What first strikes me in Barack Obama’s speech today is the image of a black American standing across the street from where the Constitution was negotiated in part by slave owners — and not condemning the Founders, but praising them.
When we hear sentences like this: “Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787,” we often hear in response America’s black leaders condemn those men as racists who don’t represent black Americans. They remind us of the slaves who suffered and died crammed into the cargo holds of some of those ships. They hold slavery to be THE defining mark of early America and discount the remarkable achievement in Philadelphia as something insincere, fraudulent, and unworthy of reverence.
But here was Obama praising the Founders for their ideals. Here he was noting the stain of slavery, but not letting it become THE story of the Founders, but only a part of the story, not letting it press out the reverence the Founders are due.
That might be the lasting legacy of this speech. The Jeremiah Wright controversy will eventually become a footnote in American political history. But the moment of the first serious black contender for the Oval Office speaking with reverence and admiration for slave-owning Founding Fathers, and dismissing explicitly the idea that the United States is, by virtue of the nation’s Original Sin of slavery, a fundamentally racist nation, has the potential to become a turning point.