WATERLOO, Canada — Barack Obama's speech on race and politics on March 18 came from and spoke to the heart. It was brutally, searingly honest. Nothing he said or could have said will appease the detractors and the naysayers. But their sniping and carping will diminish them and betray their smallness of spirit.
It was historical. Obama traced the roots of America's racial problem back to the original sin of slavery but pointed simultaneously to the civil rights protections embedded in the U.S. Constitution as the salvation. Neither excusing nor endorsing black anger and bitterness, he planted it firmly in the broad sweep of American history that includes slavery, humiliation and impoverishment. Who else would have had the audacity to connect the history of slavery to the enduring reality of black suffering in 21st-century America?
It was historic. Everybody, but everybody, is talking about "the speech." People were openly confessing to having been stunned by the power and majesty of the speech and reduced to tears. There could scarcely have been a major U.S. newspaper that did not carry an editorial on it.