Watch Barack Obama's speech on race

The candidacy of Barack Obama has already given us many memorable campaign moments, but last week’s Philadelphia address struck me as more than that. It was the most honest speech about race in America that any leading politician has given in my lifetime. It was a shockingly brave speech – the first real test of what this man does under pressure and under fire. It was also, I think, an authentically Christian speech, inexplicable without Christian theology.

Its most surprising aspect was Obama’s simple blank refusal to disown his controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright, who claimed in sermons that the United States had brought the 9/11 attacks on itself and asked African-Americans to sing “God damn America”.

In electoral politics, if someone associated with you has said something stupid or ugly or extremist, the golden rule is to “reject and denounce” him or her immediately and move on. Obama’s decision to face this head-on and actually use the moment to give a speech that spoke of racial complexity – of the legitimacy of white racial grievance as well as of historical black bitterness – sets him apart from many other politicians.

He was not trying to appeal to one constituency over another. He was actually trying to start a conversation – a perilous conversation – that might either kill his candidacy or make it more significant than any since Ronald Reagan’s.

He placed Wright in a historical context. He invoked William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” He spoke to the American public as if they were adults, aware of their country’s tortured racial history. While he didn’t excuse – and, indeed, clearly and explicitly condemned some of Wright’s toxic racial claptrap – he also refused to ignore the fact that the black church has a history of intemperate fulmination, as well as surpassing beauty and emotion.

He reminded us that Wright and Obama belong to a multiracial and mainly white Christian denomination, the United Church of Christ (at least now the rumours about Obama being a Muslim may die down). Wright’s colourful speaking style stems from a long tradition of prophetic, angry sermonising. Let me offer an example from another such preacher: “God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war . . . And we are criminals in that war. We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world and I’m going to continue to say it. And we won’t stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place . . . [God will say:] And if you don’t stop your reckless course, I’ll rise up and break the backbone of your power.”

That was Martin Luther King in February 1968. His sermon was about Vietnam. Today in America it would be regarded by many as treasonous. This kind of rhetoric is more mainstream within the black church than many whites understand and Wright, when you listen to his full sermons, is often much more sophisticated than the soundbites sometimes suggest.

So Obama trod a complicated path last week, decrying Wright’s apparent disbelief in the self-correction of the American experiment while also trying to explain where that argument comes from: slavery, Jim Crow, centuries of cruelty and humiliation. He invoked the self-confessed racism of his white grandmother and spoke of the sometimes bigoted discourse in African-America’s barbershop subculture. He was not merely being white and black; he was being ghetto black and Ivy League black, upscale black and downscale black, middle-class black and underclass black.

This is the core of Obama’s relationship to his own race. He understands that the ease of pure victimology is as phoney as the release of complete assimilation. Think of other leading black Americans: Condoleezza Rice, a black woman who grew up in the maelstrom of the civil rights movement in the South, who was nonetheless protected from it by her parents and taught classical piano while other black girls were being killed by bombs, and who barely ever invokes her race. Or take Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court justice utterly defined by race and his anger at white liberals for condescension and affirmative action. Or Al Sharpton, a man for whom black grievance almost always obliterates any empathy with white resentment. Or think of a complicated black conservative like the nuanced and sophisticated author Shelby Steele, who has nonetheless sought occasional refuge as the token conservative black man in various right-wing media outlets. I don’t mean to overly criticise any of them. It’s tough.

Between denying your difference as a minority and embracing it as totally defining of yourself, there is a world of treacherous and difficult tension. But for an intelligent and principled person, the struggle always lies in the interstices. I relate to this a little as a homosexual. I neither want to be totally defined by my gay identity, but nor do I want to deny it. I don’t want to be imprisoned by victimology, but nor do I want to disown those of my fellow gays who do indeed suffer as victims for reasons they cannot change or help.

This is the tough road that Obama has pursued. I would think much, much less of him if he had never opened himself to the black urban subculture and its fears, hopes and resentments, while also being a Harvard Law Review president and intellectual of the first order. He married a black American woman in part to reconnect with an American black experience from which he had been cut off by his own multicultural, multi-national, biracial past. It’s all there in his first autobiography, explained and unearthed with painful candour.

Did he overlook too much of Wright’s racial extremism? Did his white guilt prevent him from protesting? Perhaps. Some Chicago political posturing may have also played a part. But it is important to note that he did not merely sit back; he also dedicated his career to racial integration and understanding. Few politicians have been as dedicated to racial integration as Obama and to tie him to racial separatists because of a few sermons at his church is simply unfair.

It was a wide bridge, to be sure, perhaps too wide for the weight that it is now bearing. And maybe America is not ready for this bridge, for these contradictions, for this complexity. We will find out soon enough.

So we are suspended between the old racial politics and a new form: between Hillary Clinton who believes in her heart that America is not ready, and may never be ready, for this leap and should therefore adopt a politics that assumes the ineradicability of this racial and cultural gulf and the need to disguise it and play cynical defence – and an Obama who offers the chance to see that sometimes authentic identity requires an element of contradiction, a bridging of the resentful, angry past and a more complex, integrated future.

He may fail and the Clintons may be proven right. But he may also succeed – and what a mighty success that would be.

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