A More Perfect Union
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — March 18, 2008
"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union..."
Delivered at the National Constitution Center during his first presidential campaign, this speech addressed the controversy over Reverend Jeremiah Wright's inflammatory sermons. Rather than simply distance himself, Obama chose to deliver the most substantive address on race by a major American politician in a generation.
The Stain and the Promise
Obama begins with the Constitution—a document signed in the same city where he now speaks. It was stained from the start by the nation's original sin of slavery. Yet it also contained the promise of equality, a promise that launched the long journey toward a more perfect union.
The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years.
"Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution—a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law."
His Own Story
Obama's biography is itself an argument. The son of a Black Kenyan and a white Kansan, raised in Indonesia and Hawaii, married into a South Side Chicago family descended from slaves and slave owners—his existence embodies the complexity of American racial identity.
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line while he was overseas.
"I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible."
Reverend Wright
Obama addresses the controversy directly. Reverend Wright's sermons contained views that were not only wrong but divisive—at a time when the nation needs unity. Yet Obama refuses to disown the man who brought him to Christianity, married him and Michelle, and baptized their children.
Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely—just as I'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed. But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country.
"I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother."
Understanding Black Anger
Obama asks his white listeners to understand where Wright's anger comes from—not to excuse it, but to understand it. The legacy of discrimination did not end with the Civil Rights Act. Segregated schools, lack of economic opportunity, the destruction of Black families—these wounds do not heal in a generation.
That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table... And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.
That anger is not always productive... But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.
Understanding White Resentment
In a move that surprised many, Obama then turns to white resentment—and asks Black Americans to understand it as well. Working-class whites who see their jobs disappear, their neighborhoods change, their children bused to distant schools, feel that their struggles are dismissed or blamed on them.
Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience—as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch.
"To wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns—this too widens the racial divide."
The Choice
Americans face a choice. They can continue to dwell on grievance, accept a politics that breeds division—the kind of politics that uses race to distract from the real problems facing all Americans. Or they can come together around common challenges.
This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care.
"This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected."
Ashley's Story
Obama closes with a story. A young white woman named Ashley organized for his campaign in South Carolina. At a roundtable, she told of her mother's illness, the loss of their health insurance, eating mustard sandwiches to save money. She went around the room asking each person why they were there.
An elderly Black man had been sitting quietly. When it came his turn, he did not cite a policy position or a political grievance. He said simply: "I am here because of Ashley."
"By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough... But it is where we start."
"It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins."
— Barack Obama
End of Text
Selected passages from the original speech. Watch or read the full address for Obama's complete argument.
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