The Speech

"... that wasn't a campaign speech. That was a presidential speech. It is headed not straight to cable news networks, but to high school classrooms, to rhetoric and composition syllabuses, and to the history books. It is the first successful attempt by a twenty-first century politician to define the inequalities that still fracture American society and to link racial injustice to the other forms of psychic and material oppression experienced by the vast majority of Americans--because of the consolidation of economic, political, and cultural power in the hands of 5% of the population, because of this morally insane and economically ruinous war, because of the spinelessness of lobbyist-owned politicians who think it's more important to keep the health care industry happy than to keep their constitutents healthy, because the manufacturing economy that sustained the working class has disappeared and because the middle class is severely threatened. It is the kind of thing that most presidential candidates either cannot do or will not do because they consider it too dangerous to ask Americans to listen to anything they haven't already heard, or--heaven forbid--to think about what they're hearing...."


This quote, from a blogger called The Plaid Adder, who posted in on the democraticunderground blog, is probably the best description of Senator Obama's speech to address Race. I wouldn't even try to improve on it.