It seems it was more important in this speech for Obama to establish his and Michelle's "street cred" as children of deprivation, bogus though that is. 

President Obama's recent speech to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, on its centennial, is a prism through which one can see the dead end that is Leftism today.  Some background, however, is called for.

The organization he saluted, and in whose reflected glory he basked, is perhaps the most prestigious of civil rights organizations in the country.  Its mission statement today calls for the elimination of racist attitudes and actions, and "equality of rights of all persons."  One objective gives pause, however:  "To ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of all citizens."  This seems to mean equality of outcome, not just of opportunity.  There is a reflexive tendency in its literature to see a racial disparity and interpret it as "injustice."

The NAACP's focus has always been on the improvement of conditions external to black people themselves – fair treatment in education, employment, the criminal justice system, and voting – and there is nothing wrong with that.  But the shape of black progress since the 1909 founding seems to be a gradual climb up to the early sixties, and then a split between those who continued to climb and those who remained in, or sank into, underclass despair.

Early is his speech Obama alluded to one of the group's founders, scholar W.E.B. DuBois.  It would be interesting today to see how this President responded to the words of DuBois's published ten years before the NAACP's founding, words from his sociological study The Philadelphia Negro:

The lax moral habits of the slave regime still show themselves in a large amount of cohabitation without marriage.  …  The result of [the] large number of homes without husbands is to increase the burden of charity and benevolence, and also on account of the poor home-life [of fatherless children] to increase crime.  … [The Negro church's communal] functions are shown in its religious activity, its social authority and general guiding and co-ordinating work; its family functions are shown by the fact that the church is the centre of social life and intercourse; acts as newspaper and intelligence bureau; is the centre of amusements …  [But i]n direct moral teaching and in setting moral standards for the people … the church is timid … Efforts to stop … crime [by Negroes] must commence in the Negro homes; they must cease to be, as they often are, breeders of idleness and extravagance and complaint.  Work, continuous and intensive; work, although it be menial and poorly rewarded; work, though done in travail of soul and sweat of brow, must be so impressed upon Negro children as the road to salvation, that a child would feel it a greater disgrace to be idle than to do the humblest labor.  The homeless virtues of honesty … and chastity must be instilled in the cradle, and although it is hard to teach self-respect to a people whose million fellow-citizens half-despise them, yet it must be taught as the surest road to gain the respect of others.

From the center and right of today's sociopolitical spectrum come critiques in the same vein, some of them by black Americans.  The Manhattan Institute's John McWhorter, in a 2001 article, noted that "victim [mentality], separatism, and anti-intellectualism underlie the general black community's response to all race-related issues. …  Today, these three thought patterns impede black advancement much more than racism; and dysfunctional inner cities, corporate glass ceilings, and black educational underachievement will persist until such thinking disappears."  He points out that the American children of black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean do better educationally than their counterparts of black American parentage.

In the same year, the Hoover Institution's Thomas Sowell brought forth Civil Rights:  Rhetoric or Reality? in which he asserts that, according to one reviewer, "[unjust] discrimination does not explain the statistical variance" among races in this country.  When study of racial groups is controlled for age, education level, occupational field, incomes are comparable, and have been since the 1960s.  It is likewise with gender.

Sowell, in another article, sketches the history of black K-12 education from 1870.  His key point is that emphasis on hard work and discipline yielded excellent outcomes for these children, and that crumbling buildings, large classes, low-income parents, and even racial segregation were not barriers to this.  And, though he didn't note this, it is certain that the example of intellectually passionate black teachers, male and female, and even white male teachers for black boys, was a great asset.  When the cultural tide turned in the mid-1950s, and Leftist social engineering displaced old-fashioned dues-paying, things went to hell and have stayed there.

Then there is the matter of love.  "African Americans," commentator Joy Jones quoted Howard University's Audrey Chapman in the 2006 Washington Post article " 'Marriage is for White People,' " are the most uncoupled in the country.  Jones learned from the writings of sociologist Andrew J. Chernin that "a black child was more likely to grow up living with both parents during the slavery days than he or she is today." 

She goes on:  "Traditional notions of family, especially the extended family network, endure.  But working mothers, unmarried couples living together, out-of-wedlock births, birth control, divorce and remarriage have transformed the social landscape.  And no one seems to feel this more than African American women.  One told me that with today's changing mores, it's hard to know 'what normal looks like' when it comes to courtship, marriage and parenthood.  Sex, love and childbearing have become a la carte choices rather than a package deal that comes with marriage.  Moreover, in an era of brothers on the 'down low,' the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and the decline of the stable blue-collar jobs that black men used to hold, linking one's fate to a man makes marriage a risky business for a black woman."  She observes that "black women in their twenties and early thirties want to marry and commit at a time when black men their ages are more likely to enjoy playing the field.  As the woman realizes that a good marriage may not be as possible or sustainable as she would like, her focus turns to having a baby, or possibly improving her job status, perhaps by returning to school or investing more energy in her career."

Still more:  "As men mature, and begin to recognize the benefits of having a roost and roots (and to feel the consequences of their risky bachelor behavior), they are more willing to marry and settle down.  By this time, however, many of their female peers are satisfied with the lives they have constructed and are less likely to settle for marriage to a man who doesn't bring much to the table.  Indeed, he may bring too much to the table:  children and their mothers from previous relationships, limited earning power, and the fallout from years of drug use, poor health care, [and] sexual promiscuity."

She says, further, "A number of my married friends complain that taking care of their husbands feels like having an additional child to raise."  Quoting still another woman, "the benefits of marriage are [the man's] character and his caring.  If not for that, why bother?"

