Who's the transformative figure: Obama or Connerly?
On Tuesday, Barack Obama gave an impressive (if politically driven) speech on race in America. And on the same day, a federal judge upheld Ward Connerly's Proposal 2 eliminating race preferences in Michigan hiring and admissions.
Though it received far less press coverage, Connerly's victory was the more significant event for race relations in America.
Forced to confront the racially divisive, anti-American words of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, Obama rose to the challenge with a nuanced speech that not only distanced himself from Wright, but also from his own race-obsessed party.
"Most working/middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed, resentment builds over time," said Obama. "The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons . . . is that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made. But what we know . . . is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation."
Powerful, transformative rhetoric indeed. And rhetoric that should make Democratic special interests cringe.
The logical next step for Obama is to recognize that racial preferences only perpetuate racial division, that they hinder minority success, and that they should be abandoned so that society can focus on the real threats to black progress: Crime and family breakdown.
But Obama cannot make that leap because he is shackled to a party that jealously guards the racial spoils system. And the profound disappointment of Obama's long association with Rev. Wright is that Obama felt he had to embrace a radical, Afrocentric church in order to advance his political ambitions. As Abigail Thernstrom put it in an otherwise glowing review of Obama's speech: "(It was) the community to which he had to belong if he had any hope of building a political career based on Chicago's south side. Joining that church, one can assume, was part of a quest to belong."
This need to belong, coupled with a career marked by compromise and one of the Senate's most liberal voting records, suggests that Obama will not pursue transformational public policy on race.
Yet, that is precisely what Ward Connerly has done in his national campaign to eliminate racial preferences.
This courageous black man understands not only that race preferences divide Americans by race, but that they have stunted black progress. Indeed, as I and fellow reporter Shikha Dalmia have exhaustively reported, Prop 2's decade-old twin in California - Prop 209 - has meant more blacks graduating from state schools, more blacks getting degrees, more blacks entering the workforce. All because, without the distortion of race preferences, they are now entering schools for which they are qualified.
In so doing, Connerly - much more than Obama - is actually realizing Martin Luther King's dream to judge Americans "by the content of their character."
This year, Connerly is also on the campaign trail, rallying voters in four more states to follow the Michigan and California examples. If Obama truly wants to get beyond Rev. Wright and the racial politics of the past, he will endorse Connerly's movement.
For more Payne, go to HenryPayne.com.
