It Was Always Headed Here
Obama invited some serious thinking, an invitation that's been extended many times in the past.
Last Wednesday, Barack Obama finally found himself in a role that he had previously managed to avoid: that of explaining the history and challenges of race to America. It is a potentially treacherous place to be—and that he was there was partly his own fault. Obama could have moved more nimbly, more deftly and more pre-emptively to distance himself from the jarring—and, arguably, anti-American—remarks of his outspoken former pastor, Jeremiah Wright Jr.
But even had Wright not been a factor, it was inevitable that Obama would have been forced to make a major speech on race. He and his campaign always have been defined, in part, in racial terms. That says more about America than about Obama. He has tried hard to make the case that his candidacy is more about health care, economic opportunity and getting out of Iraq than about race. Yet he cannot escape perceptions and preconceptions based on the color of his skin. (It is telling that in our uniquely American taxonomy, Obama is almost always described as a black man with a white mother and never as a white man with a black father.) Many, of course, see his race in a positive light. Americans are eager to see his candidacy as a sign that racial divisions can be overcome, that we have moved beyond (or that he can move us beyond) the racial acrimony at the base of so much pain.
But it was not just such benign, generally unstated assumptions that forced Obama to play the role of racial teacher. It was also an unending stream of race-baiting silliness emanating from people with strong opinions about his candidacy. There was Bill Clinton, who seemed inclined to make Obama out as a latter-day Jesse Jackson. There was Gloria Steinem, who, in an op-ed, stopped just short of saying it would be unfair for a black man—instead of a white woman—to be offered the keys to the White House. Then there was Geraldine Ferraro, famous largely because she was once selected to run for vice president. She believes Obama "would not be in this position" if he had been born a white man. Never mind that most of us would probably not be in our current positions if we were fundamentally something other than what we are. Never mind that Hillary Clinton's candidacy would not exist were she not a woman—since no man could run largely on the basis of credentials garnered by being the spouse of a former president (at least not until same sex-marriage is more acceptable than it is now).
To his credit, Obama chose not to respond to the silliness with more silliness—which, given the touchiness of race and the seeming inability of different groups to see the same picture in the same way, was probably the politically clever thing to do. Instead, he invited Americans of all hues to engage in a serious, sustained thinking through of our shared history and to focus on the continuing ramifications of slavery, America's "original sin."
It is an invitation that has been extended many times in the past, by orators even more eloquent than Obama—Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. among them. The lesson of history seems to be that the invitation is accepted only in times of crisis, when racial divisions, or race-related violence, threaten to tear the country apart.
Obama's hope is that this time is different. So it would have been nice to hear him talk more about why it is different, and what will actually cause us to come together to deal with income disparity, segregated schools and the unhealed scars of past inequities. What will cause blacks to put aside their anger, whites to set aside their resentments and people of all colors to eschew the dance of blame and denial that makes coalescing around common problems difficult? His only answer is that we have no choice. But of course we do.
Forty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson's Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders released an acclaimed (and reviled) report that attempted to explain the urban riots of that era. That report challenged America to acknowledge its history of discrimination and its lingering effects and to end racial inequality. This year the Eisenhower Foundation, which considers itself the commission's successor, issued a report saying that not nearly enough has changed. Its CEO, Alan Curtis, like Obama, is banking on the hope that maybe this time is different. By focusing on the educational and economic problems that affect Americans of all colors, Curtis aspires to stimulate a new movement to meet the challenge the commission issued so many years ago.
But if the past is a guide, it seems more likely that the foundation's new report, like Obama's beautifully crafted speech, will stimulate some interesting discussions but little action. Indeed, Obama may well find some of his words hurled back at him by politicians, or their surrogates, less subtle of mind. They'll be intent on making him out to be not a transcendent, unifying figure, but just another black man wallowing in a history many Americans would rather forget.
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Ellis Cose, author, columnist and contributing editor (since 1993) for Newsweek magazine and former chairman of the editorial board and editorial page editor of the New York Daily News, began his journalism career as a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times—becoming, at the age of 19, the youngest editorial page columnist ever employed by a major Chicago daily. Cose, who is also an independent radio producer, is a popular campus lecturer and public speaker.
In addition to serving as a columnist, editor and national correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, Cose has been a contributor and press critic for Time magazine, president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Journalism Education, chief writer on management and workplace issues for USA Today (where he has also served as an occasional columnist and member of the board of contributors) and a member of the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press. He has also been a fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, at the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, a senior fellow and director of energy policy studies at the Washington-based Joint Center for Political Studies, and a consultant to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
Cose's Bone to Pick: On Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation and Revenge, was published by Atria (a Simon and Schuster imprint) in April 2004. The book is a wide-ranging look at a number of societies—the United States, Ghana, South Africa, East Timor, and Peru among them—and their ways of coping with cruelty and pain. The Washington Post had this to say: "The complex questions surrounding 'forgiveness, reconciliation, reparation, and revenge' probably require a scholarship of jurisprudence, philosophy, psychology, history and literature. This is the kind of ambitious enterprise that the world's great religions deal with. But Cose meets the challenge, and Bone to Pick ranges over centuries of contested histories, across five continents, spinning individual tragedies in and out of collective traumas, seeking the nature of 'forgiveness, albeit as a proxy for a larger set of values.' … The truth may be a prized (and politicized) commodity in the quest for social justice, but as Cose observes, quoting Czech novelist Milan Kundera, 'The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.' Bone to Pick is a timely reminder of that axiom and a useful addition to the canon of that struggle."
