Comments and discussion

This part of the study guide will give you a few extra points and ideas connected to the speech that you can comment on or discuss in your analysis.

An interesting aspect that you might want to consider in your analysis is Barack Obama’s ability to make himself a character in a story about race. Barack’s Obama speech is not about race in general, but it includes a personal story about his own background from a racial point of view: “I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather…” (ll. 51-53)

This makes the speaker come across as much more relatable than if he had talked about race relations in a general way. Furthermore, the speaker does not try to hide that even his own mixed-race relatives had prejudices about each othe...