Sherry Chandler

Obama has his Henry V moment

I have many reasons to be dubious about Barack Obama. None of them include Jeremiah Wright.

I have been dubious about Senator Obama from the very beginning just because of what he is: a golden-tongued and inspirational leader. Young and male. I am, however minor, a poet. I deal in inspiration. I know most of it is, forgive the cliché, perspiration. No one is born a poet and even Moses couldn’t lead his people out of bondage without a struggle. (He stuttered, you may remember.)

I am the mother of sons. I love young men. But I know we have to look at them for what they are.

We have seen these shining young men come in their succession to save us and yet somehow they all turn out less like Young Lochinvar riding out of the West than Monty Python’s Lancelot, feinting to the North. I give you the latest one we elected, George W. Bush, and rest my case.

I am dubious of Barack Obama for his promise to give us a Reagan/Bush foreign policy. I remember Reagan/Bush for Iran-Contra (treason), Manuel Noriega (our pawn), a blood-bath in South America, arming the Mujahadeen and Saddam Hussein. I remember Reagan/Bush for their willingness to throw American muscle around. The logical outcome of Reagan/Bush is George W. Bush.

I am dubious of Barack Obama for his promises to give us a Reagan/Bush domestic policy. He’s going to “fix” Social Security when the only thing wrong with it is that the government can’t keep their hands off the money. He is very weak on universal health care. He voted for tort reform. He would have voted for John Roberts as Chief Justice if an aide hadn’t reminded him of his political ambitions.

I am dubious about Barack Obama when he cries racism while indulging in sexism. And this doesn’t even get to the matter of his bows to abstinence only programs and his almost non-existent support for LGBT issues.

I’m dubious of Barack Obama because I don’t see anything in his record that he has stood to fight for, and that includes Jeremiah Wright.

About Wright, I’m all over the place. I’m insulted, if not outraged, when he dry humps Bill Clinton on the pulpit and says he was riding dirty on black Americans. This reminds me of Clarence Thomas’s anger at Affirmative Action for putting him in the Supreme Court. I have to admit it’s true that Hillary Clinton has never been called a nigger but I suspect Barack Obama has never been called a cunt. I also suspect that any network pundit would find himself on the street if he called for Senator Obama to be taken into a back room from which he did not come out. When he says no one ever mocked JFK or LBJ for their respective Boston and Texas accents, he’s wrong (though I understand his rhetorical point). I think he’s treading in dangerous territory when he draws a sharp dividing line between right-brained black students and left-brained whites. I think he’s patronizing when he (and his spokesmen) explain the hermeneutics of damning America, as if those of us who are white are too Bible-illiterate to know what he means. When he talks about the difference between black music and white music, I think he’s fighting a battle that’s already been won. When he says the American government did AIDS, he dilutes the fact that the American government did, indeed, do Tuskegee.

On the other hand, I think some of those in highest dudgeon about Wright are looking for some excuse, sometimes willfully mishearing him. I think Wright knows he’s going to get this reaction. I think he sees himself as a curmudgeon and a gadfly. I’m not sure I buy the simple explanations — that he’s a mere clown, that he’s fighting last century’s battle, that he’s out for revenge against the son who spurned him. Or maybe it’s all that and some other stuff too. He is sellling a book and he knows who his audience is. Human beings are complex and I’m not quite ready to flatten Jeremiah Wright into a caricature. I may just believe him when he says he has to answer to God instead of the electorate. It’s not my world view but I’m not a preacher.

He frightens us, he threatens our complaicency, our self-congratulation for being race-blind, and he’s raising some questions of great concern. We do have a race problem in this country. It is at once more complicated than the old black/white dichotomy and still just that simple. Look at these facts from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article in The Atlantic, This Is How We Lost to the White Man (link from Avedon):

Given the state of black America, it is hard to quarrel with [Bill Cosby's] analysis. Blacks are 13 percent of the population, yet black men account for 49 percent of America’s murder victims and 41 percent of the prison population. The teen birth rate for blacks is 63 per 1,000, more than double the rate for whites. In 2005, black families had the lowest median income of any ethnic group measured by the Census, making only 61 percent of the median income of white families.

Most troubling is a recent study released by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which concluded that the rate at which blacks born into the middle class in the 1960s backslid into poverty or near-poverty (45 percent) was three times that of whites—suggesting that the advances of even some of the most successful cohorts of black America remain tenuous at best. Another Pew survey, released last November, found that blacks were “less upbeat about the state of black progress now than at any time since 1983.”

I would recommend that you read the entirety of this article for its balanced and historical perspective on Black Conservatism as embodied by Bill Cosby. I do Coates a disservice by clipping. But consider this:

In 2001, a researcher sent out black and white job applicants in Milwaukee, randomly assigning them a criminal record. The researcher concluded that a white man with a criminal record had about the same chance of getting a job as a black man without one. Three years later, researchers produced the same results in New York under more-rigorous conditions.

The accepted wisdom is that such studies are a comfort to black people, allowing them to wallow in their misery. In fact, the opposite is true—the liberal notion that blacks are still, after a century of struggle, victims of pervasive discrimination is the ultimate collective buzz-kill. It effectively means that African Americans must, on some level, accept that their children will be “less than” until some point in the future when white racism miraculously abates. That’s not the sort of future that any black person eagerly awaits, nor does it make for particularly motivating talking points.

And this:

Part of what drives Cosby’s activism, and reinforces his message, is the rage that lives in all African Americans, a collective feeling of disgrace that borders on self-hatred. As the comedian Chris Rock put it in one of his infamous routines, “Everything white people don’t like about black people, black people really don’t like about black people … Liberalism, with its pat logic and focus on structural inequities, offers no balm for this sort of raw pain. Like the people he preaches to, Cosby has grown tired of hanging his head.

I also suggest you read Glen Ford’s Obama’s ‘Race Neutral’ Strategy Unravels of its Own Contradictions (link from Lambert):

Things fall apart; some things, like an ill-tied shoelace, sooner than others. Barack Obama’s strategy to win the White House was to run a “race-neutral” campaign in a society that is anything but neutral on race. The very premise - that race neutrality is possible in a nation built on white supremacy - demanded the systematic practice of the most profound race-factual denial, which is ultimately indistinguishable from rank dishonesty. From the moment Obama told the 2004 Democratic National Convention that “there is no white America, there is no Black America,” it was inevitable that the candidate would one day declare the vast body of Black opinion illegitimate.

My point here, beyond venting my own opinions? For me, Senator Obama has a problem with Jeremiah Wright but it isn’t necessarily the same one everyone else perceives. By denying Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama may win the Democratic nomination, he may even win the presidency, but he is by-passing his opportunity to actually lead on the subject of race, denying his own eloquent call for a conversation on the subject.

(I’m not giving Hillary Clinton a pass here. She also could seize this as an opportunity to lead but Jeremiah Wright is not her mentor.)

I’ll give Chris Floyd (via) the last word. I wish I’d thought of this comparison:

Obama even declared that Wright was “not the same man I’ve known for 20 years” anymore — echoing the newly crowned King Henry’s blast at Falstaff: “I know thee not, old man; fall to thy prayers.”

Complete text of Wright’s National Press Club speech.

Possibly related posts:

Obama and Appalachia

Poems for President Obama

Jesse Jackson in Hazard

The race card

Barack Obama, Poet

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