Vote Your Intellect

Accusation: “Barack Obama lied when he said, ‘Selma got me born’.”

Accuser: AudacityofHypocrisy.com

Details: Barack Obama never uttered the phrase “Selma got me born.”

The quote which is the source of this controversy is:

There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama.” (Read full transcript.)

We can verify that Barack Obama was born in 1961 - four years before the most famous Selma march (although two others had taken place before that.) (See: Wikipedia articles for Barack Obama and Selma, Alabama.) So why on earth would he suggest that Selma played a role in his birth or that he has a claim on Selma? The rest of his speech provides some clues to answer this.

After comparing early Civil Rights leaders to a biblical Moses that “challenged Pharaoh, the princes, powers who said that some are atop and others are at the bottom, and that’s how it’s always going to be”, he goes on to say:

[…] it’s because they marched that the next generation hasn’t been bloodied so much.

It’s because they marched that we elected councilmen, congressmen. It is because they marched that we have Art[h]ur Davis and Keith Ellison. It is because they marched that I got the kind of education I got, a law degree, a seat in the Illinois senate and ultimately in the United States senate.

It is because they marched that I stand before you here today.”

Is Barack Obama actually trying to say that his education was personally funded by these early civil rights leaders? Does he mean to say that civil rights icon Jimmy Lee Jackson reached into his pocket, opened his checkbook, and filled out a check to pay for a semester of schooling for a then-unborn Barack Obama?

It becomes clear, then, that Barack Obama is utilizing various “figures of speech” - including metaphors, similes, and a lesser-discussed form of expression called synecdoche, which is (according to Wikipedia), a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole. Silva Rhetoricae, a university-sponsored site about figures of speech, defines a synecdoche as when “A whole is represented by naming one of its parts”.

Throughout his speech, Barack Obama uses the synecdoche style of expression, wherein he uses a smaller incident to figuratively represent something much larger: in this case, he uses the incidents at Birmingham and Selma to represent the whole of the Civil Rights movement, and he quite rightfully attributes this to facilitating his parents’ meeting and, eventually, his conception.

Here is another example of this:

Yet something happened back here in Selma, Alabama. Something happened in Birmingham that sent out what Bobby Kennedy called, “Ripples of hope all around the world.” Something happened when a bunch of women decided they were going to walk instead of ride the bus after a long day of doing somebody else’s laundry, looking after somebody else’s children. When men who had PhD’s decided that’s enough and we’re going to stand up for our dignity.”

By reading the entire transcript of the speech and not just a small sampling of it, we see that he liberally uses the kind of narrative devices common to great speech-makers. “I stand on the shoulders of giants,” he says, in a spirit similar to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s declaration, “I’ve been to the mountaintop.”

Just as we can assume that Barack Obama has never encountered a real-life giant and lived to tell the tale, and just as we can assume that Martin Luther King Jr. did not, in fact, don rappelling gear and climb a literal mountain, we can perceive that when Barack Obama attributes his birth to “Selma”, he is - as he does throughout his speech - utilizing a figure of speech to equate a smaller incident - a “part” of the Civil Rights movement - with the whole of the Civil Rights movement.

Fortunately, there were people alive who could recognize a figure of speech during the time of Martin Luther King, Jr. Can you imagine the media headlines, if not?

King Exaggerates Climbing Experience
“Has anyone verified which mountain he’s supposedly climbed?” asks John Falk, co-Chair of the American Climbers Association. “I can’t help but think he’s mocking the very real, very dangerous efforts of professional climbers world-wide.”

Conclusion: While one might accuse Barack Obama of using a “figure of speech” while, uh, giving a speech, accusing him of lying would in fact be accusing the greatest speech-makers of our time of doing it as well.

VYI.com shudders to think of the fall-out that would bring, or of how boring and uninspiring speeches would become if all speech-givers were required to always be - gulp - literal.

Status (fact, fiction, or spin?): VYI.com believes this falls under the category of spin. There is both fact and fiction to it, and at the end of the day, the truth of it is up to the reader’s interpretation.