Obama’s snake-oil
Sir: Matthew Parris (Another voice, 29 March) defends Barack Obama’s speech on race very well. But surely we ought to resist the core of Mr Obama’s case?
The Reverend Wright said some horribly stupid things, and Mr Obama rightly distances himself from them. Mr Obama was on halfdecent territory when he said that black and white ‘bitterness and bias’ are sort of equivalent. (Though he might have stressed that one is indulged and the other isn’t.) Still, we don’t have to accept Mr Obama’s insistence that he be allowed to build a case on ‘the black experience’.
Suppose a BNP (or a Labour or even a Tory) speaker argued that while he’ll renounce any strongly racist utterance, he can’t altogether renounce nastiness among working-class people, and not only because there is nastiness among upper-class people, but more because it’s all part of the white working-class collective thing.
Mr Obama says he can’t renounce the ‘black community’, warts and all. Wouldn’t we say that this is the curse of identity politics? I have a nasty feeling that Mr Obama’s speech is the cleverest sort of snake-oil — the kind that has queues of intellectuals lining up to endorse it. Richard D. North
Fellow, The Social Affairs Unit, London W1
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