Spring break took an enormous toll on my confidence in the American political process. The shocking and tragic fall of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer left me feeling jaded and disillusioned by the low integrity and poor choices of some of our most trusted public servants.

I wholeheartedly shared the disgust expressed by the New York Times’ Gail Collins when she opined, “You pull the lever for your feisty clean-up-the-government candidate with years and years of experience putting the bad guys in jail, and it turns out he’s into high-risk, high-priced hookups.”

But just before I lost complete trust in the political system, Sen. Barack Obama delivered The Speech. This made me realize the immense power of a leader who understands the capacity of words to transform society.

Bipartisan praise for The Speech proliferated among the media elite. The Times’ Frank Rich gushed, “Mr. Obama’s speech is the most remarkable utterance on the subject by a public figure in modern memory.” And even in the conservative Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan, a former Reagan speechwriter and confidant, wrote, “I thought Barack Obama’s speech was strong, thoughtful and important. Rather beautifully, it was a speech to think to, not clap to.”

A response to the provocative statements of Sen. Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, The Speech compellingly demonstrated how white and black Americans experience life in the United States in profoundly different ways. Calling the speech a symphony, Nicholas Kristof declared that the “Obama campaign has led many white Americans to listen in for the first time to some of the black conversation — and they are thunderstruck.”

Reaction to the speech spanned the globe. Michael Trapido, a white South African blogger for the Johannesburg Mail and Guardian, found significant common ground between the American struggle to come to terms with Jim Crow laws and slavery and South Africa’s earnest, yet difficult, attempt to move beyond Apartheid.

Obama’s speech “was a reaffirmation of the ideals and aspirations of one of the greatest human beings that ever lived — Nelson Mandela — that a rainbow nation, working and living together as one, would occupy the southern tip of Africa,” he wrote.

Beyond the glowing reviews of the speech, however, lies the inherently difficult prospect of engaging in conversation about race. Emory offers rewarding opportunities to discuss multiculturalism and diversity, such as the Transforming Community Project (TCP) and Sustained Dialogues. As a participant in a TCP dialogue group last semester, I can admit that broaching topics surrounding race is not easy, but comfortably discussing past experiences with race comes more naturally than I expected.

Barack Obama’s experience and lifetime journey do not make racial dialogue any less foreboding. However, Sen. Obama is uniquely poised to help the country to begin probing the loose bandages that cover the painful wounds of racism, discrimination and prejudice.

“It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual black-white vantage point, to navigate these places where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule,” wrote Roger Cohen in the International Herald-Tribune.

For me, Obama’s speech is an important reminder of what it feels like to be the “other,” the outcast. My grandmother began to share with me her experiences as a Holocaust survivor when I was still in elementary school. I quickly realized how self-defeating and humiliating victimization can make not only an individual, but an entire community.

My grandmother’s response to her experiences took flight in 1970 when she began speaking to middle and high school students in her adopted home state of North Carolina. During the nearly 40 years since she began speaking, my grandmother has addressed thousands of students — sharing with them the pain of not being accepted for the sole reason of her identity. She charges them to avoid the pitfalls of bullying, stereotyping and self-segregating, helping them to relate her experiences to their lives and giving them a valuable sense of understanding.

Obama’s message complements what I learned from my grandmother. The Speech encompassed many prejudices that span from neglect of minority communities — where streets are not always paved and garbage is not always collected — to the segregation that once forced blacks into the shadows of society and Jews into the blood-flowing gutters of European streets.

Today’s hyper-connected society breaks down what were once formidable geographic, language and cultural barriers. But does our contemporary period foster a desire for racial reconciliation? From the United States to South Africa and beyond, are individuals forging bonds that break down insensitivity, ignorance and xenophobia?

Here again, South Africa could serve as a model. Recalling childhood visits to South Africa, Cohen wrote, “Apartheid entered my consciousness as a kind of self-humiliation. The black women who bathed me as an infant touched my skin, but their world was untouchable.”

The world of “the other” is no longer beyond reach. We are all capable of beginning new conversations and learning to listen to the experiences of our peers with respect and sensitivity.

Stanton Abramson is a College sophomore from Raleigh, N.C.