Open Thread: Obama Addresses DNC, Nation

Right now, I am still sitting in the NPR skybox at the Invesco Field, where minutes ago Senator Barack Obama finished his speech to 70-plus thousand people. The stagecraft was amazing, but it was also, and more importantly, a moment of syncretic convergence of the issues of politics and race.

Today is the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s, "I Have a Dream" speech from the March on Washington. That occurred just a year after Barack Obama's birth.

This week, some people have said that the Obama campaign downplayed race. But the coup de grace of Obama's speech referenced the words and intent of so many powerful black speeches and writings.

Here are a few that come to mind ...

*** "On Double Consciousness" by W. E. B. DuBois, excerpted from the chapter "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" in his book The Souls of Black Folk:

"It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self."

*** "Everyone can be great because everyone can serve." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

*** "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" -- Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun

Farai Chideya

Tags: Barack Obama | Obama DNC speech | Obama speech

7:14 PM ET | 08-28-2008 | permalink

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