1
Reconciliation as a Rhetorical Lens for Examining Barack Obama’s Speech
“A More Perfect Union”
by
Paul E. Stafford
Submitted to Dr. Wendy Atkins-Sayre of the
Speech Communication Department of
The University of Southern Mississippi
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
SCM 740 Rhetorical Criticism
Spring 2009
Introduction
On March 18th, 2008, then-Senator Barrack Obama delivered a speech at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center as part of his campaign run for the 2008 Presidential election. The speech was designed to address the recent controversy surrounding Obama’s affiliation with his former minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In the days leading up to the speech, the national media flooded the airwaves with images and sound bites of a flamboyant Wright espousing his views from the pulpit using incendiary language that touched off a firestorm of criticism on both sides of the color line. Rather than simply attempt to distance himself from Wright (which he would eventually do in the weeks following his speech), Obama seized the opportunity to address the controversy as a symptom of the much larger issue of race relations in America and introduce his idea of moving the country toward a more perfect union. The significance of Obama’s rhetoric surrounding the tensions of a black and white America gripped with reproach for its racial exploits reawakened the need to progress from such past disparities so that a nation can prosper in new era of hope and change.
Central to Obama’s speech is the notion of moving toward a “more perfect union,” an idea set forth in the preamble of the United States Constitution that he uses to introduce the theme of his address. Throughout his speech, Obama threads together the disparate experiences of racial tensions lingering in the background of American life “that we’ve not yet made perfect” (27). In doing so, Obama revisits the past from both a black and white perspective to explain the racial stalemate hovering over the country, and proposes how we can work through our differences toward unification and prosperity. His rhetorical style takes on a tone of reconciliation that ultimately seeks a dialogue of atonement and understanding between the races so that together we may progress as a nation. McPhail (2004) states: “If racial reconciliation is to become a reality, we all [italics added by author] must be able to speak candidly, and we all [italics added by author] must be willing to listen” (p. 398). Obama’s speech acts as lightning rod for such dialogue to take place.
While the study of reconciliation is still in its infancy (Hatch, 2006), the goal of this paper is to capture the varied arguments surrounding the concept(s) of reconciliation and its use as a rhetorical lens for examining Barack Obama’s 2008 race speech. The first section of this paper summarizes the events that motivated Obama to deliver his speech on race, beginning with the Wright controversy, followed by a review of the historical issues discussed in the speech, and a short biographical sketch of Obama. Next, a brief review of literature examines selected studies of racial rhetoric followed by an analysis of the prevailing literature surrounding the concept reconciliation. Finally, reconciliation as a rhetorical lens is applied to an analysis of Obama’s race speech, followed by concluding remarks.
Historical-Cultural Context
A primary motivating factor behind then-Senator Barack Obama’s decision to deliver his now famous race speech came in response to the firestorm of media attention surrounding controversial comments made by Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s longtime friend and pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Reverend Wright played a significant role in Obama’s life from the moment the two met at Trinity Church in 1991. Not only did he fill the role of Obama’s spiritual advisor in and outside of the political arena, he also officiated his wedding, and baptized Obama and his two daughters. Obama even titled his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope” after hearing one of Wright’s sermons (Miller, et al., 2008). The friendship became strained, however, when video clips began to surface in the media of Wright delivering stinging commentary from a number of his sermons during his years as minister of Trinity Church. In one clip, for example, Wright exclaimed, “The government gives the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America?’ No. No. No Not ‘God Bless America’, ‘God damn America’. God damn America for killing innocent people” (Wright’s Controversial Comments, 2008). In another clip, Wright suggested that the U.S. policy is to blame for 9/11:
We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Nagasaki and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost (Wrights Controversial Comments, 2008).
Wright also suggested Hillary Clinton was out of touch with the African-American struggles: “Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich, white people. Hillary ain't never been called a n——-.” (Wrights Controversial Comments, 2008). The media quickly latched onto to the videotaped remarks and within days, Wright’s bombastic voice and flamboyant delivery became popular news fodder bouncing among cable news networks, talk shows, and online blogs as questions swirled around Obama’s association with his pastor.
