More of the Same: The Grand Dissapointment of Obama's Acceptance Speech
Brooks & Dunn's "Only In America" cleaned up for Barack Obama Democractic Party nomination acceptance speech last night, an intriguing choice given the Hawaiian-born candidate's reliance on Stevie Wonder's soulful stylings throughout the campaign. "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours" was his kicker. As the Boston Globe reported in January, Obama's playlist was exclusively R&B and pop so this decision to go Nashville at that unprecedented moment in history that so many of us witnessed last night was strange. I'll go a step further and call it calculating. It's an obvious overture towards "middle America," which is just code for regular white people, working and lower middle class whites, in particular.
Obama's persistent efforts to secure their support has demanded rhetorical manipulations and silences none greater than the monochromatics of his acceptance speech last night. Not once did he even utter the word Black or people of color although he name checked the LGBTQ community and the women's movement. To become a Black first on the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and resort to broad euphemism to address the colorline, the defining chracteristic of this nation before, during and now after the Twentieth Century is, hat tip to W.E.B. DuBois, is abominable. And I say this as a broke creative who donated to Obama the day he announced and whose support remains unwavering.
I watched the speech with my co-worker, a middle aged African American progressive, and at its conclusion we turned to each other dazed, confirming with each other what we hadn't heard. Half an hour later, I spoke to my mother, a dedicated Obama volunteer in the Northwest, and she chided me for being a negative Nancy at such a triumphant moment. I imagine others might think the same but I call it like I see it. Obama is too smart a man, too gifted a writer and orator to make such an omission unintentionally. As Mark Anthony Neal pointed out in his analysis of the Tavis Smiley/Obama divide, Obama is inclined to take the Black vote for granted but we must hold him accountable. We must challenge his sometimes poor understanding of the mechanism of anti-Black racism in not only the founding this nation but its flourishing and perpetuation. And we must challenge this perception that racial reconciliation requires our cultural erasure or assimilation. Rev. Jeremiah Wright proved himself to have some foolish tendencies at his wild press conference, but damn it, he will always have a special place in my heart and my psyche and that of so many African Americans for cultivating a space in which we can be UNASHAMEDLY BLACK. We don't have to shrink from our color, our names, our musical tastes, our everything.
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Comments
1.
professorf says:
You're on to something here. I have been following his penchant for Stevie throughout this campaign as much for what it says about Obama as what it portends to say about Stevie. Politicians are adept at sanitizing the work of music icons (e.g. Springsteen vis a vis Reagan), but what is happening with Obama and Stevie is an elaborate game of hide and seek. My surprise was not with Brooks and Dunn at the end, although, I agree that it was a bit jarring, but that it was Michael McDonald and not Stevie who performed immediately prior to Obama's speech. Speak of musical miscegenation, the ordering of McDonald's performance coupled with the Brooks and Dunn nod at the end speak volumes to how people sometimes draw a musical color line when they're need not be one, and then are surprised when it's pointed out.
09/03/2008 at 8:21 PM