Hermeneuti.ca – The Rhetoric of Text Analysis

Sounds like he talked a hate speech, doesn't it? Now, analyze that. (Wright, NAACP Speech)

Introduction

In the lead-up to the 2008 US Presidential election the news media became interested in the conflict between what Barrack Obama had to say about race and what his spiritual mentor Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. had to say.1  The news media presented Obama and his spiritual father as in an oedipal drama. Obama the son tries to distance himself from his father-pastor to win the presidency while Wright struggles to continually correct the record while getting attention unlike what he is used to getting from the pews. Both, in different ways, are trying to tell the media what should be talked about and how. Both want the attention on more substantive issues and, in trying to redirect us, have given moving and important speeches on race and America (by which we meanIn statistics, the mean is the arithmetic average of a set of values. When used in text analysis, the set of values is the distribution of words in the source text, and the mean value the word with the occurrence rate closest to the average. For more information, see the Wikipedia. Return to Glossary. the USA). Both have been trying to use the attention to redirect us to what "this time we want to talk about", or, to use Wright's blunt phrase, they challenge us directly: "now, analyze that"!2 

Of course the media know where the engaging human story is and it is in the age-old conflict of the son and his father, as the son comes of age as a leader.

But, what if we took them at their word and looked away from the pulpit-and-pews drama. What if we take them seriously and look at what they say. What if we try to "analyze that" looking for the similarities and differences between their speeches. Are they a generation apart in their thinking or are they caught in the headlights of the media?

So we decided to quickly analyze and compare a speech by Obama and one by Wright. There are ironies to this analysis, but those will come out later. This is an experiment, but that too will come out.3

The Texts

The two speeches we chose to look at are:

• Barack Obama's March 18, 2008 speech A more perfect union which he gave in response to the controversy and to clarify where he stood on race. This speech has been generally considered one of Obama's finest on race and America.
• Jeremiah Wright's April 27th speech to the NAACP that follows Obama's speech and also deals with race.

Why these two texts?

1. First, because we weren't interested in the "gotchas" that bloggers and media have been focusing on, like Wright's references to Louis Farrakhan. We looked at Wright's speech to the National Press Club on April 28, 2008, but chose not to use that speech because a large portion of it took the form of question and answer and therefore would not necessarily reflect how Wright wanted to shape the issues.
2. Second, we were able to find reasonable transcripts (from prominent news media sources) for both with associated video records, though there are typos in both that suggest either problems in transcription or oral infelicities. We have not proofed either against the video records, letting the record stand.
3. Finally, and most importantly, these seem to be the important documents to which people are returning to understand Obama and Wright's positions. Why not analyze that?

Much of computer-assisted text analysis is essentially about counting and comparing. One thing the computer can show you is differences in word use, but what the computer shows you is just something to think about - we will need to interpret the something. What then stands out in their words as differences worth thinking more about?

This Time We Want To Talk

One of the first things we noticed was that Obama uses the word "time" far more often than Wright.4 In fact, at the climactic end of Obama's speech, he repeatedly uses the phrase "this time we want to talk". This table shows a concordance A concordance is a gathering of passages that "concord" or agree. Usually it is a gathering of passages with a sought for word. Concordances are a form of reading tool that go back to the Middle Ages. They are typically lists of words with their appearances. A concordance for the bible, for example, would have entries for all the content words of the bible in alphabetical order. Each entry would include information about where the word appears and some context. Searching for words on a computer now typically returns a concordance called a Key Word in Context (KWIC) with the sought word down the center and a few words of context on either side. Google returns a type of concordance when you search for a word with an example of the word in context for each page it recommends. See the Wikipedia entry on Concordance (Publishing) Return to Glossary. of all the instances of "time" in Obama, see for yourself:

Repeated phrases like this are always an indication of something, in this case they are at the climax of Obama's speech and tell us two things.

• Not this time Obama is trying to redirect what we, including the electorate and the media, talk about this election. He is making a claim about discourse during an election and calling for it to not degenerate this time as it has other times. He wants to elevate and focus what is talked about on what he believes matters to the electorate and away from the identity politics that tars him with Wright. For Obama Wright is a distraction, and if that is what the media pays attention to then the nothing will change, and change is what Obama promises. "But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change."
• We want to talk about is the phrase the precedes what Obama thinks is important, and it is a list of things that he believes are important. The repetition of the phrase is the climax of the speech, both in terms of location and in terms of the rhetorical power of its repitition. If we want to know what Obama thinks is important for us to talk about we should pay attention to what "this time we want to talk about".

And what are the five things Obama wants us to talk about? They are a fairly traditional list for Democrats that includes education, health care, jobs along with the war in Iraq.

• Crumbling Schools - Education
• Lines in the Emergency Room - Health Care
• Shuttered Mills - Loss of Manufacturing Jobs
• Shipping Your Job Overseas - Business Outsourcing
• Serving and Fighting Together - The War in Iraq

But there is a difference, and that is that for Obama these are issues that transcend race. "This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children." For Obama an election is about the common issues that affect all races rather than our differences.

