Obama, Faulkner, and Race

Obama’s erudition and eloquence was on display again yesterday in what, I have to say, was a remarkable speech on all kinds of levels. A small part of the speech touched on American literary history in his reference to William Faulkner:

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

The evocation of Faulkner is interesting on various levels. On the one hand, it signals Obama’s efforts to speak through the voice of a symbolic and prototypical Southern White Man, and to signal his broad allegiance to “American culture.” More, most of Faulkner’s oeuvre is devoted precisely to the agonized sense that the racial past is inescapable in the South. Finally, of course, it’s ironic since Faulkner himself never escaped that past and seemed to willingly embrace it regardless of his agonized sense of its destructiveness. Faulkner, after all, said that if it came down to it he would take up a gun to kill blacks in the street if he had to do so.

[Side note: Obama also comes out as a champion of reading to your children. Small point, but glad to see it.]

I’m generally with those who feel that Obama’s speech was one of the most important on race by a political figure in the past twenty years. At the least, it was one of the most courageous by a politician, who as a class are more given to dissembling, avoidance, and double-speak. The easy thing would have been to try and throw his former pastor under the bus–as, for instance Bill Clinton did with someone like Lani Guanier.

Obama’s willingness to risk the idea that Americans can stand subtlety and thought about a desperately complicated issue seemed to me…well…I almost want to say presidential, but in the context of American politics of recent decades that would be faint praise. It was leadership that we might hope for but see too rarely.

You can see and read the speech in its entirety at his web site.