Barack Obama’s attempt to defuse the crisis in his presidential campaign caused by videos of his “spiritual mentor’s” bigoted sermons has been spun as “the most significant public discussion of race in decades,” as The New York Times gushed. In fact, Obama merely recycled the tired received wisdom about race in America, the same clichés and nostrums peddled by television, government programs, movies, and just about every classroom in America. That this old racial script is being touted as some sort of fresh and “honest” discussion of race in America proves just the opposite. Liberal Americans, both black and white, apparently prefer gratifying, dishonest, and self-serving racial myths to the hard truth.

To correct the media’s packaging of Obama’s stale received ideas about race as some sort of epochal shift in our public conversation, a close analysis of the speech will be more useful and illuminating than a commentary based on sound-bite-sized quotations. The following is an attempt to provide such an analysis. [more]