Leonard Pitts Jr. during his Mary Alice Davis Distinguished Lecturer presentation on the University of Texas campus.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE ENTIRE PRESENTATION VIDEO ONLINE

Change will not come in the form of a lightning bolt, but rather through the will and effort of a nation crested on the edge of “seismic racial change.”

This according to Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. who delivered his speech, “The Education of Barack Obama: What Our First Black President is Learning about Race, Politics and the Media,” to an overflow audience Thursday, 10/27, at the University of Texas Student Union Building.

Pitts, who took a few jabs at Texas Governor Rick Perry while navigating through the news media’s failed coverage of race issues and racism in the United States, spoke as part of the Mary Alice Davis Distinguished Lecturer series.

Mary Alice Davis, who died in 2004 from ovarian cancer, championed the role of journalism in a democracy. She wrote for the Daily Texan as an undergraduate at UT and later wrote for the Austin American-Statesman and the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. The Mary Alice Davis Distinguished Lectureship was created in 2005 by the Davis family and brings notable journalists to campus to discuss the role of journalism in society.

Pitts led off with a little bit of humor, asking the audience, “How are you all enjoying the post-racial America so far?” 

With the election of Barack Obama, Pitts said Americans expected a new era where race wouldn’t define our perceptions of one another.

“We expected the Promised Land to be delivered to us in a lightning bolt,” Pitts said. “Friends and neighbors, it did not happen [after the election].”

Instead, Pitts argued, Obama has been “astonishingly slow to recognize the opposition against him. Not his policies, not his ideas, and not his legislation. The opposition to him is what drives his opponents.”

This rift, which easily could be explained away as racism, according to Pitts, is instead something more deeply rooted in the way people perceive and interact with race.

“From day one, there has been an unprecedented amount of invective and threat directed at this president,” Pitts said. “What makes this invective startling is it’s coarseness and crudeness and that it’s [coming from] the news media and establishment, from those who hold elected office or those who are trusted with the media megaphone.”

As described by Pitts, the media and the GOP have promoted the image of Obama as “an outsider, interloper, other, trespasser, and threat; as something foreign to American ideals.

“It’s as if a large majority of Americans, those in establishment, have chosen to render the country ungovernable while Obama is president,” Pitts added.

Pointing out there will be no racial majority in the U.S. later this century, Pitts urged a rethinking of the news media’s approach to covering race.

“They have largely neglected the issue,” Pitts said, “instead preferring to debate simple, Right Wing racism as a catch-all explanation [for opposition to the President]. The news media is meant to serve the purpose of explaining the nation to itself, but you cannot explain what you do not understand.

“Too often,” he added, “we do not think or consider race until the outrage de jour … Too often we cling to the simple and simplistic because it is easier.”

Pitts, who educates students on race and society at Princeton University, said the news media should first educate themselves on race and then work to contextualize issues in more meaningful ways.

“It would behoove the media to read some books,” he said. “To ask some questions. To do some hard thinking about what race really is, what it means, and what it will mean to the nation in the coming years.”

He added the news media and the nation alike “must put the simplistic behind. We must put the lightening bolt behind us because lightning bolts do not make change. We make change.”

By Avery Holton, School of Journalism PhD Student

Leonard Pitts Jr. on the day of his Mary Alice Davis Distinguished Lecturer presentation on the University of Texas campus.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE ENTIRE PRESENTATION VIDEO ONLINE

More on Leonard Pitts Jr.

 

Pitts was first published at the age of 14 when one of his poems appeared in The Los Angeles Sentinel. He graduated from the University of Southern California five years later and wrote for Musician, Spin, TV Guide, Reader’s Digest, and Parenting.

He joined The Miami Heard in 1991 as a pop music critic and went to become a columnist covering a variety of social issues. He received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2004 for his work on race and family life in the modern era. The Pulitzer committee described his work as, “fresh, vibrant columns that spoke, with both passion and compassion, to ordinary people on often divisive issues."

Pitts has authored six books, including, “Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood,” and “Before I Forget,” a novel centered on the role of African-American men in society and family life.

“Leonard Pitts tells it straight and doesn't mince words,” said Glenn Frankel, Director of UT’s School of Journalism. “He's won a seat anywhere where contemporary issues are discussed in media.”

Read Leonard Pitts Jr.'s column in The Miami Herald