While Obama disagreed with some of Wright’s rhetoric in the past, it became necessary to publically denounce such inflammatory remarks that went against his own beliefs and threatened to damage his campaign. The controversy, then, represents the primary exigence in need of positive modification. In a press conference just days after the clips aired, Obama revealed that Wright had left his spiritual advisory committee, and he also condemned the pastor’s remarks in an effort to put distance between himself and his minister, urging “Americans not to reject his presidential campaign because of ‘guilt by association’” (Johnson, 2008). However, Obama felt “that he had failed to resolve the questions, aides said, and told advisers he wanted to address the firestorm in a speech” (Zeleny, 2008). Not only would this speech present a formal opportunity to address the Wright controversy, it also provided a national arena in which to engage the underlying issues of racial tensions that continues to hang like a fog over the country. Toward this end, Obama spends part of his speech revisiting America’s past atrocities to account for the nation’s present race relations.
To paint a picture of the current racial climate, Obama takes his audience on a historical journey to highlight some of the prevailing events that have shaped race relations in America. He begins at the Philadelphia convention with the assembly of the constitution in 1787. At the time of its signing, the issue of slavery divided the convention that argued over an injunction “prohibiting and taxing the importation of slaves” (Peters, 1987, p. 164). The North wanted to tax southern slave owners for their property while the South demanded greater representation for its population, the majority being slaves (Peters, 1987). A compromise was reached that allowed the trading of slaves to continue for 20 years while approving laws governing interstate commerce (Zinn, 1980). In 1806, President Thomas Jefferson signed a law outlawing the trading of slaves, but only after a civil war some 60 years later would the issue of slavery be laid to rest. Slavery had ended but the racial divide only widened as legalized segregation gained a foothold in the South.
By the late 1890s, the Jim Crow era began to take shape as “the Supreme Court had lost all enthusiasm for supervising the South’s treatment of its black citizens” (Thernstrom & Thernstrom, 1997, p. 32). While the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments to the constitution abolished slavery, southern lawmakers found solace in a 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson initiating the “separate but equal” doctrine. This ruling mandated separate cars for blacks and whites operating on railroads within the state of Louisiana thereby opening up the floodgates to local and state segregation measures that would characterize social order in the South for decades to come. By 1940, it was estimated that 87 percent of all African-Americans were at or below poverty levels (Thernstrom & Thernstrom, 1997). White supremacy dictated the law of the land in the South, keeping African-Americans from obtaining ample paying jobs, owning land, and reaping educational benefits.
After World War II, mechanized production reduced the need for manual labor in the predominately agricultural southern states, forcing many African-Americans northward to look for work and higher wages (Thernstrom & Thernstrom, 1997). Three million African-Americans had relocated in the North by 1960 with another 1.6 million to follow during the decade. This population shift resulted in segregated neighborhoods throughout urban areas of the north as African-Americans clustered together in certain areas of the cities. “Blacks and whites lived separately; nevertheless, the arrival of blacks fueled racial tensions” (Thernstrom & Thernstrom, 1997, p. 87).
By 1954, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) submitted a number of cases to the Supreme Court challenging the segregation of public schools (Thernstrom & Thernstrom, 1997). The most important case, Brown vs. Board of Education, effectively brought an end to the “separate but equal” doctrine and a year later the Court mandated that segregated schools be integrated. By 1965, however, 75 percent of the schools in the South remained segregated. During the 1950s and ‘60s, African-Americans rallied around the civil rights leaders of the day, protesting continued segregation practices in cities and neighborhoods throughout the country.
While African-Americans experienced economic and educational progress by the late 1960s, the following decades saw little change in the poverty line. Between 1970 and 1995 the black family poverty rate wavered between 30 and 26 percent, a mere four points over 25 years (Thernstrom & Thernstrom, 1997). In the 1980s, welfare programs fell under attack by both Democrats and Republicans leaving welfare recipients still below the poverty line, and African-American children four times more likely than white children to grow up on welfare (Zinn, 1980). Affirmative Action, introduced in late 1960s to ensure equal opportunity for minorities, accelerated the rate of progress for African-Americans in the decades that followed, but also produced a backlash of resentment among many whites who saw it as preferential treatment.
Much of the anger that grew out of the discrimination practices of the Jim Crow era and Civil Rights Movement became an inherited tension passed down through generations of African-Americans. Reverend Wright is but one casualty of such intolerance. It is this culture of anger experienced by both African-Americans and Whites that Obama sees as the underlying problem of racial tension in America today.
Rhetor / Author
In addition to providing a biographical sketch of the rhetor, the purpose of this section also seeks to discover information regarding the speaker’s “experience, knowledge, and prior rhetorical action relevant to understanding the rhetorical act under consideration” (Campbell & Burkholder, 1997, p. 53). In the case of Obama, the intertwining of his own story with his credibility as a speaker is tantamount with his capacity to speak on the issue of race in America.
