Obama chooses reconciliation over rancor

Obama addresses 'white anger'
He acknowledged white anger, too — over things like affirmative action and forced school busing — but urged both sides to address the subject to find a way forward.

"Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now," Obama said. He said the controversies over the past couple of weeks "reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through — a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American."

Historians and others described the speech's candidness on race as almost without precedent. John Hope Franklin, a Duke University historian who led an advisory commission on race relations set up by President Bill Clinton, said Obama pointed out how easily the question of race can be distorted in this country, "which has three centuries of experience with it and yet we act like this is something new."

Julian Bond, the longtime civil rights activist, said the speech moved him to tears. Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, said he believed the speech would "go down as one of the great, magnificent and moving speeches in the American political tradition."

"I hear so many people saying we want a national conversation on race but it’s never quite worked," he said. "He was able to do this in one speech. But he was able to do it in a nonpartisan way in that he saw both sides."

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