A LESS PERFECT UNION, PART THREE
and a most convenient omission.
Now back to the (untold) state of the Union
speech...
Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable.
I can't argue with that.
I can assure you it is not.
With this, I can. And have. And will again argue.
I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork.
True. Though I would suggest that the second most politically safe thing to do, at least for this candidate, would be to deliver a great, flowery, subtly equivocating speech on the state of race in the union and let the Obamedia fawn and drool over it. Which is, of course, the political and intellectual equivalent of, when someone asks you why you own a vicious pit bull, answering, Hey, look at those pretty birdies behind the doghouse!
We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.
Do you see what he's doing here? If it weren't so slick, it would be really offensive.
He is, both logically and rhetorically, equating what Geraldine Ferraro said to what the Rev. Wright said. He's equating the suggestion that race -- you know, the very subject that Senator Obama here uses to propel his candidacy even closer to the nomination -- has in some way helped fuel his candidacy with the suggestion that the United States government created AIDS to kill black people. He's equating an arguable, debatable, quite possibly wrong (but also, perhaps, quite valid) argument with paranoid fiction and lunatic demagoguery.
See, we both have one, he says. And he is wrong. And he is unfair. And he knows it.
Even if few people seem to care.
But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.
Especially because my crazy spiritual advisor has now forced me to talk about it.
We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America — to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.
Is that really the mistake that Reverend Wright made? What negative did he amplify when he suggested that the government invented AIDS to kill blacks? What simplification led him to the conclusion that the USA is like one big chapter of the KKK?
The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through — a part of our union that we have yet to perfect.
Translation: it's not Reverend Wright's fault, and it's not mine either. It's everyone's fault.
And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.
Translation: let's not talk about this unpleasant stuff that may hurt my candidacy.
Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.”
Faulkner never wrote that. What he did write was, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
But hey, close enough, right?
We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
You see those birdies behind the doghouse? Well, you should have seen the big, scary birdies that used to live there. Long before that doghouse came along.
And they were big. And they were scary. But I'm not sure that, now that they're long gone, we still have to run and cower and hide from them, or use them as an excuse when our crazy pit bull goes out and bites a couple of people in the neighborhood.
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.
So does a hell of a lot of other things that, well, Senator Obama conveniently forgets to mention here.
Legalized discrimination — where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments — meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.
Forgiving, once more, how far he is from what this speech was supposed to be about -- namely his relationship to, and his knowledge of, the irredeemable thoughts and ravings of his self-proclaimed spiritual advisor -- let's note, again, that there are plenty of other factors (by which I mean, choices) that help explain that gap too.
Perhaps Bill Cosby could explain them to us.
A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families — a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods — parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement — all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.
What else helped create that cycle, Senator? Anything? Anything at all? Any choices or behaviors or self-imposed patterns of self-destructive behavior that you seem perfectly content not to mention?
How a speech that purports to be an honest and thorough examination of race in contemporary America, and that also purports to talk straight and true about the problems that beset both the black and white communities, can move through almost 5,000 words and never once speak the words drugs or guns or wedlock, never once utter the phrases single mothers or absent fathers, never once talk about the terrible cycle of children having children or a pervasive culture of dependency, is most surely a fake. Or a failure. Or both.
This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late '50s and early '60s, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted.
So did a hell of a lot of other people who did not grow up to spout venomous untruths.
What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.
So very true. But that just begs the question: if so much was right with those people, then what is wrong with Rev. Wright?
But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it — those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations — those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future.
That legacy was just passed on? It was handed down, like a hereditary disease, like a genetic deformity, like something they could not help and could not escape?
Tell that to all the people who did.
And then, when you're done hearing their stories, try, if only for a moment, to figure out what the difference is between them and the people standing on the street corners and languishing in the prisons. Is it luck? Chance? Fate? Or something more clear and definable -- and maybe even laudable -- that is inconvenient to mention but, in times like these, at least, convenient to forget for the sake of the (flawed) argument?
Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways.
For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.
Amen to that.
I would suggest that Senator Obama may even be doing that right here in this speech. Or even in other parts of his candidacy. But then I would be labeled as bad as Geraldine Ferraro. Which would make me just as bad as the Rev. Wright. And, God Damn, America, I don't want any part of that.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.
Oh, come on, Senator. They weren't surprised to hear the anger; they were surprised to hear the bullshit. The lies. And the paranoia.
That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition,...
Oh, yes, there it is. A brief mention of complicity, buried in the middle of a long passage that otherwise focuses on -- and justifies -- the righteous anger of bigots and zealots like the Rev. Wright.
...and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.
Imagine if someone said we could not condemn murder without understanding the roots of a murderer's anger. Or that we could not condemn rape without understanding the roots of a rapist's anger.
Apples and oranges? Okay.
