Race: A ‘conversation’ turns into an argument

last updated 8 January 2015

I’m confused, said Gregory Rodriguez in the Los Angeles Times. Six weeks ago Barack Obama was being “heralded as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln,” after his Philadelphia speech calling for a “national dialogue” on race. The festering rifts in this slavery-scarred society were all of a sudden “too important to ignore,” and the time had come for Americans to join together in a national catharsis of dialogue and shared feelings. These days, though, Obama has been busy complaining that too much attention has been paid to his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who continues to hog the spotlight and embarrass his former congregant with his racially divisive rants. I always thought Obama’s call for a national “conversation” on race was pretty facile. But for him to now be complaining that the conversation is going on too long is “thoroughly hypocritical.”

I’m not sure this counts as a conversation, said Sebastian Mallaby in The Washington Post, but the ongoing flap over Obama’s association with Wright certainly tells us a lot—none of it good—about the state of race relations in this country. Everyone knows Obama doesn’t share Wright’s wacky beliefs. Obama doesn’t think America is a terrorist nation, or that AIDS is “a government plot to kill African-Americans.” But to a lot of white voters, Wright neatly embodies the rage and irrationality they assume must lurk somewhere in the soul of every black person. Obama is therefore held accountable for Wright’s remarks as if he’d made them himself. Certainly it’s curious, said Frank Rich in The New York Times, that John McCain isn’t being asked to denounce or apologize for Pastor John Hagee, who has endorsed McCain and whose rants against Catholics make Wright sound like Mr. Rogers. This blatant double standard is “the all-white elephant in the room” in this presidential season.

Not so fast, said Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. Tempting as it is to dismiss Wright as a “batty uncle” whose views Obama can’t possibly share, Wright’s ravings are actually well in the mainstream of the religious tradition known as “black liberation theology.” So it’s not unreasonable to wonder whether Obama, who sat in Wright’s pews for two decades, is really as dismissive of his pastor’s philosophy as he claims. Obama, after all, did voluntarily join a church whose pastor preached about the “structural evil of white America.” It would seem that either Obama was comfortable with this worldview, or “asleep in the pew for 20 years.”