DID THE NEW YORK TIMES AND WASHINGTON POST HEAR THE SAME OBAMA SPEECH TO THE NAACP?

By Jerry D. Rose

The nation’s two newspapers that purport to be those of “record,” provide grossly contrasting records of what Barack Obama said when he addressed the NAACP convention in New York this week. The New York Times, in an article by Sheryl Gaye Stolberg, treated the speech as practically a reprise of his famous/notorious speech at Philadelphia on Father’s Day a year ago: a “fiery” exhortation to black Americans to take “responsibility” for their own fate; offering the example of how he had risen from humble origins to become President; and suggesting that they, too, could become much more through their own efforts. (In fact, the caption for the story offered in its daily headlines sent by e-mail was “Obama Tells Fellow Blacks: ‘No Excuses’ For Any Failure” but put the less explicit headline on the story: “Obama Gives Fiery NAACP Address.”) Only at the end of the Times article was it said that Obama also told this crowd what “it wanted to hear,” praising the NAACP for its sterling record in helping bring the country to the level at which an African-American could become President and citing a litany of unfinished business in the elimination of racial discrimination that will provide the NAACP with an urgent agenda for its future.

This Times report was, frankly, about what I had expected it to be in that Obama, while ostensibly addressing black Americans, was once again crafting his appeal to white Americans who need both to congratulate themselves on the non-prejudicial nature of their society, and be comforted that blacks were being offering a privatized recipe of self-help that would divert them from any “radical” agenda of “advancement” of their race by attacking the bastions of institutional racism that remain in the society.

The Washington Post article, by Krissah Thompson and Cheryl W. Thompson was in contrast very surprising indeed, as it mentioned not a single word of his “responsibility” exhortations to blacks (exactly what was emphasized in the Times article) and was totally focussed on an agenda of racial reform that he hoped to accomplish. The headline again expresses the article’s focus: “Obama Speaks of Blacks’ Struggle”; Disparities Remain, He Says to NAACP.” NAACP head Benjamin Jealous characterizes the “message” of the President’s speech as “the fight isn’t over yet,” with not even a hint that he might have been referring to any “responsibility” fight within individual black persons. Now Obama is made to appear much less like Booker T. Washington and much more like Malcolm X.

How could there be such glaring discrepancies in the “record” of this event rendered by two newspapers “of record?” For a starter, we can probably note here, is in so many other instances of Obama speeches, that he has two sides of his mouth and he speaks out of both of them, often in the same speech. Whether the auditor “hears” the words from the “personal responsibility” or the “black struggle” side of his racial speech may depend on the disposition of the reporter and, in the case of the Post and the Times, the editorial dispositions of news media editors and news directors. There is one narrative of Obama as the inspiration for blacks, using his personal example to others who stand on Harlem Street corners and evoke the President’s feeling (expressed in the speech) of thinking “but for the grace of God there go I” without any thought that any “struggle” went on to augment the grace of God. But there’s that other struggle, that other narrative that gets attached to the Rohrschach test known as Obama: his (questionable) credentials as a “fighter” in the “struggle” based on his career as a “community organizer.”

Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report wrote last week that there are “2 NAACPs”; that of the struggle for black advancement and that of the comfortable accommodation to the white power structure that led to the NAACP’s condemnation by Martin Luther King and “black power” advocates like Stokely Carmichael and Malcom X. The two sides of Obama’s mouth heard by these two “record” newspaper may have been a selective attention to the different reporters to those different “sides” of the same organization.

………………………………………….

Jerry D. Rose is editor of The Sun State Activist