Obama's interesting organization

Obama's structure of his speech is quite interesting due to the fact that he uses history and current events to collide with each other to make a semi-disorganized, semi-ordered speech. The disorganization caused by the current events helps show his point that the current events are causing racial differences between Blacks and Whites in America and that we should strive to fix that, shown through the order in the essay.

He starts his essay talking about the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, saying that everyone except the Black slaves were equal. Then he says one of his major points: "to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.", which he uses as a link between the abolishing slavery (something that comes a little after the Constitution in our nation's history) and his campaign. This then leads him into a personal anecdote followed up by a long story of Reverend Wright, after which the topic is changed back to the 1950's, a period well after the abolishment of slavery, the last point in US history where Obama left off in his speech. He then goes back to Wright once more before the conclusion. During the essay, it seems as though Obama is giving the history Black struggle during US history with breaks for Reverend Wright and current issues. The current issues are the ones that cause both the disunity in real life and the breaks in the history in the paper. The actual history is something that unifies the black people together, and that in the future, should unify both blacks and whites together.

Obama ends the essay with a story that takes place in the era of the end of conspicuous black struggle for equality in America, during the 1960's. This works as a good conclusion because it combines previous US history that Obama talks about with the beginning of "our union grow[ing] stronger", something that includes him and his potential future career. Thus Obama, as shown in this conclusion, effectively mixes the chronological order of US History, with breaks of the present (the idea of the union), creating an effect of a shrinking racial difference between blacks and whites. This idea is embedded throughout the essay by the the slow coming together of the black struggle for equality in US history and Obama's present career.