Pam Spaulding reports on a speech Barack Obama gave today at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. This is the church where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached and it is one of the nation’s premier black churches. In the speech, Obama spoke to the black community, calling for them to stand up to bigotry within their community towards gays, Jews, and immigrants. Here’s a passage that stands out:
I’m talking about a moral deficit. I’m talking about an empathy deficit. I’m taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother’s keeper; we are our sister’s keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.
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It’s not easy to stand in somebody else’s shoes. It’s not easy to see past our differences. We’ve all encountered this in our own lives. But what makes it even more difficult is that we have a politics in this country that seeks to drive us apart – that puts up walls between us.
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For most of this country’s history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man’s inhumanity to man. And all of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays – on the job, in the schools, in our health care system, and in our criminal justice system.
And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King’s vision of a beloved community.
We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity.
Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. It is played out on television. It is sensationalized by the media. And last week, it even crept into the campaign for President, with charges and counter-charges that served to obscure the issues instead of illuminating the critical choices we face as a nation.
Obama’s full remarks can be read here.
I’ll be honest and say that I don’t know enough about GLBT politics in the African American community to adequately offer my own analysis , so I’ll take Spaulding’s analysis as coming from an authority that I respect with knowledge on it. She writes:
These words are so necessary, but you can best believe he is the only candidate delivering speeches in honor of Dr. King who is willing to say it directly to members of the black community. This topic has always been a perceived as a third rail topic for the other leading Dem candidates, Clinton or Edwards — they are, like many whites, particularly if they see themselves as allies, dread being seen as pointing out the evils and hypocrisy of such bigotry in the black faith community, even as wrong and tragic as it is on its face.
What I see in this and what I hope I can continue to see from Obama is that he recognized that he has a special platform to speak to an important issue and he used took it. I say that not exclusively in reference to his race or how he, as Spaulding says, he is singularly suited to deliver this message to the black community. Rather, for me the importance is in Obama using his platform as a presidential candidate to do more than could be done by people without the privilege of being a front running presidential candidate.
Sometimes leadership means looking around and recognizing that more people will listen to you than to anyone else, that your words will change the national debate, and that it’s your time to step forward and use your unique opportunity to lead before you enter the White House. Barack Obama did that today. I hope he continues to do it on many other issues before many other communities.
I’ll even suggest one for him: join Chris Dodd to filibuster retroactive immunity if it comes before the Senate this week.
Hold Fast 
To start with, let me congratulate you on your new blog, Matt-very cool. I knew it wouldn’t be long before you were at it again.
Wow. I’m in complete shock at that Obama gave that speech. The courage it took to say that-I’m unsure if the move was foolhardy or not. Pam Spaulding is correct…to an extent. I come from an unusually diverse racial and religious background: I have Black, White, Native American, and Asian ancestors. My forebears are Catholics, Quakers, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Sephardic Jews. I see his speech through a bit of a different filter than Ms. Spaulding.
Obama is not speaking from the perspective of an African-American, but as a man from both a mixed racial and religious heritage to a community that likes to perceive itself as unprejudiced, and inclusive of all of African descent but in reality is not. There is a deep divide between West Indians (what I am on my Dad’s side) and African Americans of the southern migrations. There is a similar divide with Africans, and Hispanics of African decent. All of those people might have plenty of melanin, but to the community Obama is addressing, they aren’t black, not really.
There is this really weird cognitive dissonance in the Black Community that he is addressing here. An idea that if you come from an oppressed people you can not be a bigot. Oh yes you can. There is a laundry list of offensive names Caribbean Americans are called by African Americans. One of the stereotypes is that ‘coconuts are just the same as Jews’. Good with money, cheep, gouging. I’ve heard remarks said about Jews that have taken my breath away. And Gays? Lets put it this way, the term Down Low originated with the large group of closeted gay men married to women who pursued gay sex very discreetly with each other, usually at secret parties. They know if they came out they would be shunned as totally as any Mormon, so they live double lives. The church, especially the Baptist Church is the underpinning of the Black Community and is very socially conservative. It has a great influence still. If the people are accused of bigotry, they are shocked and offended, for it’s unchristian, and they are good Christians as well as black folk with a history of 300 odd years of oppression. Obama may have shot himself in the foot for South Carolina.
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Thanks for stopping by Stephanie.
I would hope that Obama is not hurt by the SC electorate for this clear act of leadership.
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I wonder if he’s shot himself in the foot as well. Seems to me he’s always lecturing blacks about something, and after NV and MI where he all he’s got is the black vote he might want to back off the Sista Souljahing for a bit.
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You’re welcome, Matt. Told you I used to read your Dodd blog. And I too hope he hasn’t been hurt by this, I just know that this is a very touchy subject. This is comparable to him being a Jewish politician and questioning Israeli tactics, or being of Cuban descent and telling them to stop voting solely on opposition to Castro. Some people will be upset, and offended.
And to what Cindy wrote, he can’t quite pull off what Sista Souljah did, or Bill Cosby either. He is a marginalized Black person to SC: not southern descent-meaning no background of southern tradition and no slave ancestors, a white midwestern mother, foreign father and spent his childhood away from America. He is culturally not African American, so lecturing them about a sore spot is a dangerous thing to do.
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According to WaPo today they said he’s getting 60% of the black vote. That’s not enough. I saw a youtube video of him in church singing We Shall Overcome, and I admit it was a bit jarring.
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Ugh. I just looked at that, Cindy. He’s trying too hard to be included. I’m surprised Michelle-who seems quite controlling, isn’t trying to temper this. She comes from the background he is trying to fit into , rather unsuccessfully. She should know quite well how they would react to someone like like her husband.
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