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Brazile offers insights on politics, race and unity
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“I can tell you that as a child that grew up in the segregated Deep South, I never thought I would see this day.”
America stands at a “mountaintop moment” in a year that has seen the election of the nation’s first African-American president, the centennial of the creation of the NAACP and the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, according to political strategist and CNN commentator Donna Brazile.
“This is a day to remember and rejoice; to be happy that we have finally moved forward as a country. I can tell you that as a child that grew up in the segregated Deep South, I never thought I would see this day.”
Brazile made her comments Thursday evening as the keynote speaker for UB's 33rd Annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Commemoration Event, part of UB’s Distinguished Speakers Series. The event drew a sold-out audience of about 1,400 that included members of area church and community groups, who received complimentary tickets. UB’s Minority Faculty and Staff Association was lecture sponsor.
Despite the rise of President Barack Obama to the Oval Office, Brazile said there remains a long way to go to heal not only the racial divisions that still afflict the country, but also the political divisions. She pointed to yesterday’s withdrawal of Sen. Judd Gregg from the nomination for commerce secretary as the most recent sign of the deep fissures that separate America’s elected leaders in Washington.
Brazile repeatedly spoke to the country’s need for unity, cooperation and bipartisanship, noting the NAACP not only fights for the rights of African Americans, but all groups; that the message of Martin Luther King Jr. is for “each and every one of us;” and that Lincoln’s greatest accomplishment was not as an emancipator, but as someone who “kept the nation intact.”
“In the remaining weeks of [African-American History] month,” she said, “I hope that we not only look back, but that we look forward to how we can use this moment of hope and change and energy…to begin to build ‘one America.’”
The nation, she added, cannot truly begin to move forward without engaging in a substantive conversion about race in America.
“We should celebrate all our progress, all our achievements, but it does not negate the persistence of structural racial and class inequities,” said Brazile. “The failure to have a substantive conversation has led us to a civil war, then a civil rights movement, and American still has these ugly scars.”
The country must “join together and go beyond picking at the wounds” in order to “begin to start the healing process,” she added. “We must make sure that those barriers—those old stereotypes—die the same death they did on Election Day when more than 61 percent of whites, along with 90 percent of blacks, put their faith in Barack Obama as president of the United States.”
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