The thrust of his speech is that this election time should be about the issues that Americans (both white and black) have in common, not about the issues that hijack elections (for the Republicans).

Committed to Repetition

Interestingly, when we looked to see if there was a similar repeated phrase in Wright's speech we found one, "we are committed to changing the way" that is similarly located at the climax of the speech and is similarly used to draw attention to the change important to Wright. The distribution graph for "committed" shows how it is distributed towards the end of the speech similarly to how "time" was distributed in Obama.

A concordance A concordance is a gathering of passages that "concord" or agree. Usually it is a gathering of passages with a sought for word. Concordances are a form of reading tool that go back to the Middle Ages. They are typically lists of words with their appearances. A concordance for the bible, for example, would have entries for all the content words of the bible in alphabetical order. Each entry would include information about where the word appears and some context. Searching for words on a computer now typically returns a concordance called a Key Word in Context (KWIC) with the sought word down the center and a few words of context on either side. Google returns a type of concordance when you search for a word with an example of the word in context for each page it recommends. See the Wikipedia entry on Concordance (Publishing) Return to Glossary. of the word "committed" in Wright shows a patternIn text analysis, a pattern is a string of characters (such as a word or phrase) or regular expression to be searched for within the source text. Return to Glossary. of similar phrases that he repeats:

Again, that which Wright and his audience are committed to is at the heart of what Wright has to say and has to do with changing the way we see and treat ourselves and others. The heart of it is two words that show up with text analysis as used more by Wright: different and deficient. Wright wants people to see and treat each other as different, not as deficient. And it is not just about race.

In the past, we were taught to see others who are different as somehow being deficient. Christians saw Jews as being deficient. Catholics saw Protestants as being deficient. Presbyterians saw Pentecostals as being deficient.

Folks who like to holler in worship saw folk who like to be quiet as deficient. And vice versa.

Whites saw black as being deficient. ...

Europeans saw Africans as deficient.

Strangely Wright also goes on about differences beyond those between people like differences between African and European music. These differences of rythm illustrate something important for Wright.

Now, what is true in the field of education, linguistics, ethnomusicology, marching bands, psychology and culture is also true in the field of homiletics, hermeneutics, biblical studies, black sacred music and black worship. We just do it different and some of our haters can't get their heads around that.

Different and Deficient

This is the difference between Obama and Wright. Obama sees challenges common to all and Wright sees differences that need to be recognized in order to be treated.

Obama is running for President and wants us to turn away from difference so we can see the challenges we have in common - what is deficient in the country as a whole. Wright is not running for election (though he is dealing with the media attention from an election), but is a minister and asks us the audience to make a commitment to how we see and treat difference.

Obama is trying to turn electoral discourse to political issues that administrations can solve. Wright is trying to turn away media criticism to focus on individual change - the changes we as individuals can commit to.

Obama talks about Wright, but otherwise is talking to the American public. Wright references academics, as if to say that his position isn't so extreme, but otherwise is talking to the NAACP and not about Obama. Obama needs to distance himself from Wright, and Wright probably doesn't want to cause any more trouble of Obama.

Conclusion

So what do these two have to say about race in America? First we should note that race is still about "black" and "white." Here are the most frequently used words in both speeches.

"Black" is the highest frequency word after "I", and "white" is up there, though it should be noted that Wright only uses "white" 4 times compared to Obama's 27. It is also worth noting that neither of them uses the phrase "White House", preferring the less coloured "Oval Office."

In sum, Obama is talking to all races, and he goes out of his way to talk about his white grandmother. Wright, on the other hand, is addressing the NAACP and talking from the perspective of the black church.

Obama distances himself from Wright's use of "incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike." Obama has some sympathy for his "religious leader's effort to speak out against perceived injustice", but unequivocally condemns Wright as being divisive.

As such, Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Wright on the other hand is insisting that there are real differences, and by implication divisions that must be acknowledged even if politically charged.

1. 1. See the Wikipedia article, Jeremiah Wright controversy
2. 2. Transcript of Jeremiah Wright's Speech to the NAACP.
3. 3. We are digital humanists interested in how computing methods can be used to study, among other things, contemporary culture and politics, not political scientists. This essay was written as an experiment in rapid collaborative computer-assisted text analysis, what we call extreme text analysis after the movement in computing called Extreme Programming or Pair Programming. Our goals were:
   • To spend no more than two days taking a small and meaningful text analysis project from discussion through to presentation of results (this page.)
   • To test the TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) environment and record bugs, enhancements and general thoughts.
   • To develop new tools like Voyeur or fix our old ones to better suit real projects like this.
   • To reflect on computer-assisted text analysis as a research practice and the rhetoric of reporting results.

   For more on this see Experiments In Text Analysis. In particular see the May 1, 08 Experiment Notes which were written as we were doing this.

4. 4. When comparing texts using the computer, it makes sense to compare their relative use of vocabulary - to see what words are used more often in one text compared to another.