"The complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through"

Whichever candidate you're supporting, you may want to watch or read in full Barack Obama's speech on race.  I got home late last night and only got to hear the CNN folks sound-byting the speech.  Although some folks were calling it "historic," their remarks had that slanted, reductive feeling that post-complexity commentary often has. 

This morning, I watched the whole thing online.  It was honest and smart, and it didn't pull punches in the interests of political expediency:

. . . [W]e do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

To watch the whole thing, you need 38 minutes; if you're a fast reader, the manuscript is available.  Go here for either version.

My favorite book about race relations in the U.S., which I've been teaching with for several years, is Beverly Daniel Tatum's Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and Other Conversations About Race.  It's a great primer on white privilege, racial identity, the complexity of social identity, and the necessity of being actively, rather than passively, anti-racist.  It's only about ten bucks, and it can affect your whole way of seeing the world.  Tatum, a psychologist who studies the development of racial identity, is the president of Spelman College--and one of my personal heroes.