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133 Epilogue PERFECTING INNOCENCE One way to understand the interplay between the shifting rhetorical referents of American exceptionalism and American innocence is to turn our gaze to an event which may be understood as a culmination of the civil rights movement, tangible proof that the African American community’s pursuit of full equality in America has reached a high-water mark: the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States of America .1 But, in order to fully comprehend how Obama’s ceaseless invocations of American exceptionalism throughout his election campaign served to support—indeed to reinvigorate—the premise of American innocence, we must turn to the pivotal moment in that campaign. While Obama’s improbable rise to the presidency faced many challenges, it is important to remember that he became the front-runner after he emerged victorious in the Iowa caucus (where polls predicted he would finish second) and followed that with a narrow loss in New Hampshire and then a resounding win in the South Carolina primary. After South Carolina, the field winnowed to two candidates, Obama and Hillary Clinton, and the senator from Illinois inexorably built an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates. He would surely claim the nomination of the Democratic Party and then win the White House. And then came Rev. Wright. Rev. Jeremiah Wright was pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, the church Obama attended for more than a decade. Rev. Wright married Barack and Michelle Obama, baptized their children, and served as one of Obama’s closest advisors when he was an Illinois state senator moonlighting as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. So, when video emerged of Rev. Wright profanely condemning American foreign policy in the aftermath of 9-11, it threatened to inject a potentially fatal strain of racial resentment into a campaign that, until that point, been carefully calibrated to render questions of race inert.2 Rev. Wright’s 134 Epilogue comments, played incessantly on the nightly news and across the web, seemed poised to destroy in a number of days the months of groundwork laid by Obama and his campaign team by sowing doubt about Obama’s narrative and thus his viability in the general election. As the media furor grew, and calls for him to step aside and cede the Democratic Party nomination to Sen. Clinton increased, Obama needed to neutralize Wright’s toxic words, to stop voters from associating Wright’s statements with his candidacy.3 To accomplish this, he prepared a speech that celebrated American exceptionalism and sanctified the premise of American innocence even as it attempted to place America’s racial history in a context that would allow Obama’s campaign to survive. “A More Perfect Union” is an incredible rhetorical performance, masterfully separating Obama from the views of his erstwhile mentor, as was its design. It served to reassure a significant plurality of American voters that Obama possessed the proper temperament to be president. And it did so by invoking the particularly American narrative of exceptionalism , progress, and innocence, one that Obama had referenced before and one that often attaches itself to matters of race and reform.4 Deriding the “racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years,” Obama asserted that, in order “to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America,” the nation should take this moment of political crisis as an opportunity to reflect on the history of racial progress in the United States. “The fact is,” Obama stated, “that the comments that have been made [by Rev. Wright and others] . . . over the last few 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.” It is, Obama continued, only by coming to terms with these historical complexities that the United States can begin to tackle the “two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change” that presently challenge the nation. This is an amazing bit of sleight of hand. Obama connects the political crisis bedeviling his campaign (Rev. Wright’s toxic rhetoric) with the United States’ history of ambivalence to emancipationist discourse. He then asserts that only by properly understanding how this reluctance to accept the claims of emancipationist discourse continues to affect...

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