Obama race speech, Post 1

I thought this was a great speech - by far the best of the campaign so far, and the best I've heard in years - so I think I'll write a couple of posts on it.

The first thing about the speech that jumped out at me was the same passage that jumped out at everybody else, so I'll go ahead and quote it again:

In fact, [racial] anger [also] exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

We tend to blame pervasive racism in the white community for many of the ills of black America, and I think that's probably accurate. But rarely do we ever pause to ask where that racism comes from. In the South, white racism obviously comes from the legacies of slavery and resentment over the Confederacy's downfall. But there's plenty of white racism in states where no slave was ever kept, and Obama points out some of the reasons why.

This says something about affirmative action as a policy for uplifting black America. On the one hand, affirmative action almost certainly helps those black people who are talented enough to take advantage of it, giving them a leg up into the middle class. But at the same time, affirmative action set black America apart from the rest of America, by enshrining differential status under the law. That pissed off a lot of white people who worked hard to achieve equality on their own, without any help from the government. Many white people came to see the black community as the "teacher's pet" - and every time liberals pooh-poohed fears of high crime rates in poor black neighborhoods, it seemed like this "teacher's pet" was allowed to get away with misbehaving.

As a result, pervasive white (and now Hispanic) racism has kept poor blacks down and out, even as the black middle class has flown free. Affirmative action ended up helping a few black people a lot, and hurting a much larger number of black people by a moderate amount. Was it worth it? Who knows. But I don't think we want to keep trying to force racial equality at the expense of perpetuating racial separation under the law. One way or another, separate will be inherently unequal. Fortunately, it seems Obama understands that.