Abstract:
Barack Obama’s address of March 18, 2008, sought to quell the controversy
sparked by YouTube clips of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United
Church of Christ, condemning values and actions of the United States government.
In this address, Obama crosses over the color line with a rhetorical strategy
designed to preserve his viability as a presidential candidate and in so doing,
delivered a rhetorical masterpiece that advances the cause of racial dialogue and
rapprochement. Because of his mixed racial heritage, he could bring perceptions
and misperceptions in black and white “hush harbors” into the light of critical
reason. The address succeeds, I argue, because Obama sounds the prophetic voice
of Africentric theology that merges the Hebrew and Jewish faith traditions with
African American experience, assumes theological consilience (that different religious
traditions share a commitment to caring for others), and enacts the rhetorical
counterpart to Lévinas’s philosophy featuring the “face of the other.”