Conservative commentators, with a few exceptions, have spent the last few days picking apart Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech on the problem of race in American history, politics, and culture. The consensus seems to be that even though the speech was well-crafted and included several memorable turns of phrase, Obama came up short on substance.
Their criticism tends to focus on two points: 1) Obama did not once and for all disassociate himself from Jeremiah Wright, his pastor of 20 years and spiritual mentor, whose incendiary, grotesquely paranoid statements about America necessitated the speech; and 2) The remedies favored by Obama to bind up the nation’s racial wounds and address lingering disparities amounted to a laundry list of big government same-old-same-olds.
The second point can be set aside with the observation that Obama is not, and doesn’t pretend to be, Thomas Sowell. He’s a liberal senator running, as a Democrat, for the presidency. If elected, he’ll likely toe the party line on all major issues — which, of course, will be bad news for African Americans. So, for example, he’ll be steadfast in his support for affirmative action in higher education, which means that promising black students will continue to be channeled into colleges for which they’re unprepared, rather than into colleges indicated by their standardized test scores, ensuring another generation of higher drop-out rates. He’ll also find himself beholden to Democratic contributors and thus in the pocket of teachers unions, so he’ll continue his party’s tradition of fighting tooth and nail against school choice and any hint of accountability in education. Oh, and Obama is certain to push for universal health care — i.e., the creation of another nightmarish adventure in socialism that will function much like public education. You know the drill there . . . those who can afford to do so will quickly opt out, taking with them the best physicians and nurses, leaving behind a wrecked bureaucracy of underpaid, unaccountable, marginally competent medical providers going through the motions until their retirements kick in.
That’s just Obama being Obama.
The problem of Obama’s loyalty to Wright is another matter, however, and here conservative criticism of Obama’s speech has been, by and large, unfair. Unless you’ve spent the last few weeks in a cave, you already know a scattershot of the gospel according to Reverend Wright: that America is “the U.S. of K.K.K. A” and brought upon itself the attacks of September 11, 2001; that America “put Nelson Mandela in prison” in South Africa and “supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there”; that the American government “lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color”; that America is “only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty”; and that America, through its Zionist proxy Israel, “has supported state terrorism against the Palestinians.”
Such statements are beyond wrongheaded. They’re delusional — a point Obama himself acknowledged: “The remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.”
So why wouldn’t Obama kick Wright to the curb in an effort to put the issue behind him? The first reason, according to Obama, is that there’s more to Wright than nutty rhetoric: “The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over 30 years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth — by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.”
The validity of Obama’s reasoning here should be immediately apparent to any conservative who struggled to defend Jerry Falwell and his ministry after his notorious remarks on the causes of the 9/11: “I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who are trying to secularize America . . . I point the thing in their face and say you helped this to happen.” It was Falwell’s worst moment; he soon backtracked, but the quote provided bulletin board fodder for his enemies for years. The point is that the true measure of a clergyman doesn’t lie in his political insights; it lies in his good works and his ability to inspire religious faith in his flock. On this level, we cannot question Obama’s loyalty to Wright.
But Obama’s refusal to renounce Wright goes beyond distinguishing between the latter’s work and his words. Acknowledging that Wright’s congregation “contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America,” Obama further insists that the man himself “contains within him the contradictions — the good and the bad — of the community that he has served diligently for so many years. I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”
The point is as powerful as it is undeniable — and it should be borne in mind whenever dissecting the predicament of African Americans. Whereas conservatives, like me, rightly attribute the entire range of pathologies that beset black communities to individual bad choices, especially the unwillingness to delay gratification, there’s at least a kernel of truth in the collectivist analysis offered by Obama, who insists that “so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.” It’s absurd, to be sure, to suggest that slavery and segregation are the immediate causes of the bad choices made by people born in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, but slavery and segregation are surely implicated in the degenerate, nihilistic culture that has coalesced to justify those choices, in the reflexive fetishizing of victimhood and authenticity that undermines the will of many young black people to strive for success.
This is the cognitive gap that continues to divide black America from the rest of the blurring palette of American ethnicities. The fact that many African Americans still ascribe their personal failures to institutional racism — which, if you define it as a concerted effort to deprive blacks of basic human and civil rights, no longer exists — represents a tragic error in judgment. But it’s a self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating judgment, rooted in a real history of racism, and given human nature, it’s easy to understand why African Americans would be seduced such a narrative . . . and why the suggestion that institutional racism no longer exists would be viscerally repugnant to them.
Indeed, the truth that institutional racism no longer exists constitutes the collective blind spot for many of Wright’s generation. Institutional racism was the air they breathed growing up. “They came of age,” Obama notes, “in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.”
Here is another lesson conservatives would do well to keep in mind. There’s a moral distinction to be made between, on the one hand, a sixty-something black preacher spouting off dementedly about racism in America and, on the other hand, the twenty-and thirty-something buffoons in his congregation jumping to their feet and applauding while he’s spouting off dementedly about racism in America. We can forgive the Jeremiah Wrights of the world the phantom grievances of their dotage; they lived through the real thing and came by their confusion honestly. The younger followers can and should be held to account. If they don’t recognize that 2008 is not 1958, they’re not just ignorant; they’re willfully ignorant.
Would an Obama presidency begin to chip away at that ignorance? If it did, then that, rather than his unworkable big government policies, might be his greatest legacy.
– Mark Goldblatt is a writer in New York.