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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago this June, a lanky Illinois lawyer-turned-politician gave a speech that changed the way Americans talked about the great racial issues of their day. The lawyer was Abraham Lincoln and the speech was the famous "House Divided" address.
America's political story is studded with such addresses -- historical signposts that divide that which went before from all that followed. Sen. Barack Obama, another lanky lawyer from Illinois, planted one of those rhetorical markers in the political landscape Tuesday when he delivered his "More Perfect Union" speech in Philadelphia.
The address was meant to dampen the firestorm of criticism that has attached itself to the senator's campaign since video clips of race-baiting remarks by his Chicago church's former pastor began circulating last week. But instead of offering a simple exercise in damage control, Obama chose to place his discussion of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright's incendiary comments in a wider consideration of race.
It was all the more remarkable because Obama -- like Lincoln -- wrote his address himself.
Obama did what he had to do, unequivocally repudiating Wright's extreme rhetoric. But what was truly radical about his analysis was his implicit demand that black and white Americans accept the imperfection of each other's views on race. Embedded in such acceptance is the seed of that "more perfect union" toward which this country -- unquestionably great but itself imperfect -- must strive.
It was a concept that Obama invoked by pointing to the fact that although the Constitution "was stained by the original sin of slavery," 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; a Constitution that promised its people liberty and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time."
Obama went on to build on that concept, invoking the authority of his own mixed heritage -- son of a black immigrant father and white mother, raised by a loving white grandmother -- and refusing to reject either Wright, a man of good works as well as extreme rhetoric, or his loving grandmother, who was prone to racial stereotypes. Obama demanded that black anger make an allowance for white anxiety and that white resentment make a place for black grievance.
No candidate for national office has ever spoken so candidly or realistically about race as it is lived as a fact of life in America. As he put it Tuesday, "The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country ... is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past."
• Tim Rutten is a Los Angeles Times columnist.
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