DAVIS TURNER/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

JANNY SCOTT ESSAY

Americans and their political leaders have been hesitant to talk about the subject of race.
We were reminded of that recently when Senator Barack Obama, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, took the almost unimaginable step of going before a national audience at a precarious juncture in a close campaign and speaking explicitly about what race means to blacks and whites.
He spoke of black anger and white resentment and the significance of race in American history; his purpose was political but he spoke with seriousness and gravity .
How much the speech helped him remains to be seen.
But the moment was unlike virtually any in the more than 40 years since the triumphs of the civil rights struggle tore up party alignments of the past and tamped down explicit discussion of race by presidents and majorparty candidates .
The dynamic had been different once - when African-Americans had begun to vote Democratic as well as Republican and presidential candidates of both parties competed for their votes.
In the early 1960s, opinion polls found that a majority of Americans saw civil rights as the dominant issue facing the country.
And President Lyndon B. Johnson, in one of several memorable 1965 speeches on race, said, speaking before a joint session of Congress after the voting-rights march from Selma, Alabama: “Their cause must be our cause too.
Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome.
” Yet after signing the Civil Rights Act in July 1964, President Johnson is said to have observed that he had just handed over the South to the Republicans for at least a generation.
The Republicans developed the “Southern strategy” of appealing to white voters that helped Richard Nixon and later Ronald Reagan.
With blacks voting overwhelmingly Democratic by that point, and their party struggling to hold onto white workingclass ethnic voters in the North, there was little incentive for presidential candidates of either party to bring up race in a serious way.
Race did not disappear entirely from presidential campaigns; it went under cover.
It lay buried in code phrases like “crime in the streets,” “states’ rights,” and “welfare mothers.
” In 1980, Ronald Reagan, campaigning on a platform that included “states’ rights,” opened his general election campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi - a decision criticized because it was where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964.
Democratic presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton addressed the race issue in various forms, but not nearly in the strong terms of Mr. Obama’s speech, historians say.
In June 1997, President Clinton proposed a year-long national “conversation” about race and appointed a high-powered advisory board to hold town meetings and report on its findings.
The undertaking was plagued by lack of organization and interference from White House officials .
“It’s not an easy subject for black people or white people,” said Ira Berlin, a historian at the University of Maryland who writes on slavery.
“As Obama indicated, there are lots of legitimate hurts on both sides.
It is extremely easy for people to misspeak.
In part because we don’t speak a lot and because we don’t speak a lot you don’t understand the language.
People don’t understand where the land mines are.
They sometimes use the wrong words or are condescending or seem to be condescending when they’re trying to be honest.
It’s easy for people to take offense when the wrong language is used, particularly when they’ve got within them a lot of anger and are looking for someone to beat with a small stick.
In those circumstances, it’s often better to say nothing.
” For more than a year, Mr. Obama had campaigned in such a way as to appear to transcend race, and had managed to elude narrow identification as a black politician.
But he finally confronted race head-on in the speech in Philadelphia, responding to an escalating controversy over videotaped snippets of inflammatory anti-white and anti-American rhetoric by the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., his longtime spiritual adviser and former pastor.
Mr. Obama’s approach was historical, personal and finally political.
He traced the country’s racial divide back to the Constitutional Convention, which the question of slavery brought to a stalemate “until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least 20 years.
” He said the answer to slavery lay in the Constitution’s promise of liberty, justice and a union to be perfected over time.
He said he had hoped his campaign would continue the progress of others toward a more just society.
But it would not be possible to solve the challenges without understanding “that we may have different stories but we hold common hopes.
” Whether voters accept Mr. Obama’s analysis and take up his invitation to move on may become apparent in the coming primaries in places like Pennsylvania.
It remains to be seen whether he has nudged whites and African-Americans any closer to mutual understanding or simply stoked the anxieties and suspicions that helped close down the conversation before.
The country is a work in progress, Mr. Obama suggested.
“I think he is uniquely positioned because he straddles the racial divide very well,” said David Goldfield, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
“I think some of what he said will resonate.”