"Too many black men are in prison or trapped in low-wage jobs or subjected to racism or dead or homosexuals or married to white women," is the way commentator LaShawn Barber summarizes black attitudes she commonly encounters.  But her own take is somewhat different.  She grants the truth of these factors but observes that "black boys are not being socialized to marry and take care of families, and black girls are not being socialized to accept nothing less than an honorable man who will marry and care for them."  The reasons she cites are father deprivation and the lessened stigma on unwed childbearing, leading to sexual chaos among the young.

It should be said that McWhorter, Sowell, Jones, and Barber are all African American.
 

About a quarter of the text, some at the beginning and some at the end, pays tribute to the direct-action, legislative, and judicial feats of the NAACP, particularly during its 1950's heyday.  The rest, for the most part, is devoted to today's racial disparities and the themes of education and family and community, and to the sounding of familiar tropes:  "A rainbow coalition of underdogs must unite; African Americans are uniquely underdog; America is still a hostile environment; I, the white-raised son of an absentee-father African student and later African economist, am one of you."

He touches on a favorite subject of the NAACP, structural inequality, and lists remedies for poverty he is already implementing:  expanded tax credits, affordable housing, ex-offender re-entry programs, wraparound services for ghetto children.  And "for everybody," there are health insurance, green jobs, and consumer protection against mortgage fraud.  Ask, indeed, what your country can do for you.
 

As his current economic plans seek to expand statist dependency, so his speech called for the expansion of the Grievance Class.  Rather than focus on racial justice and progress, and on that of African Americans in particular, as would have been appropriate to the occasion, he called as well for equal outcomes for women, gays, and Muslims.  In politics, numbers count, and underdogism is the cocaine of politics, imbuing an artificial sense of power.  The concluding sentence of Washington Post writer Eugene Robinson's article, in which he interviews Obama the day after the speech, is telling.  "Said Obama, 'I do think it is important for the African American community, in its diversity [of class, immigrant heritage, multiraciality, and age], to stay true to one core aspect of the African American experience, which is we know what it's like to be on the outside.  If we ever lose that, then I think we're in trouble.  Then I think we've lost our way.'"

Obama's magic bullet, the thing that will make those "left behind" able to take advantage of existing and new opportunities, is education.  It is the subject with which he feels most comfortable, and he goes on about it at length.  But one senses its meaning for him has mostly to do with elevation of social status, not with moral or even intellectual cultivation for the sake of a life more properly human.  In a rare call for self-responsibility, he calls on parents to take "no excuses" from their children concerning school effort, but offers only a few brief specifics:  Read to them, get them to do their homework, encourage them to go into academia and the professions and politics (not, notably, business), put them to bed on time, go to parent-teacher meetings.  There is something hollow about this, partly because of the disproportionate number of black children whose parents are too wayward to take any advice, or who are in the limbo of inferior foster care.

A passage by Mr. Obama on ghetto children bears extended quotation:

I remember the principal of [a school I visited while a community organizer] telling me that soon [in these young children] [the] sparkle would begin to dim, that things would begin to change, that soon, the laughter in their eyes would begin to fade; that soon, something would shut off inside, as it sunk in – because kids are smarter than we give them credit for – as it sunk in that their hopes would not come to pass – not because they weren't smart enough, not because they weren't talented enough; not because of anything about them inherently, but because, by accident of birth, they had not received a fair chance in life.

"By accident of birth."  As if poverty were merely an "accident."  As if the circumstances into which one bears a child were merely "accident."  As if the way one raised that child were merely "accident."  This doesn't even match what he says later on, that "your destiny is in your hands."  As if that refers to education but not to sex and childbearing.

The fact that screams to be heard is that father deprivation is a big part of the light going out in those children.  Obama, however, would rather valorize single motherhood than give any recognition to three men to whom he and his wife owe so much.

Stanley Dunham, the President's maternal grandfather, was, for all intents and purposes, his father – even residential during parts of the boy's youth.  And, for significant chunk of his latency years, Lolo Soetoro, his stepfather, provided important masculine support.  A white man and an Asian man.  Obama has made enough of these facts when he thought it suited him politically.  But they are outside the pale, apparently, for America's first black president to note to the NAACP on its centennial.

As if this were not enough, a black man, Frasier Robinson, steadfast – even while disabled with multiple sclerosis – worker, husband, and father, Obama's father-in-law, gets no mention.  It seems it was more important in this speech for Obama to establish his and Michelle's "street cred" as children of deprivation, bogus though that is.  Instead, it is the mother who is real for Obama.  She "gave me love, she pushed me, she cared about my education." (Never mind that it was the elder Dunhams, merely middle-class and not wealthy, who made it possible for Obama to attend an exclusive private high school.)  To be sure, Obama's claim to fatherlessness has some basis, as we know.  His biological father, who married his mother when she found herself pregnant with Barack, left when the boy was two, and Barack saw him again only once, briefly at age ten.  Obama could say, in 2007 at a black civil rights commemoration, "My [biological] father wasn't around when I was young and I struggled … . I know what it means when you don't have a strong male figure in the house."  But that's not what the NAACP wanted to hear.  Moralizing to the epicenter of America's Leftist racial conscience doesn't play.  A non-aggression pact seemed to be in effect between them; the President, in his opening words, had expressed gratitude for being able to be among uncritical loyalists:  "It's just good to be among friends."

So, with the expected token tributes to personal and community responsibility, Obama served up the standard Leftist dish on the subject of race and justice.  It was anticapitalist, statist, and laissez-faire on family structure.  It cast the black in America as forever victim.  It had no grandness of thought or of expression.  It was the last thing black America really needs.