Brass Knuckles

Barack Obama has spent a lot of time in the last couple of weeks trying to convince us that Jeremiah Wright’s “liberation theology” has been taken out of context; he’s borrowed a page from the John Edwards playbook, and is asserting that it’s White America that needs to evaluate its response to an angry pedagogue named Jeremiah Wright.  Barak Obama from his race speech:

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. 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.

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. 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, 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.

Nice.  He goes on to allow that some whites are angry, too, and politicians like Reagan have capitalized on that anger to catapult themselves to power and serve their rich masters. I’m not kidding.

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. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. 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.

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.

Here’s the real meat of the speech. 

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.

This is little more than a logical fallacy; well, it’s more like a cute little rhetorical trick.  Obama first give you the reasons for black rage, then gives you some token white rage,  to establish moral equivalence.  Once you agree that they are morally and logically equivalent, then you can’t label either as misguided or racist.

Except that I can.  Any theology rooted in hatred, anger and racial divisiveness is misguided and racist.  I’m a Mexican-American of a certain age; growing up in a small, impoverished Mexican-American town, I have first-hand experience with “liberation theology”.  The Catholic Church was rife with it in the late seventies and eighties, especially churches that ministered to Hispanic communities.  I did the whole Chicano power thing, hanging close with MECha leadership and even doing the brown-power handshakes.  As a (relatively) light skinned brown man with an English surname and an undetectable, non-descript accent, I understand growing up in an explosive, racially ambiguous context.   But that was a quarter century ago.

Jeremiah Wright the pastor, and by extension Barak Obama, the congregant,  are stuck in the liberation theology of the 1970’s, and the world has gone zooming by. 

Michelle Malkin has a nice post carrying a column by Jenetta Rose Barras, who in her Washington Post column, “He’s Preaching to A Choir I’ve Left” speaks to an African-American community that’s moved beyond Rev. Wright and his ilk.

That other African Americans and I were able to overcome seemingly insurmountable hurdles is undeniably due, in part, to Wright-like prophetic speech. Like Negro spirituals, it helped us organize, motivate and empower ourselves.

But just as spirituals eventually lost their relevance and potency as an organizing tool against discrimination — even as they retained their historical importance in the African American cultural narrative — so, I believe, has Wright-speak lost its place. It’s harmful and ultimately can’t provide healing. And it’s outdated in the 21st century.

Obama cleverly admits all this progress in his speech, and takes on the voices that have been condemning Rev. Wright,  attempting to separate himself, at least ideologically, from his pastor and mentor of twenty years.

Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change.

It is a profound mistake, but not on the part of Rev. Wright; Jeremiah Wright has made no bones of what he believes.  He has let it be clearly known that he is a preacher of Black Liberation Theology, a theology that defines God within the context of Black Liberation.  He has been Barack Obama’s pastor and minister for not one or two years, but twenty.  Not once in the previous nineteen years has Barak Obama taken issue with the dogma that Rev. Wright preached to Obama and his young family; on the contrary, he baptised his children in the Jordan River of this anachronistic, ethnocentric theology.

I believe that Barack Obama is making a strategic blunder; in the heat of his contest with Hillary Clinton, he’s forgotten that he’s not running for president of the Democratic Party, he’s running for President of the U.S. of A.  In the America that the rest of us live in, he’s going to have to deal with the Angry White Man. From an Aspen Times column by Gary Hubbell, forwarded to me by a friend:

He might be a Republican and he might be a Democrat; he might be a Libertarian or a Green. He knows that his wife is more emotional than rational, and he guides the family in a rational manner.

He’s not a racist, but he is annoyed and disappointed when people of certain backgrounds exhibit behavior that typifies the worst stereotypes of their race. He’s willing to give everybody a fair chance if they work hard, play by the rules and learn English.

Most important, the Angry White Man is pissed off. When his job site becomes flooded with illegal workers who don’t pay taxes and his wages drop like a stone, he gets righteously angry. When his job gets shipped overseas, and he has to speak to some incomprehensible idiot in India for tech support, he simmers. When Al Sharpton comes on TV, leading some rally for reparations for slavery or some such nonsense, he bites his tongue and he remembers. When a child gets charged with carrying a concealed weapon for mistakenly bringing a penknife to school, he takes note of who the local idiots are in education and law enforcement.

I don’t get the feeling that Obama is looking to the general.