A (white) conservative friend writes to say that I may have been too hard on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's spiritual mentor:
It is extremely important to make distinctions between different black groups and their “anti-white” rhetoric. On the one hand, you have the Jesse Jacksons of the world who share the same basic worldview as the white guilt ridden baby boomers and utilize it to grub from the same trough. They are just as much a part of this official “white culture” as the minorities whom they exploit. It is a symbiotic system of mutual exploitation. I suspect smarter small-c conservative black groups who understand and articulate the plight of blacks well (perhaps like Wright, though I have not thoroughly investigated his teachings) have this kind of white culture in mind when they blast “whiteness” which is symbolic more of class and power-distribution and official culture than it is symbolic of actual “race.”White=middleclass=subservience to faceless powers far away=disloyalty to one’s roots=being bought off by material bribery. This kind of argument is classic populist rhetoric and speaks well of the possibility for a healthy “black” community to rise and resist the depredations and exploitation of “creative destruction” and the oppressor-guilt-victim-dependence symbiosis it tends to generate. It is important to keep in mind that “middleclass” in this sense primarily denominates an upwardly mobile class (and the victim/ressentment classes it leaves behind) that has a deeply ingrained mental servitude to a hyper-materialism that is one part crude marxism (oppressor/oppressed) and one part crude capitalism (irrational belief in the end of scarcity and dependence on increasingly destabilizing cycles of creative destruction)—Christopher Lasch described this class very well. “Middleclass” in this sense does not mean stable, localist, traditional communities.
It seems to me that there ought to be some high degree of affinity between this kind of “black values system” and the old right and paleoconservatives and perhaps even the “traditionalist left”; the sometimes referred to “radical middle;” the anti-federalists; the secessionists; the front-porch anarchists and don’t-tread-on-me communitarian-liberationist types. If this is right, the ironic thing is that the candidate most suited to Wright’s church (as I have supposed it to be – which again, may not match reality) is not the status-quo liberal Obama, but the Constitutionalist and regionalist Ron Paul.
What think ye?
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I think that you've discovered one of those places where black folks and white folks completely part ways. What the Rev. Wright was saying is completely true - from a very afro-centric point of view. This country was founded with racism written into the constitution. My husband lost a job a couple of years ago because of a racist while all the whites looked the other way and waited until the damage was done to reprimand the man. My husband and I just had a conversation about whether the US is fundamentally a bigoted country and he pulled out these two facts as beginning and end.
Part of it comes down to white people spending their time looking lovingly at what we do right. Black people say, "great - you got that right, but it doesn't do much to help me when such awful things can still happen to me and I have no recourse."
The fact of the matter is that black people view America differently than white people do. And it's not really a hateful thing so much as an explanation for the petty troubles and sometimes large injustices which they deal with at various points in their lives.
My husband told me in our conversation yesterday that he was able to move past being pushed out of that job by a racist because, "I just know that's the way it is. Hopefully things will keep getting better, but for today the reality is that a black man can lose his job and not be able to care for his kids for no reason than his race. And the people in power - all of whom are white - who are the system - looked the other way. Whatever their personal feeling about it is, the white power system aids and abets the racists within it. That's a racist system."
If he got up on a pulpit on Sunday and forcefully said pretty much the same thing, would you judge him to be a white hating bigot? With his white wife and kids who could pass for white and many white friends who break bread with us regularly?
I think that this issue is just more complicated than you realize, Rod. And it looks completely different from the other side. What you see as hateful rhetoric, sounds to a lot of black people an accurate description of their everyday struggles. Do you get to tell people that their struggles aren't real? Or that they can only talk about them in nice ways with 5 positive comments for every negative one like a fighting couple in therapy?
At its bottom I think that these divergent views owe as much to the fact that white people tend to grossly underestimate how affected black people are by the racism which they experience as it does to race baiting nonsense from the likes of jesse jackson. I have always been surprised with those african americans I have gotten to know well to find out how deeply and profoundly they are affected by racism. I have seen a full grown man in tears because a little girl ran to her mom with terror on her face when she saw him at the play ground. I have heard black women make choices about where she will or will not live based on whether the local school her children would attend had any history of racist graffiti or slurs. I have known women who would rather send children to sub-par schools then to one where they might be subjected to racist taunts. I know several black people who live in majority white areas who will drive into poorer majority black areas to shop because they just don't want to deal with the stress of going out in the middle of a bunch of white people.
If you were shaped by such experiences, then odds are that what Jeremiah Wright has to say probably wouldn't seem hateful - it would just seem like common sense. Now, that's not to say that he communicates it in particularly useful ways. Or that he isn't sometimes guilty of overplaying the point. But I think that simply equating what he's saying with a white pastor making similar comments about black people is inaccurate.
Thank you Rebecca T.
That is one awesome post, rebecca. Truth speaks; people should listen.
Thank you, rebeccat (again -- I said so in the other post, too).
Abraham Foxman of the ADL sometimes overreacts. But this time he is right in saying that Obama should leave his church if he is unable to change his Minister's mind about Farrakhan
Would you vote for a Presidential candidate (not your candidate for village supervisor, mind you )who refuses to end his /her membership in a golf club that declines membership to Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, etc?
That Obama expressed "disagreement " with the "views" of Wright/Farrakhan is not enough. As a candidate for President, not village dog catcher, he must quit that church. Make a clean break. But he will not do it. Why should he? He is the media-made immaculate Messiah.
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