Eric Holder’s confrontational speech

Eric Holder’s confrontational speech to members of the Justice Department on Wednesday spoke plainly and bluntly about the level of racial discourse in America. “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot,” he said, “in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” However equivocal his windup, Holder’s line was a punch in the face to America. As top cop of the United States, it’s his job to play the disciplinarian—but the lengthy admonition, given in honor of Black History Month, by the first African American attorney general, was the verbal equivalent to shock and awe.

"On Saturdays and Sundays, America in the year 2009 does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some 50 years ago,” Holder said. “This is truly sad.” He spoke, with a tinge of bitterness, of the “polite, restrained mixing that now passes as meaningful interaction but that accomplishes little.” Sure, blacks and whites mingle at the workplace or in the marketplace, on the subway or in line at the deli, but voluntary segregation, he assured his listeners, is still rampant.

America talked a lot about race during the 2008 campaign. We chewed over Barack Obama’s biraciality, his cleanliness and articulateness, the question of whether he'd be black enough, the reluctance of older blacks to back him, Michelle Obama’s American-ness and her collegiate views on race relations, the role of the Hispanic vote in sending western swing states into the blue column, and the maelstrom of commentary that followed the “revelation” that when it comes to race, Pastor Jeremiah Wright is not, in fact, a big fan of the United States.

But we never really went there. Not like Eric Holder did. Obama's March 2008 speech in Philadelphia, "A More Perfect Union," was greeted with a sense of collective relief in America. "This was his kairos moment," said one black minister at the time, using the Greek word for "destiny." I agree. Amen. Tell it, brother. Obama for America capitalized on the positive reception of the disquisition—selling $12 DVDs of “A More Perfect Union” and almost daring rival campaigns to bring up Wright or race again. They did not. The final analysis: case closed.

Holder, in lawyerly fashion, cracked the case back open. There is, of course, the argument that Obama was running for president, while Holder has his job sewn up. Or that Obama’s speech as given by a man forced to talk about race in America, and Holder’s was given by a man who chose to. But that’s too simple. Obama, by all accounts, had been chomping at the bit to give a speech on race during the campaign. Advisers gave the OK, but the 45-minute oration wasn’t written in three days. The words were the worry beads Obama had been clacking about in his head for months, years even—the same thoughts that clack about the heads of most people of color.

So why did Holder’s words seem so confrontational, so angry, so “un-Obama”? Most notable was Holder’s unequivocal habitation of the black perspective. Obama’s careful speech was eager to embrace many sides: the worker who feels maligned, the old preacher who feels burned by the American dream. Holder offered no such accommodation: “The history of the United States in the nineteenth century revolves around a resolution of the question of how America was going to deal with its black inhabitants,” he said. “The fight for black equality came first and helped to shape the way in which other groups of people came to think of themselves and to raise their desire for equal treatment.”

Should Holder's message come as such a surpise? Polls suggest that the percentage of Americans who count at least one black friend has jumped 25 percent since 1973. But what about two black friends? Real friends? (Barack Obama doesn’t count.) Little current data exist, but now that the bar for “post-racial” interaction has been raised, American failures become more obvious. So Holder decried “electronically padlocked suburbs” alongside “race protected cocoons,” and also lamented the caging of race-based topics that are not to be brought up in mixed company—which, as Obama’s speech pointed out, “find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table” instead of being aired in plain view. Holder's conclusion, that “this nation has still not come to grips with its racial past nor has it been willing to contemplate, in a truly meaningful way, the diverse future it is fated to have” sounds the alarm: America is still segregated, is still blind to its uphill climb, is still afraid of itself.