As goofy as I find the collective infatuation with Barack Obama these days, I’m very glad he’s running for President. I’m glad because it forces us to face things we would prefer to ignore in American culture.
Information continues to surface about his upbringing and community and the people he surrounds himself with. The shocking negativity of his wife and now the racism and kook conspiracy theories of his Pastor reveal an incongruousness that forces us to wonder about the authenticity of his inspiring (yet malleable) messages. More than that, it reveals to us a part of America that has too long been ignored.
Mark Steyn at The New York Sun soundly condemns and clarifies the importance of the Pastor Wright controversy:
Free societies live in truth, not in the fever swamps of Jeremiah Wright. The pastor is a fraud, a crock, a mountebank — for, if this truly were a country whose government invented a virus to kill black people, why would they leave him walking around to expose the truth? It is Barack Obama’s choice to entrust his daughters to the spiritual care of such a man for their entire lives, but in Philadelphia the Senator attempted to universalize his peculiar judgment — to claim that, given America’s history, it would be unreasonable to expect black men of Jeremiah Wright’s generation not to peddle hateful and damaging lunacies. Isn’t that — what’s the word? — racist? So much for the post-racial candidate.
Many of us have known for some time that these kinds of messages are spread regularly in the black community. Yet as a nation we turn a deaf ear and continue to patronize the impoverished with government assistance and low expectations. But these things need to be brought to the light of day and rebuked. Larry Summers was forced to resign because he observed differences between genders, and yet political correctness at the same time demands we allow men like Reverend Wright to spread lies and paranoia because we presume it’s an integral part of black culture.
Obama is now guilty of this as well in refusing to distance himself from it. He likens it to not disowning his white grandmother. After walking an incredibly fine line throughout his campaign avoiding being too black for white folks and too white for black folks, he is now attempting to go a step further in fusing together the cultures that he straddles and that both run through his veins. He may get away with it thanks to our willingness to ignore the prevalent pathologies this story reveals. But the problem and the solution, as always, go beyond just race.
Obama cannot disown his Reverend, not because he’s black, because he has willingly participated in his congregation for 20 years. But what he can do is identify and disown the culture of victimization and the impoverished worldview that continues to keep many African Americans in poverty and disarray. He will not do so in unquestionable terms and risk the ostracization and rejection that truth-tellers like Bill Cosby have endured. Either way he deftly reframes the Wright story, we cannot escape the fact that Obama either attended this church purely to prove his “authenticity” as a black man for future political gain or because he believes and is complicit in promoting these views in his community. Neither conclusion is comfortable.
This is Obama’s Ron Paul Newsletter - at the end of the day, by his affiliation he has implicitly endorsed the views espoused in Reverend Wright’s church year after year. Voters, especially those singing the Obama song, would be right to snip some heartstrings.
h/t Montzter
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