Native Son.(The Talk of the Town)(Barack Obama, Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. )

The first time that Barack Obama met the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., at Trinity United Church of Christ, on the South Side of Chicago, in the late nineteen-eighties, the young community organizer tried to make a point about the growing importance of class division in America. As Obama described the exchange in his autobiography, "Dreams from My Father," Wright wasn't having any of it: "These miseducated brothers, like that sociologist at the University of Chicago, talking about 'the declining significance of race.' Now, what country is he living in?" The deluded black scholar in question was William Julius Wilson, whose 1978 book of that title analyzed the economic forces affecting black Americans and advocated universal remedies over race-specific ones. Wright, a proponent of black liberation theology, dismissed every remark about class from Obama with a categorical racial answer, and Obama allowed the topic to drop. As we all now know, he also joined Wright's church.

That conversation haunts Obama's campaign for the Presidency, in more ways than one. Their first encounter apparently set the pattern between pastor and parishioner whenever politics came up in church. As Obama suggested in Philadelphia on March 18th, when he delivered an intimate lecture on the politics of race, he deferred to the authority of the older man's experience--to Wright's "memories of humiliation and doubt and fear . . . the anger and the bitterness of those years"--even though Obama shared neither the extent of the experience nor the harsh views that derived from it. This deference, while natural and understandable, has led to the first crisis of his campaign, one that should have been foreseen and addressed from the beginning; and not even the greatest speech on race by an American politician in many decades will entirely overcome it. After all, Obama is confronting not just the centuries of injustice that he so eloquently evoked in Philadelphia but also the realities of modern American politics.

The speech seemed to have been composed in intense solitude, and it has the personal drama, the encompassing structure, the moral and intellectual intricacy, of a great essay. In particular, it evokes James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son," which is also about the distorting power of rage, the charge to acknowledge the inheritance of racism without being defined by it. The older man whose bitterness cast a shadow across Baldwin's life was his father, and Baldwin wrote of his effort to understand and also transcend him: "One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one's own reactions are always canceling each other out. It is this, really, which has driven so many people mad, both white and black." In the same key, Obama said last week of Trinity, "The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and, yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America." Obama's ability to contemplate the contradictions in Americans of all colors without going mad--to be made stronger by them--accounts for his power as a politician. He also pays the electorate the supreme compliment of assuming that it, too, can appreciate complexity.

The political heart of the speech and of his campaign is a call to Americans of all races to come together, on the basis of hopes and concerns that unite them, especially economic ones. He spoke of black Americans "binding our particular grievances--for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs--to the larger aspirations of all Americans: the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who's been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family." Obama's character and candidacy offer a ...