Barack Obama's NAACP Speech “Missed the Boat”

Barack Obama's NAACP speech in the New York Times reportedly “missed the boat”– because journalists did not understand what he was talking about, Sorn Jessen says in the Guardian.

The article, Obama tells fellow blacks: 'No excuses' for any failure, published in the New York Times reported a 45 minutes speech and the related issues, which were addressed by the President, Barack Obama, to his mainly black audience.

People gathered in New York City to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation’s largest civil rights organisation.

Jessen claims the News York Times missed the point of what Obama was saying due to “unrecognised cultural blind-spots”. He first questions if the New York Times reporters ever go to church. If they don’t this would limit their understanding, as the speech appeared to be written in a sermon style, with a soft tone.

He says the structure of Obama’s speech is different from the structure of an ordinary political speech, and he thinks if journalists were more familiar with pulpit pounding, then they would have understood what Obama was trying to say.

Secondly, he says American mainstream society has two stereotypes when it comes to talks about minorities. Either members of minority groups are portrayed as drunk, lazy good-for-nothing, or they are pictured as noble savages resisting the incursions of the evil white man.

Sorn Jessen continues to argue that the sermon was reported in a lazy, half-assed way by the New York Times, but the speech was meant to be and was, in fact, inspiring.

He thought in the New York Times article, the two sides are fused and people get both types of stereotypes. On the one hand, there’s the noble savage stereotype in Barack Obama. On the other hand, there is an element in the original article, of the “good” minority who has come back to tell the “bad” minority how to adopt the white man’s ways and be successful.

He thought the problem with this entire way of reporting is that somewhere in the fusion of stereotypes, people lose their humanity.

Sorn Jessen then addressed in his article, entitled A sermon from Obama, that Obama’s speech was a sermon, and the best sermons in his mind are the ones where people are preached to both individually and collectively.

Collectively, the president brings everyone into contact with their history. Individually, he relates his own struggle to the individual struggles of the audience members. The end result is to give strength to the individual by preaching a collective message of hope, and to inspire the collective by preaching an individual message of perseverance.

Jessen maintains that Obama used the individual stories of people like Moses Wright to give strength and a voice to the communal experience of African-Americans.
“Of course the New York Times journalists got it wrong” - Sorn Jessen concludes in his article in the Guardian.

He says the confusion occurred because the journalists do not understand the tradition, and they do not understand the dynamic between the individual and his group. He argues that if the reporters went to church a bit more, or if they stopped viewing ethnic minorities as monolithic communities, they might get a bit more right