Obama's Race Speech: Some Comments You May Not Have Seen

Following Obama’s remarkable speech on race last week, I was looking forward to reaction from a few folks in particular. Here are a few thoughts from writers you may not have seen:

First, Thabiti Anyabwile has some fine thoughts. He is an African-American pastor who serves as pastor at my former pastorate, First Baptist Church of Grand Cayman. In this post, he challenges us to think about what our gut reaction to the Obama speech says about our attitude toward the whole subject of race. He has also posted the entire Jeremiah Wright speech here and has asked readers to answer some great questions while listening to it.

Next up: I was sure Julie “Bible Girl” Lyons at the Dallas Observer would have some good comments, and she did not disappoint. I particularly liked how she introduced us to her friend DD:

DD, who’s in her late 30s, grew up as the only black kid in her rural Texas elementary-school classes. “I thought my first name was Nigger,” she says. Compounding her separateness was the fact that she was impoverished as well, living in a tumbledown shack with an outhouse.

Coming up, she had every reason to hate. The same day she held in her hand an acceptance letter to medical school, a truck full of yahoos barreled past her in the street and screamed, “Nigger!” One of the first times she entered the operating room in scrubs, she was mistaken for the cleaning lady. She has duly noted the disparities in position and pay for women of her race, and it frustrates her that many of her white colleagues assume she is a beneficiary of affirmative action.

Every black girl she knew growing up, she says, wanted at some time to be white and blue-eyed with straight, silky hair pulled in a ponytail. It is something few white people understand at all -- what it’s like to have a sense of inferiority sown in your soul from the earliest age. DD gathered from her early school years that everything black was bad, and everything white was good. Black kids were stupid, ugly, poor, dirty and despised. White kids were smart, pretty, rich, clean and worthy.

The stain goes so deep, she says, that only a relationship with Jesus Christ can purge it out. When she got saved at the age of 21, she says, she gradually lost all those feelings of inferiority -- replaced by an understanding that she was a daughter of God. The people who reached out to her at that time, she says, were white Christians. It is something she will not forget, and it precludes her from viewing white people as an evil, homogeneous group. She loves her white brothers and sisters in Christ.

“I live my faith and not my race,” she says. “It is a simple choice.”

As a former speech writer for President Reagan, I expected Peggy Noonan to weigh in from her unique perspective. In “A Thinking Man’s Speech” in the WSJ, she wrote:

“The speech assumed the audience was intelligent. This was a compliment, and I suspect was received as a gift. It also assumed many in the audience were educated. I was grateful for this, as the educated are not much addressed in American politics. He didn't have applause lines. He didn't give you eight seconds of a line followed by clapping. He spoke in full and longish paragraphs that didn't summon applause. This left TV producers having to use longer-than-usual soundbites in order to capture his meaning. And so the cuts of the speech you heard on the news were more substantial and interesting than usual, which made the coverage of the speech better. People who didn't hear it but only saw parts on the news got a real sense of what he'd said.”

The always-provocative Christopher Hitchens in Slate was rather more skeptical:

“The consequence, which you can already feel, is an inchoate resentment among many white voters who are damned if they will be called bigots by a man who associates with Jeremiah Wright. So here we go with all that again. And this is the fresh, clean, new post-racial politics?”

What were your favorite reactions from bloggers, pundits, and opinion columnists?