How should we think about racism in the age of President Barack Obama? In his first speech as president to the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization, Obama’s answer to that question was a rich mixture of his presidential agenda, Bill Cosby’s self-help spiel, the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s political push and rapper Jay-Z’s oratorical flow.

Yet, as a historical turning point, what he said was less important than who was saying it. America’s first president of African descent takes office in the same year as the 100th anniversary of a group that helped make it possible, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The irony of that happy coincidence is how much it haunted conversations at the convention with a nagging question: As civil rights-era protests have declined and blacks participate at all levels of politics, is the NAACP still relevant?

Obama chose to answer that question by reframing it. Regardless of how relevant it may or may not be at the end of its first century, he offered ways for it to become more relevant in the next.

After his obligatory salute to the debt that he and other successful African Americans owe to the NAACP’s past leaders, he left no doubt that he believes “the pain” of prejudice and discrimination against blacks, Latinos, gays, lesbians, Muslims and others is real and “still felt.” Nevertheless, he pointed out, they are not “even the steepest barriers to opportunity today.”

More difficult, he said, are the often-neglected “structural inequalities that our nation’s legacy of discrimination has left behind.” This led into a list of Obama policies and programs that, while color-blind in their application, have particular importance to black Americans who have disproportionately been left behind.

Yet, the most notable portion of the speech came with his self-help message, the same message that last year Rev. Jackson was caught by an open TV network microphone bitterly deriding as “talking down to black people.” At the NAACP gathering, Obama received rousing “amens” as he said, “Government programs alone won’t get our children to the Promised Land.”

He called for “a new mindset, a new set of attitudes” against an internalized sense of limitation in which “so many in our community have come to expect so little of ourselves.”

His Cosbyesque message to put away the Xbox and put your kids to bed at a reasonable hour, like so many of his other messages, transcends racial lines. Yet it has special meaning to African Americans who, polls show, vote liberal but hold conservative moral values. It is also a message that would be hard to imagine coming with much moral credibility from any president except one who grew up as Obama did, as a mixed-race son of a father who abandoned him in his early childhood.

The speech was classic Obama. He found ways to address issues related to race in terms and values that are not limited to any one racial or ethnic community. It fleshed out in many ways the issues raised in his only other major address on race, his Philadelphia campaign speech to explain his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Ironically the victory of America’s first black president came partly because he chose to avoid the subject of race, no matter how much he was taunted to address it by the likes of Rush Limbaugh on the right or Ralph Nader on the left. It is politically safer for him to show us models of racial harmony than to tell us about them. Like the Huxtables on “The Cosby Show,” Obama and family visibly redeem the old 1950s American middle-class family ideal from the clutches of irony and dare the chattering classes to make fun of it.

Watching his NAACP speech, I was reminded of a lingering question among his skeptics: How could he have spent 20 years in the church of a racial firebrand like Rev. Wright. One reason, I have long theorized, is that along with his religious lessons he was learning the depths of America’s racial divide so that someday he could bridge it. His sermon to the NAACP — he preached too much to call it a “speech” — reveals how well he learned his lessons.

It remains to be seen how the NAACP uses those lessons. Other organizations like the National Urban League or 100 Black Men already emphasize economic development and family-mentoring programs that build the black community’s internal strengths. Today’s NAACP sees their goal as “social justice,” not “social service,” as Chairman Julian Bond has put it. But the families left behind by the civil rights revolution need both.

Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. His e-mail address is: cpage@tribune.com.