Now imagine if someone said we could not condemn white racism without understanding the roots of the racist's anger. Without wanting to lift up the hood and look deep into the soul of some lynching, cross-burning bastard.
That might be interesting. But Senator Obama doesn't do it. Watch what he does instead.
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience — as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
This is a wonderful passage. For my eye and ear, it may be -- at least if you take it at face value -- the best and most honest passage in the whole speech, explaining, even as it does not excuse, the seeds and inspirations of a very real kind of latent white racism.
But we can just take it at face value. Nor can we ignore the slippery transitions that have led Senator Obama to this point. He has figured the Rev. Wright's absurdities as just another justifiable kind of black anger. Now he's gone and drawn a parallel between that black anger and this "similar" anger in the white community. Now. It's been a while since I took Honors Geometry, but I remember the transitive postulate well. And if the Rev. Wright = Black Anger, and Black Anger = White Anger, then the Rev. Wright = White Anger.
To which I am compelled to add, That Equation = Bullshit. Q.E.D.
Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition.
So Reagan was elected thanks to festering racism? Is that what you're saying, Senator?
Just checking.
Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends.
This, of course, is true. And lamentable. (Michael Dukakis, meet Willie Horton.)
But I'm not sure that it's any less lamentable when politicians' wives do it in reverse. (Lady McBama, meet those 60 Minutes cameras.)
Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
This is also true.
Just as it is true that talk show hosts and liberal commentators built entire careers exploiting ad exaggerating legitimate claims of racism (and sexism) while ignoring the many bogus and illegitimate claims of each.
Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze — a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns — this too widens the racial divide and blocks the path to understanding.
Here, again, is a wonderful passage: honest and open about these white American resentments in ways that precious few politicians of any color ever are. And that is truly refreshing.
But. (And you knew there was gonna be a but.)
The turn here to a common enemy, to the fight against corporate America and questionable accountants and Washington insiders and the wealthy few, sounds awfully divisive for someone who's supposed to be uniting us all. It all sounds pretty standard-issue, old-school, liberal-left, class-warfare-esque for a guy who's supposed to represent a new kind of politics.
Maybe when he says he's going to bring us all together, he really means just white and black Democrats.
This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy...
That may be contrary to the claims of his critics, but I'm not so sure it's contrary to the claims of his rhetoric. Or of his speeches. Or of his supporters.
...— particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.
This time, I didn't say it; he did. So everyone still reading and thinking about sending an email of complaint can just send one to the Senator instead.
[to be continued...]
Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable.
I can't argue with that.
I can assure you it is not.
With this, I can. And have. And will again argue.
I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork.
True. Though I would suggest that the second most politically safe thing to do, at least for this candidate, would be to deliver a great, flowery, subtly equivocating speech on the state of race in the union and let the Obamedia fawn and drool over it. Which is, of course, the political and intellectual equivalent of, when someone asks you why you own a vicious pit bull, answering, Hey, look at those pretty birdies behind the doghouse!
We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.
Do you see what he's doing here? If it weren't so slick, it would be really offensive.
He is, both logically and rhetorically, equating what Geraldine Ferraro said to what the Rev. Wright said. He's equating the suggestion that race -- you know, the very subject that Senator Obama here uses to propel his candidacy even closer to the nomination -- has in some way helped fuel his candidacy with the suggestion that the United States government created AIDS to kill black people. He's equating an arguable, debatable, quite possibly wrong (but also, perhaps, quite valid) argument with paranoid fiction and lunatic demagoguery.
See, we both have one, he says. And he is wrong. And he is unfair. And he knows it.
Even if few people seem to care.
But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.
Especially because my crazy spiritual advisor has now forced me to talk about it.
We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America — to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.
Is that really the mistake that Reverend Wright made? What negative did he amplify when he suggested that the government invented AIDS to kill blacks? What simplification led him to the conclusion that the USA is like one big chapter of the KKK?
The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through — a part of our union that we have yet to perfect.
Translation: it's not Reverend Wright's fault, and it's not mine either. It's everyone's fault.
And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.
Translation: let's not talk about this unpleasant stuff that may hurt my candidacy.
Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.”
Faulkner never wrote that. What he did write was, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
But hey, close enough, right?
We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
You see those birdies behind the doghouse? Well, you should have seen the big, scary birdies that used to live there. Long before that doghouse came along.
And they were big. And they were scary. But I'm not sure that, now that they're long gone, we still have to run and cower and hide from them, or use them as an excuse when our crazy pit bull goes out and bites a couple of people in the neighborhood.
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.
So does a hell of a lot of other things that, well, Senator Obama conveniently forgets to mention here.
Legalized discrimination — where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments — meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.
Forgiving, once more, how far he is from what this speech was supposed to be about -- namely his relationship to, and his knowledge of, the irredeemable thoughts and ravings of his self-proclaimed spiritual advisor -- let's note, again, that there are plenty of other factors (by which I mean, choices) that help explain that gap too.
