[5] Speaking before an audience at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Obama was responding to a spike in the attention paid to controversial remarks made by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor and, until shortly before the speech, a participant in his campaign.

[9] The book is a collection of original essays from "leading black thinkers" – journalists, scholars and public intellectuals – exploring literary, political, social and cultural issues of Obama's speech.

In October 2009, Book TV (C-SPAN) aired a program of T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and five of the essayists, filmed at Vanderbilt University in September 2009,[13] reading excerpts and talking about the collection and their views on Obama's speech as well as the ideas of a post-racial America.

[12] Essays are from "contributors of diverse backgrounds and vocations" including; The Los Angeles Times noted, "Overall, "The Speech," though somewhat uneven, is a rich landscape of opinion on the state of race and Obama's singular relationship to it.

"[3] Publishers Weekly said the collection is "scholarly without being dry, the book offers a way forward from what has become a stalemate between a "color-blind" white America that sees racism as a problem solved in the 1960s and a nation of ethnic minorities that experiences daily its structural inequities.