I agree with much of what Glenn and Ta-Nehisi have said about Obama's speech, including the notion that it is too early to say if it will lead to progress, and that it seemed to be mostly about, or to have the most importance to, black/white relations. But I found myself perhaps more impressed than they with Obama’s speech--impressed by its political boldness and its political brilliance.

These are my main points: Obama’s speech was remarkable and powerful for what he said, how he said it, and because of who he is. At the same time, it showed that even a politician as gifted as Obama cannot transcend rule number one of American politics: there shall be no policies targeted to benefit blacks.

Key to the power of the speech, of course, is who Obama is.

He reminded us that he is the child of a black immigrant father and a white midwestern mother. He spent his formative years abroad, and he later embraced the African American community in a major political and cultural center of that community: the South Side of Chicago. Ta-Nehisi rightly pointed out that there is controversy about Obama's blackness, but I think that Obama has sought to speak at different times from different identities. Though many will disagree with me, I think he can plausibly portray himself as a player on many teams--Black, White, Mixed-Race and Immigrant America--and this can give authenticity and insight and thus power to his words.

Especially on race. Being a racial everyman allows Obama to transcend the major obstacle to racial progress in America. I won’t name it but most Americans know what it is: that toxic brew of emotion--of anger, resentment, guilt, denial, license and hypocrisy--that seems to creep to the surface when Americans discuss racial issues, especially those involving blacks and whites. This toxic brew has two sources, one of which Obama tackled head on, the other he approached only implicitly, but I think even more powerfully.

The first we can call the Fallacy of Racial Continuity. This is the idea that because races--or what Americans call races--exist unceasingly over time, then the injustices that one race can be said to commit or have committed against another in the past can be attributed to the component individuals who make up that race today. This is the basis of an idea that lies behind much race conversation in America: whites dominated, exploited and committed atrocities against nonwhites, especially blacks, and thus owe reparations, affirmative action, or some other compensation.

Advocates for justice for African Americans see a lot of sense in racial continuity arguments because so much of black inequality, as Ta-Nehisi points out here and Glenn has written about extensively, is the result of accumulated disadvantage with origins far back in history. But Obama pointed out that as a rhetorical strategy, or moral argumentation, emphasizing racial continuity does not work because whites are very sensitive to the Fallacy of Racial Continuity: because whiteness existed does not mean that today’s whites existed when the worst oppression or crimes were carried out. First, there is the simple matter of generations: no whites today were alive during slavery and those alive during Jim Crow are passing on. Second is the matter of immigration: millions of whites came to America after slavery ended and, as Obama noted, have their own narrative of overcoming oppression. A final factor--and one that Obama seemed to gloss over-- is that many of the current injustices that blacks or other nonwhites face, and the ways whites now benefit from past injustices, are simply invisible to whites.

One consequence of this, as Paul Frymer has shown in this book, Uneasy Alliances, is that it is difficult to bring blacks into political coalitions and to target them with beneficial policies because many whites, as well as Latinos and Asians, see blacks as unworthy or undeserving of special help. Blacks tend to vote Democratic but the Democratic Party tends to take them for granted and downplays their specific problems. Another consequence, as revealed by sociologist Mary C. Waters, is that whites tend to be more comfortable with immigrant blacks than with the descendants of American slaves. When whites interact with immigrant blacks --such as Obama's father--tragic American history, American historical guilt and American denial are less likely to get in the way of harmonious relations.

When Obama invoked the Fallacy of Racial Continuity, that whites feel little connection to past injustice because they personally did not cause it, he made a big concession. But it mitigates white resentment.

However, Obama, playing the part of a kind of racial broker, simultaneously sought to explain past racial injustice to whites. He did so while invoking the second source of our emotional obstacles on racial issues. We might call this the Fallacy of the Racist Mind. This is the idea that everyone falls into two categories--either non-racist or racist--and the latter minds are either ill or incorrigibly evil or both. Racism in this view is thus the defining and all-consuming quality of the afflicted Racist Mind, and good people never say racist things.

Obama’s first striking move here was to not run from Reverend Wright while screaming that Wright is a racist. Instead, Obama endeavored to make White America understand where Wright and other blacks who think like him are coming from. He did not justify Wright’s outrageous comments, and he specifically stated that they represented a tragically wrong path. Wright’s comments were wrong, Obama explained, but they were not the product of a racist mind. They were wrong, but these comments could be put in an historical context, and Obama, speaking as an African American, explained how a history of racial injustice could make Wright say the things he did. As other commentators have noted, Obama humanized Wright rather than demonized him.

Most remarkably, Obama then spoke as a white man. He reminded whites that they have loved ones to whom they extend a moral generosity and acceptance because, as with Wright, there is far more to these individuals than some racist comments they might make. His arguments were powerful because Obama the white man could then talk about his beloved white grandmother. Obama could convincingly invoke the Fallacy of the Racist Mind because he is black and white, and he knows that both blacks and whites everyday forgive family and friends for racist words just as we forgive each other for other hurtful words or wrongs that we might commit.

Of course, Obama was not saying that any racism is understandable or explainable or forgivable. But speaking as both a black man and a white man, he was saying that otherwise good blacks and whites may be flawed. It was a kind of racial realism and a healthy set of expectations: due to past harms and complex histories, people--sometimes good people--will say racist things. Accept that it will happen in a diverse society of unprecedented complexity, and work to improve it.

And so, listening to Obama as a white man who grew up in a segregated community just 30 minutes from Wright’s congregation, I found much to commend in Obama’s speech. Unlike Glenn, I did not see his speech as silencing the Sharptons and Jacksons. In fact, I saw his speech potentially making Sharpton and Jackson, their words and their styles, as well as their claims for justice for black America, more understandable to white America.

And that new understanding is absolutely necessary if any candidate is to go beyond Obama’s by-the-playbook policy universalism. It has now been (arguably) 40 years since there was a new policy initiative explicitly targeted to aid African Americans. All of the major civil rights acts and affirmative action regulations--as well as Lyndon Johnson's Howard University speech that Glenn rightly praises-- are from the 1960s. Obama, as Democrats (and Republicans) now typically do, pitched all of his policy discussion, his “right way” to talk about race, in universalist terms. As Glenn and Ta-Nehisi note, African Americans suffer egregious inequalities in incarceration rates, childhood poverty, residential segregation, and other areas. But apparently these are to be combatted, in Obama’s view, only with policies that also benefit whites, Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans.

This non-targeted, universalist strategy might indeed be the the best way to get elected and the wisest course. And I must admit I'm excited by Obama's universalist vision. But in a country that regularly helps specific groups, such as farmers or residents of particular regions or college students or even corporations, a truly open and honest conversation about race should explore and explain why a serious candidate can't talk about using targeted policy to help racial groups. The Fallacies of Racial Continuity or Racist Minds may explain the emotion that limits or ruins so much racial discourse. But as Ta-Nehisi points out, there are ways to sell to whites (or nonblacks) policies to help blacks (or nonwhites) that do not depend on morality, on historical debts or labeling people as racists, and appealing to self-interest may be one of them. I've long felt that using conservative arguments (self-interest, economic efficiency, national security) to sell liberal policies was a strategy with much untapped potential.