together” to “move beyond some of our old racial wounds.”50
At the same time, without delving deeply into the “history of racial injustice in this country,” he maintained that “so many of the disparities that exist in the African American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.” He praised African Americans in the past who “overcame the odds” while also calling upon them to embrace “the burden of our past without being victims of our past.” He did not summon his white audience to face the tangible realities of white privilege, but instead to realize that “the legacy of discrimination … is real and must be addressed.” Obama ended his speech with a plea to Americans to unite in the spirit of “many generations” of Americans “over the course of the two hundred and twenty-one years since a band of patriots” created the US Constitution, a document that legalized slavery and the slave trade, created a fugitive slave law, and introduced the three-fifths clause.51
In arguably the most important speech in his political career, Obama established an approach to publicly speaking about black history to white America that he would continue to use. Most important, he further honed his skills at code-switching.
“My fellow citizens: I stand here today,” Obama opened his historic inaugural address on January 20, 2009, “humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you’ve bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.” If my fellow citizens were removed from these opening lines, it would not be unreasonable to assume that Obama was addressing a predominantly black audience. After all, he routinely celebrated the far-reaching sacrifices made by previous generations of African Americans, especially the Moses generation. As was the case with “A More Perfect Union,” in his inaugural address, he was, of course, speaking to a predominantly white audience; therefore, in evoking our, us, and we he was referring to all Americans. “Our ancestors” and “our forebears” for Obama was a double entendre: catch-all terms for past generations of Americans and a patriotic reference to “our Founding Fathers.” In fact, he spoke of the proslavery “Founding Fathers” in a manner similar to how he previously and later hailed the Moses generation to black audiences. “Our Founding Fathers,” he pronounced, were “faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine.” Under such circumstances, he maintained, they persevered and created enduring ideals. “We are keepers of this legacy,” Obama announced. In charting the “work of remaking America,” he revisited the black past only in passing, mentioning those who “endured the lash of the whip” and “tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation.”52
Without delving into America’s troubled racial history, Obama assured Americans that one of the best ways for the nation to move forward was by returning to the values and “truth” of the past, “the quiet force of progress throughout history.” In doing so, he ignored the widespread oppression of African Americans. He concluded his inaugural address by citing the “timeless words” of George Washington. How did the first black president reconcile the fact that in 1799 America’s first president owned 123 slaves at Mount Vernon? His veneration of Washington was similar to his praise song to “the small band of patriots” in his annual remarks on the South Lawn in honor of the Fourth of July. If Obama had been speaking to one of his black audiences, he would have most likely quoted Martin Luther King Jr. or another icon from the civil rights era (maybe even Douglass’s famous 1852 speech).
At the beginning of his second term, Obama spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington. He highlighted the interracial nature of the march and credited the marchers with profoundly altering American society—“Because they marched,” he repeated. He expressed that Americans owed a debt to these activists, an obligation similar to the one that he assigned to younger blacks toward the Moses generation. In identifying martyrs, he strategically eulogized black and white freedom fighters—Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and Martin Luther King Jr.—and, in a sense echoing white conservatives who have appropriated King’s “dream,” he de-raced King’s sentiments. “What King was describing has been the dream of every American,” he commented. And whenever he singled out African Americans, he added “all races” or the phrase “regardless of race.” He drew connections between 1963 and 2013, acknowledging that the 1960s belonged to a much more challenging era than the new millennium but that parallels did exist between the two. For Obama, the most important legacy of the March on Washington was unity, cross-racial coalitions and exhibiting “empathy and fellow feeling.” For him, “the lesson of our past” is that “when millions of
