Race Denial at its Finest
Posted by
KTK
I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to the “Obama’s Pastor” controversy, because it’s the product of three forms of conservative stupidity that I am glad to be immune to. The first is their deliberate, calculated, and organized distortion of political campaigns with red herring issues and machine-gun assaults of irrelevant attacks whipped up by their noise machine to drown out a substantive discussion of issues on which they cannot compete. The second is their inability to think for themselves and its corollary, their assumption that nobody else is capable of thinking for themselves - hence the bizarre “controversy” over whether Obama was present in the room when somebody else said something that makes white conservatives uncomfortable. (It’s true: a major portion of the noisemaking over individual sentences spoken by Jeremiah Wright and taken out of context by Obama’s critics is the question not whether Obama agrees with them, but whether he was present when they were spoken. Somebody should ask these clowns if they are so weak-minded that they are incapable of hearing anything and not believing it - and if not, why they assume that black people must be.) The third is the inherent inability even to acknowledge race and racial history as an issue in America - the drooling stupidity that allows conservative whites to imagine that the Confederate flag is not a symbol of race hatred, but that black anger over discrimination is. Like so much of conservative discourse, this nonsensical “controversy” simply fails to rise to the level that would deserve to be taken seriously; as with conservatism in general, giving it no credence is the safest and most efficient way to deal with the mess it presents.
But the speech that Obama planned on the subject was interesting to me - interesting as a phenomenon. It occurs to me that this election has now seen two “Kennedy moments” - defining speeches in which a candidate has been forced, by others’ bigotry, to confront their own outsider status and challenge America to expand its notion of community membership and our range of shared values. Kennedy did it with panache over the question of Catholicism, and this year Romney did a decent job in the same vein regarding Mormonism. Obama faces a larger challenge on the question of race. Race and sex are the fundamental lines of discrimination written into the Constitution itself; race especially was the ground of the most vicious and tenacious divisions of American society, the one that defined and shaped the country as no other, and laid the groundwork on which the lives of all Americans are lived today.
Americans have always been able to make themselves feel good about themselves by invoking both religiosity and religious freedom, but they have invested to an even greater degree in defining and maintaining racial divisions. In some ways, Kennedy and Romney were fighting a downhill battle; it required little more for either of them than to express teary-eyed religious fervor and promise not to go overboard with it. Obama is unquestionably struggling uphill; he cannot claim community with other groups by invoking his devotion to his own, as Kennedy and Romney could, and he cannot erase their bigotry by any degree of non-threatening rhetoric or promises not to challenge their complacency (which is just as well, because that’s not what he’s about). Even so, a speech on race is an opportunity to bring race to the forefront of the discussion in a serious way, and potentially to cut through the winking code-words and denials and evasions that invariably smothered any approach to the subject heretofore. It was an unique enough opportunity, also, that it just might have had a chance to make whites shut up and listen for a change, and maybe shift the grounds of discussion just a bit. I was interested to see what Obama would do with it.
(More after the break)