Perhaps Bill Cosby could explain them to us.
A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families — a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods — parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement — all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.
What else helped create that cycle, Senator? Anything? Anything at all? Any choices or behaviors or self-imposed patterns of self-destructive behavior that you seem perfectly content not to mention?
How a speech that purports to be an honest and thorough examination of race in contemporary America, and that also purports to talk straight and true about the problems that beset both the black and white communities, can move through almost 5,000 words and never once speak the words drugs or guns or wedlock, never once utter the phrases single mothers or absent fathers, never once talk about the terrible cycle of children having children or a pervasive culture of dependency, is most surely a fake. Or a failure. Or both.
This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late '50s and early '60s, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted.
So did a hell of a lot of other people who did not grow up to spout venomous untruths.
What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.
So very true. But that just begs the question: if so much was right with those people, then what is wrong with Rev. Wright?
But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it — those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations — those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future.
That legacy was just passed on? It was handed down, like a hereditary disease, like a genetic deformity, like something they could not help and could not escape?
Tell that to all the people who did.
And then, when you're done hearing their stories, try, if only for a moment, to figure out what the difference is between them and the people standing on the street corners and languishing in the prisons. Is it luck? Chance? Fate? Or something more clear and definable -- and maybe even laudable -- that is inconvenient to mention but, in times like these, at least, convenient to forget for the sake of the (flawed) argument?
Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways.
For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.
Amen to that.
I would suggest that Senator Obama may even be doing that right here in this speech. Or even in other parts of his candidacy. But then I would be labeled as bad as Geraldine Ferraro. Which would make me just as bad as the Rev. Wright. And, God Damn, America, I don't want any part of that.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.
Oh, come on, Senator. They weren't surprised to hear the anger; they were surprised to hear the bullshit. The lies. And the paranoia.
That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition,...
Oh, yes, there it is. A brief mention of complicity, buried in the middle of a long passage that otherwise focuses on -- and justifies -- the righteous anger of bigots and zealots like the Rev. Wright.
...and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.
Imagine if someone said we could not condemn murder without understanding the roots of a murderer's anger. Or that we could not condemn rape without understanding the roots of a rapist's anger.
Apples and oranges? Okay.
Now imagine if someone said we could not condemn white racism without understanding the roots of the racist's anger. Without wanting to lift up the hood and look deep into the soul of some lynching, cross-burning bastard.
That might be interesting. But Senator Obama doesn't do it. Watch what he does instead.
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience — as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
This is a wonderful passage. For my eye and ear, it may be -- at least if you take it at face value -- the best and most honest passage in the whole speech, explaining, even as it does not excuse, the seeds and inspirations of a very real kind of latent white racism.
But we can just take it at face value. Nor can we ignore the slippery transitions that have led Senator Obama to this point. He has figured the Rev. Wright's absurdities as just another justifiable kind of black anger. Now he's gone and drawn a parallel between that black anger and this "similar" anger in the white community. Now. It's been a while since I took Honors Geometry, but I remember the transitive postulate well. And if the Rev. Wright = Black Anger, and Black Anger = White Anger, then the Rev. Wright = White Anger.
To which I am compelled to add, That Equation = Bullshit. Q.E.D.
Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition.
So Reagan was elected thanks to festering racism? Is that what you're saying, Senator?
Just checking.
Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends.
This, of course, is true. And lamentable. (Michael Dukakis, meet Willie Horton.)
But I'm not sure that it's any less lamentable when politicians' wives do it in reverse. (Lady McBama, meet those 60 Minutes cameras.)
Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
This is also true.
Just as it is true that talk show hosts and liberal commentators built entire careers exploiting ad exaggerating legitimate claims of racism (and sexism) while ignoring the many bogus and illegitimate claims of each.
Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze — a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns — this too widens the racial divide and blocks the path to understanding.
Here, again, is a wonderful passage: honest and open about these white American resentments in ways that precious few politicians of any color ever are. And that is truly refreshing.
But. (And you knew there was gonna be a but.)
The turn here to a common enemy, to the fight against corporate America and questionable accountants and Washington insiders and the wealthy few, sounds awfully divisive for someone who's supposed to be uniting us all. It all sounds pretty standard-issue, old-school, liberal-left, class-warfare-esque for a guy who's supposed to represent a new kind of politics.
Maybe when he says he's going to bring us all together, he really means just white and black Democrats.
This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy...
That may be contrary to the claims of his critics, but I'm not so sure it's contrary to the claims of his rhetoric. Or of his speeches. Or of his supporters.
...— particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.
This time, I didn't say it; he did. So everyone still reading and thinking about sending an email of complaint can just send one to the Senator instead.
[to be continued...]
Posted: Sun - March 30, 2008 at 09:41 AM
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