Speech ignites interest in race

The speech Sen. Barack Obama delivered Tuesday morning has been viewed more than 1.6 million times on YouTube and is being widely e-mailed. While commentators and politicians debate its political success, some around the country were responding to Obama's call for a national conversation about race.

Religious groups and academic bodies, already receptive to Obama's plea for such a dialogue, seemed especially enthusiastic. Universities were moving to incorporate the issues Obama raised into classroom discussions and coursework, and churches were trying to find ways to do the same in sermons and Bible studies.

The Rev. Joel Hunter, senior pastor of a mostly white evangelical church of about 12,000 in Central Florida, described Obama's speech, in which the Democratic presidential candidate discussed his relationship with his Chicago pastor, as a kind of "Rorschach inkblot test" for the nation.

"It calls out of you what is already in you," Hunter said, predicting that those desiring to address the topic would regard the speech as a spur, while those indifferent to issues of race might pay it little heed.

Hunter said the Obama speech led to a series of conversations Wednesday morning with his staff members that would have been difficult to raise otherwise.

It also was a topic of discussion on Wednesday at the Washington office of the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy and social-welfare group. Hispanics can be white, black or of mixed race.

"The cynics are going to say this was an effort only to deal with the Rev. Wright issue and move on," said Janet Murguia, president of La Raza, referring to the political fallout over remarks by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., which prompted Obama to deliver the speech.

But Murguia said she hoped the speech would help "create a safe space to talk about this, where people aren't threatened or pigeonholed" and "can talk more openly and honestly about the tensions ... that exist around race and racial politics."

On the Internet and among traditional news media, such a discussion already was taking shape. Some 4 million people watched Obama's speech live and it is now the top YouTube video.

The speech has stimulated passionate discussion on scores of blogs of varying ideological tendencies, and an article about the speech in The New York Times has provoked more than 2,250 comments.

Some conservative commentators, including Bill O'Reilly on Fox News, found positive elements in the Obama speech, which O'Reilly called "a mixed deal."

He criticized Obama for not repudiating Wright's views in stronger terms but also said Obama "was right that race remains an unresolved problem in America on both sides."