I don’t understand the big media flap over statements made by Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., Barack Obama’s former pastor. Why is Obama being held accountable for statements made by someone else, statements taken out of context, statements that probably resonated with the largely African-American audience to which they were aimed? Dr. Wright has no doubt seen his share of poverty, despair and hopelessness. Dr. Wright’s job is to give hope to people who have none. In the short video clip that has become so familiar to TV news viewers, I didn’t hear Dr. Wright calling for African-Americans to rise up and smite their white oppressors; I heard him describing a reality that African-Americans know all too well.
White Americans – and particularly Conservative white Americans – become nervous when an African-American person brings up the race issue. Whites would much rather believe that institutionalized racism is long behind us and that we are now color-blind, with no need for corrective measures like Affirmative Action; whites want desperately to believe that only merit matters; and I think whites desperately wish to believe that the incarceration rate for African-American males is disproportionate because of some inbred lack of ambition, responsibility or morality within African-American males rather than the predictable result of a society where racism is still prevalent. Overt signs of racism may be less obvious today than they were in 1940 or 1950 or 1960, but the underlying assumptions about black people in the minds of white people are still alive and well.
White Americans would do well to read James Baldwin who wrote in an essay called “The Fire Next Time” that, “The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace…” In other words, African-Americans could see America for what it is, warts and all, rather than an idealized picture that bears no resemblance to reality.
Sounds somewhat familiar, doesn’t it? Sounds like the myths and distortions bandied around every day by white right-wing radio commentators like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, who tell their largely white audiences that racism is all in the heads of black people, an excuse blacks use to account for their failure to lift themselves out of poverty, drug addiction, and violence.
Perhaps the white media is upset about Dr. Wright’s sermon because it rips the scab off the American scar and exposes the wound that no amount of myth-making by white people can heal.
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