Early in his speech, Obama declares, “I am the son a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas” (8). Born in Hawaii, Barack’s parents divorced when he was two-years old. His father left to attend Harvard, then returned to Kenya where he worked for the government. He saw his son only once, when Barack was 10 years old, and was later killed in a car accident. His mother later remarried to an Indonesian man and the family moved to Jakarta where Barack first experienced the conditions of a third-world country and the distinction of being the first foreigners to live in their neighborhood (Ripley, 2008). Later, Obama’s mother sent him back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents and attend prep school. Here, Obama was one of only a handful of black students and learned how to move between his “black and white worlds” (Ripley, Thigpen, & McCabe, 2004).
After graduating high school, Obama attended Columbia University in New York City where he received a degree in political science. Soon after, he made his way to Chicago to work as a community organizer for Altgeld Gardens, a public housing project where he campaigned among its neighborhood citizens for improved conditions “amid shuttered steel mills, a nearby landfill, a putrid sewage treatment plant, and a pervasive feeling that the white establishment of Chicago would never give them a fair shake” (Walsh, 2007).
After three years of working in the Chicago community, the project ran out of funding and Obama left for Harvard Law School where in 1990 he became the first African-American president of Harvard Law Review, and graduated magna cum laude with a law degree a year later (Walsh, 2007). Also during this time, he met his future wife, Michelle, whom he married in 1992. After law school, Obama practiced as a civil rights lawyer for a Chicago law firm, and also taught at the University of Chicago Law School (Walsh, 2007).
Obama’s advocacy work helped him land a state Senate seat in 1996 where he worked along side Republicans in creating programs like the state Earned Income Tax that provided $100 million in tax cuts to families in Illinois. He also pushed through a landmark bill requiring law enforcement officials to videotape police interrogations after a number of death row inmates were found innocent (Briscoe, 2004). In 2004, Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate and, working along side republicans, he passed a law to help revitalize people’s trust in the government by making it possible for individuals to go online to see how their tax dollars were spent. He also served on the Environment and Public Works Committee, the Veteran’s Affair Committee, and the Foreign Relations Committee (Organizing for America, 2009). In 2008, Barack Obama became the first African-American elected to the office of President of the United States.
A perspective built from a diverse family lineage, filtered through a myriad of educational and political endeavors, places Obama in a unique position to articulate the complexities of race relations that revisits America’s past while injecting his aspirations for a more harmonious future. The following section exemplifies a few of the studies that have analyzed the rhetorical strategies orators use to frame the issue of race.
Literature Review
For decades, orators have spoke on the issue of race using different persuasive strategies toward their audience. Selby (2002) suggests that Frederick Douglas applied parody as a tonal attribute in several of his speeches and also understood that religion was a key element in white society’s argument of slavery as justified and natural because of the hierarchal view that whites prevailed above all other races. Selby (2002) notes that by pointing out religion’s argument for slavery, “Douglass’s parodies reveal his genius as a rhetor and are most significant as a response to religion’s legitimization of racial oppression” (p. 334). In doing so, Douglass undermines the “naturalness” of racism, leaving many to view his discourse as “blasphemous and his presence threatening” (Selby, 2002, p. 338).
More that 100 years later, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech drew on a number of “integrative” styles that speak directly to his desire of an integrated America (Vail, 2006). Vail examines King’s speech through three theoretical lenses: voice merging, prophetic voice, and dynamic spectacle. First, King merges his voice with Lincoln’s Gettysburg address voice through his use of “scores” and years to measure time. He also refers to the sanctity of the Emancipation Proclamation much in the same way Lincoln used the Declaration of Independence in his anti-slavery argument. King’s prophetic voice uses biblical metaphors to illustrate the importance of the moment when he says, “We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now” (Lucas & Medhurst, 2009, p. 376). King again employs biblical reference when he implores the nation “to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation” (Lucas & Medhurst, 2009, p. 376). Finally, the March on Washington signifies the dynamic spectacle of 250,000 people of different races and ideologies gathered in one place to listen to King’s speech.
In terms of Obama’s skill as an orator, few academic articles exist at this point in his career that examines his rhetorical strategies. Atwater (2007) studies Obama’s rhetoric of hope in his 2004 Keynote Democratic National Convention speech. While Atwater does little to advance any rhetorical significance, she does offer a definition for a rhetoric of hope as more than a persuasive campaign approach; it involves using “symbols to get Americans to care about this country, to want to believe in this country, to regain hope and faith in this country, and to believe that we are more alike than we are different” (p. 123).