The Speech (Sharpley-Whiting book)

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The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union"
LC Class
E184.A1 S698 2009

The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" is a 2009 non-fiction book edited by

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, author of several books on race and director of Vanderbilt University's African American and Diaspora Studies, concerning the "A More Perfect Union" speech of then-Senator Barack Obama.[1][2][3][4][5]

The speech

The speech was delivered on March 18, 2008 in the course of the contest for the

race in the United States. The speech's title was taken from the Preamble to the United States Constitution. Obama addressed the subjects of racial tensions, white privilege
, and
African-American ancestry, is the first non-white US President.[9]

Content

The book is a collection of original essays from "leading black thinkers" – journalists, scholars and public intellectuals – exploring literary, political, social and cultural issues of Obama's speech.

structural inequalities and race relations in America that was sparked by the Jeremiah Wright controversy.[12]

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and groups of the essayists were brought together on several occasions around the US with a few of them being recorded and one being aired on national cable television. In October 2009, Book TV (C-SPAN) aired a program of T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and five of the essayists, filmed at Vanderbilt University in September 2009,[13] reading excerpts and talking about the collection and their views on Obama's speech as well as the ideas of a post-racial America.[13] The same month the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library presented a panel discussion of the book with several contributors.[12]

Contributors

Essays are from "contributors of diverse backgrounds and vocations" including;

  • Associate Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and author Omar H. Ali, "Obama and the Generational Challenge" [14]
  • ta-Nehisi Coates[15]
  • Michael Eric Dyson[15]
  • political commentator Keli Goff[12][16]
  • Biblical scholar and theologian Obery M. Hendricks Jr., "A More Perfect (High-Tech) Lynching."[3]
  • columnist Derrick Jackson, contributed three parts; "Wright Stuff Wrong Time", the build-up to the speech, the press pool reaction to the speech and the ways the speech took on its own life during the campaign.[3][13]
  • Glenn Loury[15]
  • author and playwright Adam Mansbach, "Toward a More Perfect Union?"[13][17]
  • journalist, author and cultural critic Joan Morgan, "Black Like Barack"[12][18]
  • Orlando Patterson[15]
  • novelist Alice Randall, "Barack in the Dirty, Dirty South."[12][19]
  • columnist Connie Schultz[20]
  • sociolinguist Geneva Smitherman[3]
  • professor, researcher and consultant Gilman Whiting[13]
  • sociologist William Julius Wilson[3]

Reception

The Los Angeles Times noted, "Overall, "The Speech," though somewhat uneven, is a rich landscape of opinion on the state of race and Obama's singular relationship to it."[3] Publishers Weekly said the collection is "scholarly without being dry, the book offers a way forward from what has become a stalemate between a "color-blind" white America that sees racism as a problem solved in the 1960s and a nation of ethnic minorities that experiences daily its structural inequities."[11] Salon called the book an "eye-opening collection of essays" although they also called it "a provocative, if uneven set of essays".[20]

Further reading

References

  1. ^ "Program in African American Studies". www.vanderbilt.edu. Archived from the original on 2 February 2008. Retrieved 17 January 2022.
  2. ^ Faculty Biography of Vanderbilt's Program in African American and Diaspora Studies
  3. ^ a b c d e f Kaplan, Erin Aubry (August 9, 2009), "Race speech reconsidered", Los Angeles Times
  4. ^ Obama, Barack (2008-03-19). "A more perfect union". The Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on 2008-06-08. Retrieved 2008-03-22.
  5. ^
    Wall Street Journal
    . Retrieved 2008-03-18.
  6. ^ Pickler, Nedra; Apuzzo, Matt (2008-03-18). "Obama confronts racial division". Huffington Post. Associated Press. Archived from the original on March 21, 2008. Retrieved 2008-04-04.
  7. ^ Pew Research Center (2008-03-27). "Obama Speech on Race Arguably Biggest Event of Campaign". Retrieved 2008-03-28.
  8. ^ Hertzberg, Hendrik (November 17, 2008). "Obama wins". The New Yorker. p. 40. Retrieved November 18, 2008.
  9. ^ Salit, Jacqueline (2009-02-09). "How the independent movement went left by going right". Huffington Post. Retrieved 2010-02-20.
  10. ^ "Log In | Publishers Marketplace". www.publishersmarketplace.com. Retrieved 2024-12-22.
  11. ^ a b "Nonfiction Reviews: The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" Edited by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. Bloomsbury, $18 paper (272p) ISBN 978-1-59691-667-8". Publishers Weekly. June 15, 2009.
  12. ^ a b c d e f Jelani Cobb (moderator), T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Keli Goff, Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., Adam Mansbach, and Joan Morgan (panelists) (October 14, 2009). The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" (Panel discussion). Schomburg Center Audio/Video Resources. New York Public Library.
  13. ^ a b c d e Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting (moderator), Obery M. Hendricks Jr., Derrick Jackson, Adam Mansbach, Alice Randall, Gilman W. Whiting (panelists) (16 September 2009). Is America postracial?. Book TV (Panel discussion). Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University / C-SPAN. Retrieved 12 April 2015. A panel discussion was held by contributors to the book The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" (Bloomsbury USA; August 18, 2009. It is a collection of essays about the famous "race speech" then-presidential candidate Barack Obama delivered in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008, in response to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright controversy. The essays are interspersed with Boston Globe columnist Derrick Johnson's coverage of the highlights of the 2008 election. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, the editor of the book, moderated the event. After she read a passage from an essay the contributor made comments, focusing on the concept of a post-racial country. Then the panelists responded to questions from members of the audience. The event called "Is America Postracial?" was held by Vanderbilt University at 8:00 p.m. CT on Thursday, September 16, 2009, in Wilson Hall.
  14. ^ Omar Ali (Curriculum Vitae)
  15. ^ a b c d BloomsBury Press, Walker & Company, BloomsBury Book Catalog Spring 2009, May–August, page 59.
  16. ^ "Race and the president". Mid-Morning. MPR News. Minnesota Public Radio. January 26, 2010.
  17. ^ Mansbach, Adam (July 22, 2009). "Toward a More Perfect Union?: In an excerpt from the forthcoming book, The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union", edited by Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, a white hip-hop novelist writes about the audacity of post-racism". The Root.
  18. ^ "Black Like Barack" by Joan Morgan from the book The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union"
  19. ^ Randall, Alice. "Bio". AliceRandall.com. Archived from the original on 2009-09-27.
  20. ^ a b O'Hehir, Andrew (August 10, 2009). "Critics' Picks: The legacy of Obama's "race speech": An eye-opening collection of essays revisits the legendary campaign-trail moment". Salon.
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