Cose's The Envy of the World, an in-depth essay on the state of black men in America, was published by Washington Square Press (an imprint of Simon and Schuster) in 2002 and has appeared on several best-seller lists, including the Essence magazine list, where it was number one. Newsweek featured the book on its cover and National Public Radio produced a special a program based on it. Kirkus Reviews called The Envy of the World, "A slender volume with a substantial and significant message." The Washington Post described it as "lucid, eloquent and deeply personal book." The Chicago Tribune called its author "a gifted, rhapsodic essayist." "Cose charts both an urgently argued history of black masculinity and a moving and nuanced snapshot of where it is now," declared Publishers' Weekly. The paperback edition was published in January 2003.
In May 2004 the Rockefeller Foundation issued Beyond Brown v. Board: The Final Battle for Excellence in American Education—a major report authored by Cose on the legacy of the historic Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision and the current challenges facing American educators. The report was the basis of a Newsweek cover feature and for a David Broder column and other stories in the national press. In November 2006, the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC's Annenberg School published Cose's Killing Affirmative Action: Would ending it really result in a better, more perfect Union? That report, featured in several newspaper and in Newsweek magazine, examined California's 10-year experience living with Proposition 209, the measure that ended affirmative action in the public sector in California.
Cose's best-selling The Rage of a Privileged Class, a book-length essay on race in America, was published by HarperCollins in January 1994. It was featured as a Newsweek cover story and described by The New York Times Book Review as a "disciplined, graceful exposition of a neglected aspect of the subject of race in America." His A Man's World (published by HarperCollins in June 1995), was featured in a front page review in The New York Times Book Review. The Washington Post called it "a valuable, cogent and well-written contribution to an enormously complex subject."
Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World (published in January 1997 and also excerpted in Newsweek) explored America's continuing obsession with race. The New York Times Book Review called it "a book this country desperately needs, one with genuine healing potential," and included Color-Blind among its best book of the year recommendations for 1997. Cose edited an essay collection entitled The Darden Dilemma published by HarperCollins in March 1997. His debut novel, The Best Defense, was published by HarperCollins in September 1998 ("a formidable first novel...crisp, fast-paced and engaging. In a genre glutted with lightweight fare, The Best Defense reaches higher"— The Seattle Times).
Cose is also the author of A Nation of Strangers, a history of American immigration, published by William Morrow and Co. in 1992 and of The Press, published by Morrow in 1989. He is the author of Energy and the Urban Crisis (1979) and the editor of Energy and Equity: Some Social Concerns (1978), both published by the Joint Center for Political Studies. He also wrote The Rebirth of Community Power, published by Westview Press: 1983.
At the Institute for Journalism Education (at the University of California, Berkeley), Cose designed and directed a widely quoted study on journalism careers published by IJE: The Quiet Crisis: Minority Journalists and Newsroom Opportunity (1985). He also instituted and served as inaugural director of IJE's Management Training Center at Northwestern University.
In his capacity as president of Ellis Cose, Inc. Cose has produced, written and hosted the pilot for a multimedia documentary series: "Against the Odds." The radio project (which has received funding from the Ford Foundation and will be distributed by Public Radio International) profiles individuals who have overcome tremendous adversity. It aspires to provide continuing and better coverage—in public radio but also on the web and in other media, including print—of people and communities often relegated to the margins of society. It also aims to stimulate thinking on how they, and their respective societies, can overcome that marginalization. The pilot focuses on a young man from a refugee camp in northern Kenya who, studying by the light of a rechargeable lamp, managed to get himself into Princeton University.
Cose has appeared on The Today Show, Nightline, Dateline, ABC Evening News, Good Morning America, the PBS "Time to Choose" election special, Charlie Rose, CNN's Talk Back Live, and a variety of other nationally televised and local programs. He has been interviewed for British, Brazilian and Canadian television. He is also a judge for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Cose has received fellowships or individual grants from the Ford Foundation, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and numerous journalism awards—including the University of Missouri medal for career excellence and distinguished service in journalism, two Clarion awards, and four National Association of Black Journalists first place awards. He was also named the 2002 winner of the New York Association of Black Journalists' lifetime achievement award, winner of the 2003 award for best magazine feature from the National Association of Black Journalists as well as the winner of two New York Association of Black Journalists' first place 2003 awards for commentary and magazine features. In 2004 Cose was named the first recipient of the newly inaugurated annual Vision Award from the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. In 2006 he won a Unity award for commentary and also shared in a first place award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
A Chicago native, Cose holds a master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy from George Washington University. He is married to Lee Llambelis, former legal director for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and current director of intergovernmental relations for the Attorney General of New York. He has a daughter, Elisa Maria.
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