Race in America

It is a volatile subject and one most of us really are tired of talking about, optimistically believing that, for most Americans, the horrors of slavery and segregation are past, and as the glittering images of Oprah, Condoleezza, Colin, and Barack so clearly show, there is as little resisting force stopping blacks from succeeding in this country and culture as there is stopping women, and that is a very good thing.

What is transpiring for political speech around this subject over the past few weeks is dismaying, and Fr. Neuhaus puts it in perspective in his admirable and scholarly way, in this excerpt from a First Things article.

The Strange Ways of Black Folk
By Richard John Neuhaus
Friday, March 28, 2008, 6:23 AM

“To understand all is to forgive all.” It’s a beguiling French adage, although of doubtful truth. Senator Barack Obama, we were told, has invited America to engage in a “national dialogue about race.” This morning’s paper describes the dialogue as “last week’s big story.” So quickly do national dialogues come and go. It is worth staying with this one for a while.

Obama’s Philadelphia speech in response to the furor generated by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s preaching was in many ways brilliant and admirable. Mitt Romney’s speech on faith in America was also remarkable, but it bore all the marks of a staff product with carefully calibrated sound-bites. We are told that Obama spent two days in isolation writing this text, and I believe it. No doubt staff members went over it and offered suggestions, but every line has the feel of a thoughtful man’s long-considered judgments on a vexing cluster of questions surrounding race in America. Is there any other national politician today capable of offering in public such a candid and personal reflection on an issue of such great moment? The question answers itself. Not wishing to invoke the ghost of Ronald Reagan, Obama partisans shy away from calling him the great communicator, but he is that.

Conservatives have not been inhibited in pointing out gaps, inconsistencies, and even contradictions in the speech, and all three are there to be derided. Yet I expect that many, if not most, conservatives experience a measure of ambivalence. They think that, all things being equal, it would be a fine thing to have a black president. Not because they want a dialogue on race but because they want to get beyond tedious and rancorous disputes about race, and a black president would put a stake through the heart of liberal guilt-mongering about our putatively racist society.

Of course, all things are never equal. In the speech, Obama once again invoked the boilerplate leftisms of class warfare and the grievances of what he depicts as a nation, black and white, of seething resentments. Without using the phrase, he calls for a new war on poverty and massively increased spending on urban public schools, even though such spending has been multiplied in recent decades to no discernible effect. The teachers’ unions make sure that the alternative of school choice never gets mentioned.

In this speech, he did not mention abortion, the single most polarizing question in our public life, but his promise is to move us beyond our divisions by taking a position so extreme that he refuses to support even the “born alive” legislation that would protect the lives of infants who survive the abortion procedure. Not for nothing is he rated the most liberal member of the Senate. His call for national reconciliation, however rhetorically appealing, is more believably a call for capitulation by those who disagree.

But our subject is the Philadelphia speech and race in America. Watching the speech on C-Span, one noticed that the usually exuberant Obama crowd offered only occasional and tepid applause, except for the familiar populist passages excoriating our exploitation by the rich and powerful. They seemed uneasy about his decision to put race front stage center in his campaign. But this is obviously something he thought he had to do, if only to return the subject to the wings.

Slavery is, politically speaking, the “original sin” of our national founding, just as Obama says. And he is surely right in forthrightly condemning the “incendiary” words of his pastor. The great offense is not in the Reverend Wright’s “God damn America.” Biblical prophets called down the judgment of God on their people. But they invoked such judgment in order to call the people to repentance. They spoke so harshly because they had such a high and loving estimate of a divine election betrayed. The Reverend Wright—in starkest contrast to, for instance, Martin Luther King Jr., whose death we mark next week—was not calling for America to live up to its high promise. He was pronouncing God’s judgment on a nation whose original and actual sins of racism are beyond compassion, repentance, or forgiveness. He apparently relishes the prospect of America’s damnation.

And he does so for reasons that are, not to put too fine a point on it, simply crazy. For instance, the claim that the government unleashed the HIV virus in order to exterminate people of color. The question inevitably asked is why Senator Obama, for fifteen or more years, attentively listened to, generously supported, and submitted his children to the ministrations of a man who espoused such odious and bizarre views. To ask the question is not to deny that, as the senator emphasized, the Reverend Wright also did and said many good things. That a peddler of hate and vile slanders is not without virtues is quite beside the point.

…Perhaps the single most telling statement in the Philadelphia speech is this: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.” The most reasonable interpretation of that statement, maybe the only reasonable interpretation, is that the Reverend Wright represents “the black community.” This ignores the great majority of blacks in America, who are in the working and middle classes and participate fully in the opportunities and responsibilities of the American experience.

The senator lends his prestige to the claim promoted by sundry race hustlers that Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, and Bill Cosby, along with millions of other black Americans, are not black enough to be part of “the black community.” One can understand why a Harvard law-school graduate born in Hawaii with a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas would, for political and perhaps personal reasons, seek the street credential of having “roots” in a militantly black sector of the intensely race-conscious city of Chicago. But complicity in the explicit slander of America and the implicit slander of most blacks in America is a very high price to pay for a ticket of admission to “the black community.”

…I don’t know what all this means for the presidential election. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times wrote some while back that the choice between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama depends on whether Americans feel more guilty about their sexism or their racism. It seems now that Obama will be the Democratic nominee. Most Americans do not feel guilty about either sexism or racism, and are thoroughly tired of being incessantly nattered about both. Those who do feel guilty about racism may feel they have now been given a pass by the depiction of blacks as incorrigibly irresponsible children.

In any event, and whoever is the Democratic nominee, it is worth remembering that running on a platform of America’s guilt has not usually been an electoral winner. Political punditry is not my forte, but, as I watch this race develop, I can’t help thinking about George McGovern in 1972.