The lack of a black agenda

Barack Obama finally showed up.

On the centennial anniversary of the NAACP last month, the president took the microphone at the organization's convention in New York and, for the first time since his inauguration, spoke directly to black Americans.

Noting that it was "good to be among friends," he went on to deliver a clear, sometimes informal and impassioned speech on the state of the race -- his race. He unselfconsciously used the terms "us" and "we." He charted the victories of the black past and described the present as much more paradoxical: Civil rights was the battle of the previous generation, he said, but persistent inequality is the fight of the present one. He even said that American society suffers from "structural inequality," a phrase loathed by conservatives and plenty of liberals too.

The appreciative audience shouted amens and hooted with pride. It was in part because of the work of the NAACP, Obama acknowledged, that he was able to stand before the organization on its 100th birthday as the 44th president of the United States, an astonishing development.

And yet, today, the fate of black folk is far from certain and is in some ways less secure than at any time in the last 100 years. Why? Blacks don't have an agenda. They have no lobby.

Obama's empathy was heartening, and the crowd's connection with him was moving. But all of that is emotion. It is not a plan of action.

Ironically, one key reason black people don't have an action plan has to do with the middle class that Obama addressed. Growing divisions of class and expectations have stalled blacks in a crisis of inaction for decades, unable or unwilling to fight against the damning statistics -- in health, education, incarceration, employment -- of a black reality that has wounded us all. It's a reality that Obama articulated very clearly and soberly (and that he first articulated, though less forcefully, in his now-famous "race" speech last year). Obama understands that his singular success, far from pointing to a post-racial America, illuminates collective black failure like nothing else.

Most blacks believe that there is still racial inequality, and many of us experience it directly. We just don't agree on what to do about it. Though you wouldn't have known that last year, when blacks formed a rock-solid voting bloc behind Obama in the general election. It was a relief to put aside class differences that flared up like oil fires in heated debates between Bill Cosby and Michael Eric Dyson, Al Sharpton and Don Imus. How much more satisfying it was to act instead of react, to support an educated, ambitious, self-aware striver, exactly the sort so many black leaders through the generations have held up as a model for the race.