There is so much stuff out in the blogosphere now about Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama that I’ve decided to do a roundup of what people are saying.
Obama has announced he will give a major speech in Philadelphia tomorrow on the subject of race in this campaign:
Barack Obama will give a major speech on “the larger issue of race in this campaign,” he told reporters in Monaca, PA just now.
He was pressed there, as he has been at recent appearances, on statements by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.
“I am going to be talking about not just Reverend Wright, but the larger issue of race in this campaign,” he said.
He added that he would “talk about how some of these issues are perceived from within the black church issue for example,” he said.
He also briefly defended Wright from the image that has come through in a handful of repeatedly televised clips from recent Wright sermons.
“The caricature that’s being painted of him is not accurate,” he said.
The speech could offer Obama an opportunity to move past the controversy over his pastor, and to turn the conversation to a topic he’d rather focus on: his Christian faith. But the speech also guarantees that the Wright story will continue to dominate political headlines.
The Wright story will continue to dominate headlines regardless. And it will come up in the general election, unquestionably, should Obama get the Democratic nomination. I think Obama is doing the right thing here. He is being proactive in dealing with the controversy, but more than that, it sounds like he intends to put the controversy in its larger context, which is how race is affecting this campaign.
The New York Times ran an interesting story by Jodi Kantor over the weekend in which Kantor touched on the aversion many whites have to open expressions of black anger:
He attracts audiences because of, not in spite of, his outspoken critiques of racism and inequality, said Dwight Hopkins, a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, in an interview last year.
But Mr. Wright’s blistering statements about American racism can shock white audiences.
“If you’re black, it’s hard to say what you truly think and not upset white people,” said James Cone, a professor at Union Theological Seminary and the father of black liberation theology, who has known Mr. Wright since he was a seminary student.
Deborah Mathis, a former White House correspondent and current syndicated columnist for Gannett News Service, is more blunt:
The eruption of outrage, shock and fear that is flowing over Barack Obama’s campaign like hot lava because his pastor has preached some strident sermons tells us one thing for certain: Many white people don’t know black people at all.
If they did, they would know that Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago is hardly the only black minister who uses the pulpit to rant against racial duplicity and injustice. The black church has always been the place for letting our hair down and speaking our peace — a safe haven from the criminations outside. It’s how and why the black church became the nursery for the freedom and civil rights movements. Not every minister seasons his or her sermons with political commentary, and not every one who does is as fiercely spoken as Rev. Wright, but there is nothing unusual about the black clergy as social agitator. Guess the shockees didn’t know that.
It seems they were also clueless that, when race, racism and discrimination do invade the pulpit, it is not always in the context of forgiveness and humility. Much of black America is resentful, angry and distrustful — rightly so, some of us would say. Did the uninitiated honestly believe that slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, white resistance and flight, economic and educational duality, hyper-incarceration and yawning disparities in wealth, health and longevity have had no lasting effects; that all of that is really no big deal — something we can kick off as easily as our Sunday shoes?
Surprise.
This could be a teaching moment for the society at large, which would do well to pay closer attention to 35 million of its members and to give heed to their accounts of their own experiences. Unfortunately, and typically, the alarmists are threatening to make it a Waterloo for Obama.
Via Bruce McQuain, who is unmoved by what Mathis has to say. Referring to Mathis’s statement that many whites don’t know blacks at all, Bruce writes, “Ummm but many white people know hateful speech when they see and hear it.”
Ummm, maybe, maybe not. It seems to be a whole lot easier for some folks to “know hateful speech when they see and hear it” when that speech comes from a black preacher railing against social injustice than when it comes, say, from white preachers telling the faithful that the Catholic Church is the “Great Whore”; or that Islam is a “demonic,” evil religion that must be destroyed.
Bruce also says, about historic injustices against African-Americans, that “Most whites not only know about, acknowledge and condemn that history but have worked very hard to rectify it as well.” I assume Bruce means “most non-Southern whites” — but even then it’s not true to say that “most whites … have worked very hard to rectify” that history. White abolitionists were never more than a tiny minority of white Americans, and there was no historically significant number of whites who did anything to advance the rights of black Americans until the civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century. Hundreds of white people went down South to stand with black people in their struggle for freedom, and many of them paid the same price that blacks had always paid for doing that. There is no way to overstate the courage, integrity, and sheer heroism of those whites — but they were not “most whites,” either. And as an extra little note of historical interest, a disproportionate number of those whites who were actively involved in the civil rights movement were Jewish. And since Jews are only about 2.2 percent of the U.S. population, it could not possibly have been “most whites” actively trying to rectify historically unjust treatment of African-Americans.
Well, it’s getting late. More roundup tomorrow.
Kathy
Liberty Street 