I watched Obama’s 2008 race speech with my white colleagues in a conference room in Washington. It was a spectacular speech. But Holder's comments are a much more productive, proactive take on race in America and, in some ways, can be seen as a critique of the message of Obama’s stump pitch. In the Philadelphia speech, Obama prettified the sentencing disparities, employment discrimination and affirmative action battles that are the province of the U.S. Justice Department. He spent more time explaining Chicago’s Trinity United Church, the subject of the uproar that prompted his address. “Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety—the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger,” he said. However charming (or disarming) it seemed at the time, Holder’s point is more relevant—most churches today are still all black or all white, and in 2009, such voluntary segregation isn’t going to move America forward.

In Wide Sargasso Sea, an adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre, the author tells the story of Bertha, the part-black “madwoman in the attic” of the earlier title, who was married to Jane’s love, Mr. Rochester, and who has been shut above the house and out of sight. The 1966 text restores a voice to the woman of color who was only mentioned in passing in Bronte’s novel, animating not only the world she endures in gloomy England but her past life in Dominica. Jean Rhys, a white woman from Dominica, brought the madwoman down from the Attic and into public consciousness.

I mention Bertha not to dwell on literary treatments of a living problem. But Rhys’ rejection of one-sided histories is also a rejection of invisibility—the same principle that animates Holder’s loud and public call to action. In a sense, his speech was aimed at fighting racial invisibility—the opposite of the unifying instincts that are so valuable to a politician running for national office.

America has embraced Obama for talking the talk. While Obama may have paved the way for him to do so, Eric Holder is walking the walk.

Dayo Olopade is a Washington reporter for The Root.