Is It Because O Is Black?
ByAre people really more open to Barack Obama’s oratory because he is black? John McWhorter seems to think so:
As to [Mario] Cuomo’s speech, 1984 was about the last time that a middle-aged white man could pull off true oratory without seeming pretentious. What white 40-something could orate to all of America as Obama can now? The nation’s openness to Obama’s orating – i.e., OK, here he goes, shh, this is going to be deep! – is of a part with what helped get him elected: his color.
Yes: Legions of whites see him as a symbol of America’s having gotten beyond the hideousness of our racial past, of having healed the most grievous division of our history. This symbolic status makes us hear Obama in a special way, as speaking above the fundamentally dress-down and speak-down nature of post-countercultural America – without seeming phony.
We can drink in his words as music rather than dismissing him as merely mimicking the lofty language of a distant time, because we see an ineluctable justice in the sheer fact of his having become our leader.
We assume that, having fashioned himself as an achieving adult despite being someone who not long ago would have been relegated to society’s margins, he has something to tell us about real work, about making the best of the not-so-good – that is, about so much of what being American has always meant.
