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History in the Making?
"Rather, it [Obama's speech] should be examined and replayed in the same manner as the late Dr. King’s, if not more so. "
By King Anyi Howell, 23
On Tuesday, presidential candidate Barack Obama gave a speech in response to the controversy started by comments made by his pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Youth Radio's King Anyi Howell grew up listening to Dr. Martin Luther King’s legendary “I Have a Dream” speech, but thinks Obama's speech is more relevant given the current issues in the United States.
When I was in middle school, we had to memorize Martin Luther King’s legendary “I Have a Dream” Speech. By the time I was born, Dr. King’s speech was 20 years old and by the time it was 30, the world changed dramatically, in some ways better, and in a lot of ways, for the worse. When repeated over and over every January and applied to today’s social climate, the speech inspired dreams of my own...through sleep. Fantastic dreams of me fighting along side Optimus Prime and Lion-O.
The reality I was escaping was not comparable to that of the generations before me, filled with the type of overt racism and violence that compelled my father and uncle to join activist groups like the Black Panthers. Nor was it the fantastic world Dr. King spoke of with little black and white boys and girls standing side by side judging each other, not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. My reality was a world filled with closet racists, institutional racism, racial profiling, and other forms of covert racism. In my reality, the content of one’s character could be forgiven by the content of one’s bank statements, FICA score, cultural assimilation, or socioeconomic stratification.
My sound slumber has been interrupted by the sound of Presidential hopeful, Barack Obama, addressing race in America in response to some racial hits his campaign has taken recently. Aside from the terrible sound engineering setup at Obama’s Philadelphia speech, his words stood out for a number of reasons. The main reason was the purpose of the speech - to defend or explain his association with the pastor who introduced Obama to Christianity, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Reverend Wright’s interpretation of the bible through Afro-centric lenses allowed him to draw correlations between Jesus Christ and many African American people, including Obama. The main connection Wright pointed out was that Jesus, too, was a struggling black man in a world ruled by rich whites who also faced persecution from his own people, in addition to the powers that be. While I admit the reverend’s sermon was loud and aggressive, it was far from hate-mongering, as it was spun in several news organizations. Really, I couldn’t find anything in the snippets offered by media press that was inaccurate or inconceivable. I won’t get into details of his address because they’ve been on the web for quite sometime. The story broke shortly after Geraldine Ferraro, a Hillary Clinton supporter, and super delegate, simply attributed Obama’s success and popularity to his being African-American. If only that success could be applied to when African-Americans in all other aspects of American society, such as police profiling, and mandatory minimum sentencing laws.
Obama’s response, however, was an incredibly poised, personal, emotional and thorough evaluation of the current American racial climate. He cites failing school and social service systems as contributing factors to the existing racial tensions that divide this country. But when Obama talks about the fears of job displacement, he points out how the color green holds dominance over all other colors. By green I mean money, not environmental concerns, which were also touched on. Because of all of this, what was to be a response to political smear tactics turned out to be the most important speech I’ve watched on the subject of race in the United States. I am in not at all insisting Dr. King’s dream is irrelevant and shouldn’t be achieved. But the reality Obama spoke of in his address cannot be ignored. Rather, it should be examined and replayed in the same manner as the late Dr. King’s, if not more so.
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