The Strange Ways of Black Folk

“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.”

In his speech, Obama reminded us that eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week in America. He might have done something about that by joining one of the racially integrated churches in his New Hyde Park neighborhood. But of course that would not have given him the “black street creds” that he needed for political, and perhaps personal, reasons. In saying he could not disown the black community represented by the Reverend Wright and his church, Obama, however inadvertently, invited his supporters to join in giving new respectability to old stereotypes. The message was and is: This is how those black folk are. Get used to it.

John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute is an uncommonly wise and candid, even courageous, black writer on matters racial. But he, too, has succumbed to the spell cast by Senator Obama. Americans, he says, must understand that when blacks cheer the Reverend Wright and his like: “They hear a stirring articulation of rebellion listenable according to a sense that fealty to one’s race entails at least a gestural nod to sticking a finger in whitey’s eye now and then. The tone, the music of the statements, is more vivid than the content. Sermons like this are Sunday morning’s version of gangsta rap.”

Sure, gangsta rap celebrates unbridled violence, drugs, and the raping of young black women, but, hey, black folk love it. And they don’t really mean it, not really. In applauding the outrageous statements of the Reverend Wright and his like, McWhorter writes, “they weren’t listening to them as logic, but as atmosphere.” He concludes: “I, for one, am still ready for a black president. I wonder if the rest of America is.” I’m afraid that a very large part of America is all too ready to accept Obama’s stereotype of blacks, and is therefore not ready for this black as president.

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times takes a similar line. Yes, you may think it’s crazy to say that the AIDS virus is a government plot to kill black people. “That may be an absurd view in white circles,” writes Kristof, “but a 1990 survey found that 30 percent of African Americans believed this was at least plausible.” Absurdity and plausibility, we are given to understand, are racially determined. On the AIDS conspiracy, he quotes a black social scientist at Princeton who says: “That’s a real standard belief. One of the things fascinating to me watching these responses to Jeremiah Wright is that white Americans find his beliefs so fringe or so extreme.”

Kristof writes: “Much of the time, blacks have a pretty good sense of what whites think, but whites are oblivious to common black perspectives . . . . All of this demonstrates that a national dialogue on race is painful, awkward, and essential.” Those oblivious whites are, however lamentably bigoted and dimwitted, teachable. Although it will be painful and awkward, they, too, can be helped to understand that the idea that the government unleashed the AIDS epidemic in order to kill black people is not so absurd after all.

As I said, the Philadelphia speech was in many ways an admirably thoughtful and candid reflection on race in America. Yet the no doubt unintended message, reinforced by the senator’s pundit supporters, is that white people need to be more accepting of the strange ways of black folk. Blacks don’t really believe all that stuff about “AmeriKKKa” being a racist nation. McWhorter writes: “Now, to be sure, on the occasions when Reverend Wright would launch into that ‘crazy’ routine, those people were laughing and clapping along. But this doesn’t mean they were cheering when the Twin Towers fell.” Well, yes, the clips do show them laughing, clapping, and cheering when Wright declared that, on September 11, America got what it deserved, but they didn’t really mean it, even if he really did. Cut them some slack, as Mike Huckabee generously, and condescendingly, said. They’ve had a rough time of it. They can’t help being that way. Remember those separate drinking fountains of half a century ago.

Conceding to him the best of intentions, Senator Obama has inadvertently launched an exercise in the demeaning of black America that is, in consequence, very ugly. Whites are invited to make their peace with the fact that these are the children of Stepin Fetchit and Amos and Andy who have replaced humor with the shuffle of political extremism but are still entertaining the country by doing their black thing. Cut them some slack. Lighten up.

It’s true that white folk have spent decades learning the protocols of respect, sensitivity, and fair-mindedness in dealing with race. But you expect black folk to reciprocate by “acting white”? You’re forgetting who was the victimizer and who the victim. Victims, like children, have a license to indulge in what John McWhorter calls that “crazy stuff.”

By reviving historic stereotypes, Senator Obama’s speech and the uses to which it is being put has dealt a severe blow to race relations in America. It is giving a big boost to what someone has rightly called the soft bigotry of low expectations.

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.

References

“Ready for Obama . . .” by John McWhorter ( New York Sun , March 19)
“Obama and Race” by Nicholas D. Kristof ( New York Times , March 20)