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. In his repudiation of such politics, Obama challenges thedivisions that the spin masters have set forth. Well I say to themtonight, there s not a liberal America and a conservative Americathere is the United States of America.There s not a black Americaand white America and Latino America and Asian America; there sthe United States of America. 25 This theme of challenging existingnotions of a divided nation became a mantra of presidential candidateObama as he repeatedly declared in the face of different divisions thatthere is one United States of America that connects us all.After watching or reading Obama s 2004 Democratic NationalConvention speech, you come away knowing that it is historic in itsstructure, message, response, and messenger.And, in particular, itis the messenger who must be interrogated when trying to under-stand the racial messages of this speech.We have to factor into our My President Is Black 215 analysis that at the podium was a well-polished individual who wasundoubtedly read as black by most television viewers, regardless ofhis ambiguous racial positioning early in the speech.The speech, inand of itself, however, largely stayed away from any significant andsustained mention of race.Indeed, it is the diminished importancegiven to race and racial division in the United States that is most glar-ing when analyzing the speech through a racial lens.Both directlyand indirectly, this is a speech largely about class inequality that shiesaway from explicit racial references.Of course, this is not surprisinggiven that candidates Obama and Kerry would both need the votesof a significant number of whites in order to win their elections inNovember 2004.When the topics of race or, specifically, black communities aredirectly engaged in this speech, it is usually through the frame of a def-icit model.We hear about a young black woman without the money toattend college, black children on the South Side of Chicago who can-not read, black children who are underachieving because of low expec-tations, black parents who need to parent by turning off the televisionsets, and the belief by young blacks that studying is acting white.I donot believe this imagery is intentionally meant to demean black peo-ple, but it is not surprising that a political candidate, even a black one,in crafting a speech for a wide audience would refer to deficit-basedstereotypes that are most widely recognized, resonate, and embracedby white audiences and journalists.In the commentaries that followed the speech, reporters were clearlytaken with its brilliance, but they also highlighted Obama s willingnessto take on the bad behavior of black people.For example, on PBSMark Shields, when discussing Obama s comments about parents turn-ing off the television sets and eradicating the idea that black youth hav-ing a book is acting white, said, Obama is the only person who couldhave said it and he said it so well. 26 Another commentator on the pro-gram said, Forget uniters and dividers, tonight we heard from a tran-scender. While this speech would establish Obama as a transcenderand a player on the national stage, the racial discourse contained in thishistoric speech did little to transcend or even alter the racial dialogueof the country.Instead, it was Obama s personification of a new black-ness and a new black politics the third wave that reinscribed theracial discourse, at least among those whites who believe that blacksshould stop complaining and do the hard work that is demanded ofevery individual in the postracial social order.In Obama, and morespecifically in the words of his speech, many whites saw the promise216 Democracy Remixed of transcending the established racial order and truly moving toward apostracial society.While this 2004 speech was never intended to be a discussion ofrace, his 2006 More Perfect Union speech in Philadelphia had to beone.The immediate factor dictating the speech was the controversysurrounding Obama s former minister, the Reverend Jeremiah WrightJr.Reverend Wright had served as pastor of Trinity United Churchof Christ for over thirty years.It was Wright s teaching and preachingthat had brought Obama to the Christian faith.Theirs was an intimaterelationship, with Reverend Wright officiating at the wedding of Rob-inson and Obama and later baptizing their two daughters.So it createdgreat difficulty for the Obama campaign when the press swarmed tocover to Reverend Wright and his seemingly extreme views on race,racism, and white supremacy in the United States.Increasingly, stories in major newspapers and magazines andprobably most explosively videos on YouTube emerged, highlightingsome of Reverend Wright s most exaggerated and decontextualizedstatements, showing a few provocative minutes of much longer ser-mons.In these videos, Reverend Wright is seen making extreme and,to many, offensive statements.In one video, Wright says, See thegovernment gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes athree-strike law, and then wants us to sing God bless America. No,no, no.Not God bless America, God damn America.for treatingher citizens as less than human. 27 He also refers to the United Statesas the US of KKK-A. 28 In another video, he contrasts Obama sexperience as a black man in a racist country with Hillary Clinton spositioning as a white women, stating, Hillary ain t never been calleda nigger
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