"Therapeutic alienation"

As Abe Greenwald on Commentary's blog informs us, John McWhorter, the African-American linguist and cultural commentator, came up with a brilliant term to describe the kind of thing Jeremiah Wright and his church engage in: therapeutic alienation. Here is McWhorter explaining what he means:

In black America, what began as concrete activism aimed at getting justice devolved into abstract gestures unconcerned with justice. The vestigial gestures live on because they serve a psychological function: they assuage personal insecurities that are legacies of our station in American life until very recently. Many today genuinely think that the gestures are activism. So much time has gone by, and ever fewer were mature in the era of genuine civil rights activism.

Our problems, then, have not been the eclipse of the manufacturing economy, overly ambitious middle-class blacks, drugs "coming in," structural racism, or any of things commonly adduced. Under ordinary conditions, black America could have stood up to all of these things. But conditions have not been ordinary since the late '60s. The burden of legalized segregation and disenfranchisement was immediately replaced with another one: a sense that black Americans are defined by defiance.

Only rarely does this create a gun-toting rebel spouting revolutionary rhetoric. More commonly it just programs one with a general sense that the rules are different for us. Things considered ordinary requirements of others are "too much" for us -- or at least, most of us. Choices considered inappropriate by others are "understandable" for us -- or at least, most of us. Allowing that racism plays no significant part in our lives would be disloyal for us. Even if some of us are OK, it must always and forever be that most of us are much less OK, and this could only be whites' fault. To be authentically black is to maintain a wary sense of white America -- whatever that is -- as eternally "on the hook."

The most crucial and damaging aspect of this way of thinking is that it is passed on from person to person and generation to generation because it sits well on the soul, but regardless of societal conditions. For this reason, this ideology has hindered black America from adapting to changing economic conditions. It has rendered black America overly susceptible to the temptations of open-ended dependence and criminality. It has discouraged black American leaders from innovative responses to community problems.

Yet over the years I have learned that my take on this is an eccentric one. Some are aware that posturing is not unknown on the black sociopolitical scene. But few are aware that it is the decisive factor on that scene today.

Is that what most Americans are now learning in this Wright episode? Remember that Obama has been open about how he found himself in Wright's church, and that his half-sister told the Times last year that her brother's entry into Trinity UCC helped him "embrace the African-American community in a way that was whole and profound." Could it be that Barack Obama, the half-black outsider raised by a white family, felt that to be authentically black he had to embrace the therapeutic alienation of Jeremiah Wright and Trinity UCC -- even though he doesn't really buy it -- because that's the price of admission into the community he desperately wanted to belong to?

If so, this whole mess is shaping up to be a real tragedy, and not just for Barack Obama.