Race and "the race"

I've just watched Senator Barack Obama's sweeping commentary on race relations in the United States, a speech of considerable skill and sensitivity to nuance that may or may not "work" in any significant way for his campaign.

What was most interesting to me was not his historical summation of the race problem in this country, but rather his crucial understanding of the context in which the speech was given.

I, like many folks, watched the speech on my own time via the convenience of YouTube (and, as I write, so are significant numbers of other people), the very medium which, in large measure, sparked the very controversy to which Obama's speech was addressed. As we continue down the path toward the Democratic nomination and the general election, a path which is both symbolically and actually a "race" in itself, Obama's moment (or roughly 38 minutes, more on that shortly) at the podium serves to underscore the negotiations underway in a media culture which has suckled at the teet of the soundbite for many years now.

One of the key points Obama seems at pains to emphasize here is that the tempo and tenor of the race that is the presidential election cycle does violence to issues of even moderate complexity (which, of course, is most of them) by creating an atmosphere in which nuance (there's that word again) and thoughtfulness are mistaken for weakness or "liberal," PC claptrap. That YouTube is such a key component of Reverend Wright-gate (surely someone has used that unfortunate compound already) should be a cue for a moment of consideration.

The soundbite, and the network news broadcast of which it is an integral part, responds to a kind of perceived and actual busy-ness on the part of its audience. Few mainstream media outlets allow for the full broadcast of comments (that the speech in question was broadcast in its entirety speaks to its centrality in the news cycle and not, in my opinion, to an appreciable reversal of this trend), and most news programs do little more than create one-dimensional "sides" to a story. This is old news, of course. But what if maybe, just maybe, YouTube, in addition to being a playground for the creative, the fomenting, and the embarassingly narcissistic, might also be, strangely, an antidote to the soundbite?

Sure, we're all busy at any given time. We might want our news quick and dirty sometimes. But on other occasions, perhaps we'll actually tune into a 38-minute analysis of what is probably the central social problem in United States history. We Tevo Lost, right? Maybe YouTube is our Tevo for news, analysis, and discussion (where they are still extant).

By way of full disclosure, by the way, I'm an Obama supporter, so I was a bit mooney-eyed by the speech itself. But more important, to me, was that there might be a channel whereby we begin talking and listening carefully again.