July 30, 2004

Obama-palooza

Barack Obama swooned the country this past week, if the blogosphere is any indication. A few observations by Anna Deveare Smith in today's New York Times:

    Will Mr. Obama change black political oratory? His speech did not, for example, elicit the traditional call and response we associate with powerful black speech. The speech instead evoked speechlessness. "That guy's amazing," said the blond model sitting next to me in the hall. Mr. Obama comes out of a mixed tradition, and I'm not talking about his racial mix. He is mixing traditions of communication. As he himself explained to me: "I tap into the tradition that a lot of African-Americans tap into and that's the church. It's the church blended with a smattering of Hawaii and Indonesia and maybe Kansas, and I've learned a lot of the most important things in life from literature. I've been a professor of law. I'm accustomed to making an argument. When I am effective, it's coming from my gut."

    If Mr. Clinton goes from Stoppard to Shaw to Shakespeare, does Mr. Obama go from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Langston Hughes, to preachers, to slavery? No, wait. It's not that simple. Mr. Clinton takes a road that stops off at the black church. Mr. Obama stops off in a literary tradition that we do not immediately associate with black oratory. Is this what Dr. King's dream was all about? Was it about more than schools and laws? Was it about irresistible fusions, irresistible mixed oratories? Was it about all of us talking to one another and as one another?

Also check out this take on Barack Obama from Leon Wynter's new blog, the American Race. Wynter, the former "Business and Race" columnist for the Wall Street Journal, wrote his own influential bestseller on "transracialism" --American Skin -- back in 2002. That treatise is pretty much the de facto business plan of our firm, New American Dimensions (we'll be one year old this coming Sunday!)

To mark the one year anniversary of our enterprise, I will be publishing an interview I did this past week with Mr. Wynter here -- so check back soon!

Posted by thomas at July 30, 2004 07:15 PM | TrackBack