The Unity Pole

 Today Barack Obama is getting up on the podium, in the context of various people saying things that might or might not be race-baiting, and other people accusing people of race-baiting for accusing people of race-baiting, all whipped up into a froth by the energetic actions of the press. Everybody meringue!

It's a good speech. It emphasizes the unifying aspects of American life and its remarkable promise. It also answers in an intellectually honest way, the questions and pseudo-questions surrounding race that have inevitably belched up into this campaign.

Still, it's a partial speech and a safe one. The Unity position is both intellectually honest and noble: we sould all rally 'round the flag boys and girls, rally round the flag, singing Kumbaya and shouting the battle cry of freedom. It's beautiful and something we should all aspire to.

It's genuine unity, too, and not the point equidistant between Dick Durbin and Ann Coulter that the Centrists seem to have erected their pole on. (Hint: if you can see Abu Ghreib from there, you're in the wrong place.)

But the question (and as an Edwards guy, it's the question that most concerns me about Barack) is: is that a good basis for proper action? And it's intimately wrapped up in the question: is Pastor Wright wrong? Should he be repudiated?

The problem is twofold: the first is that there's nothing in what Jeremiah says that shows he's alienated from America's core values, even if he isn't standing by the Unity Pole, while the second is that an awful lot of black Americans stand close to Jeremiah Wright.

It's an inconvenient truth that a lot of black Americans do not have the warm fuzzies for America that white folks do. Our precious Eisenhowerland, with the establishment of the Suburban Peaceable Kingdom and the second Era Of Good Feeling, was simply a land of  racist oppression. A huge part of America had as official policy the oppression of blacks, and the official policy of the rest of the country was to tolerate that policy. The Greatest Generation that we get the warm fuzzies about fought Hitler and Tojo with a segregated army. We were the only member of the Allies to do so. 

But didn't we fix that? Depending on what you mean by 'fix' and what you mean by 'we', yes we did. We moved our legal structure more towards our core values of 'all men are created equal' and 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' Millions of white people woke up from their complacency and said this must change. (millions of other white people did not.) And Martin Luther King became an American Icon--and got shot by a white man.

And white Americans want to rework continuity and extend our improved social structure bac to the founding. What we consider America --what we admire and defend about our State--is pretty much America after the 14th Amendment. And, we have remind ourselves, the 19th. There are women alive today that were born second class citizens in the eyes of the Constitution. And that ain't nothing compared to the Voting Rights Act.

Yes, the United States of America was and is a great experiment in democracy, and its success means something important for the fate of humanity. And yet, look at the dates. 1920. 1964. Susan B. Anthony was arrested for voting in 1872 and the Nineteenth Amendment passed in 1920. We would like to see America as the fixed America from its inception, that it could be a Great Nation since the white men wrote all that stuff.

Now the proponents of the idea that all that racism stuff and Jim Crow and all is over and done with and so we should be all colorblind and black people should be just as lush in their praise of America as we are are not doing it in good faith--almost needless to say. Whether they simply are racists, or whether they don't want to give up power and privilege to anybody, or whether they just can't stand patent evidence of America's evil actions and the hollowness of its commitments to its stated ideals that it wants to throw it down the memory hole, they are saying the equivalent of, "Gee, i sure am sorry I ran over your little girl with my car. But I've fixed the brakes so it won't happen again. OK?" and then suggest that they all dance around the unity pole--or rather, let us sit here and watch you do it.

People like Reverend Wright can be thought of as America-hating unpatriotic radicals--but only if we all agree that America is about 43 years old. And in that case, Jeremiah Wright was not born in that nation, nor was I, nor are most of the table thumpers demanding his repudiation. And maybe as naturalized citizens, as recent immigrants from a less free and less admirable country, we should be less arrogant about ourselves and our adopted land.

Or we can look at America the way Langston Hughes did: America as promise and project. America  is something to be done, which sometimes looks like it can't be done, but which can. Barack Obama plants his unity pole right there, and he's dead right to do so. But I submit that Jeremiah Wright shows another part. He says this:

 "'God bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," Wright said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

Well, yes, you can't get more America-hating than 'God Damn America", can you? Pretty bad, right? Obama right to distance himself from that stuff, can there be any doubt.

What I say is this: that in order that America be, being an America-hater is not only a good idea, but necessary--because 'America' is the name of that admirable country that deserves praise AND the country without a 14th Amendment, a 19th amendment, or a Voting Rights Act, a land of injustice, intolerance and bigotry. It's the land I was born in, that Jeremiah Wright was born in, that Hillary Clinton and J. Sidney McCain III was born in--that maybe we were all born in. And in order to become good citizens of the one America, we must learn to shout down the damnable parts of that other America.

Having the same name, of course, leads to some regrettable confusion, but it eventualy comes out right.

Or will.