The Thin Line

Obama's comments today about his respect for the Rev. Wright and love of his own white grandmother, despite their racial attitudes, reminded me of something I wrote in a review reprinted in this post:

I know these men [Mississippi sheriffs shown in a photograph], or the men like them who were my neighbors, my uncles, my friends' fathers and our Sunday school teachers and scoutmasters. When I was growing up in Mississippi, they would say such appalling things about black people that even to remember 40 or 50 years later causes my gorge to rise. Yet I also know that when they weren't spewing racist filth, they could be men one could respect and even love. It was as if, in the lives of these men, a tributary of human feeling had been dammed, grown stagnant and polluted, and its foulness had seeped out and corrupted a mainstream that should have run clear.

I think lots of people, especially white Southerners of a certain generation, know this feeling -- of affection and respect for someone with whom you disagree deeply and painfully on particulars, usually concerning race. It was thrilling to hear something similar articulated so well today by a candidate for president. Whether the sound-bite-obsessed media can comprehend and accurately report the subtlety of what Obama had to say is another question.

Update: Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Eugene Robinson do an excellent job of analyzing and commenting on this particular section of the speech.