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The target audience Obama Speaks. Who Listens?By Rick Horowitz After all, it's not every day you hear a candidate running for the highest office in the land attempting to tackle the hardest issue in the land. Race. And right out in public. It's not something he particularly wanted to do -- at least not under those circumstances, under assault and with YouTube at a full boil. But once he decided he had to do it, he did it. So here's the question, fellow white folks: When Barack Obama spoke, what did we hear? Did we hear him saying it's all our fault? All of it -- the crime, the poverty, the broken families, the despair? The anger? Did we hear him making excuses? For blacks who do this or that, or who fail to do this or that? Did we hear him giving his pastor a pass?
Did we hear him saying all that? Or any of that? That's certainly the way certain people would like us to hear it. They'd be perfectly happy if we turned away from the TV feeling agitated and aggrieved. Victimized. They've got a large stake in keeping us feeling agitated and aggrieved and victimized. Or did we hear a very different speech? Did we hear a man trying to peel away the protective shells we've all built around us, trying to describe, as only someone with strong roots on both sides of the fence could do, what life looks like and feels like from each side? To talk with frightening candor about the fears that each side feels? The injustices that each side struggles to overcome? Did we hear a man explaining how it's possible to love someone, and to keep loving someone -- whether it's a fiery black preacher or a fretful white grandmother -- despite that person's far-from-enlightened behavior or attitudes? Is the concept really so foreign, so unfathomable to us? Did we hear a man treating us, on both sides of the fence, as adults, and trusting us -- against so much evidence, and so much history -- to respond in kind? That's the speech I heard. And I should have known. Just weeks ago, I was trying to tell someone about something Barack Obama had said months ago. The interviewer had asked him to describe the strengths he brought to his campaign. And Obama said -- I'm paraphrasing here -- that one of his greatest strengths was his ability to help people see something of themselves in others. It struck me as a moment of amazing self-awareness. Only I mustn't have said it quite right, or the person hearing me say it wasn't ready to hear it quite right. "So Obama can empathize with how I'm feeling," he replied. Not that big a deal, he made clear. That's not what I meant, I said. It goes beyond that. It's not just that Obama understands how Person A feels, or how Person B feels. It's that he can help Person A and Person B each understand how the other one feels. How many people can do that? That's the speech I heard. A painful, loving and courageous speech. It may have been a courage forced upon him by circumstance, but still -- when Barack Obama was faced with the circumstance, he stepped up to it. He more than stepped up to it. The question, fellow white folks, is: Will we? Posted 3/20/08. Provocative.
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Rick Horowitz
