Wednesday, March 19, 2008
OBAMA, RACE and WRIGHT -- FINAL (?) THOUGHTS
I was just listening to NPR as I was getting ready to go into the office. Their story on Obama's "race speech" took the predicable line of focusing on the "black church experience" and stressing how whites don't understand the history that has lead to a figure like Wright. This is so wrong, and so typically post-modern: the powerful subtext is to forbid moral judgment of "the other" and to warn white people not to tread into the racist ground of making a judgment of a black tradition or a black institution.
Obama explicitly claims the mantle of "racial healer" who offers himself as a vessel for "racial transcendence." But as I listened to the NPR piece, I couldn't help but imagine how they would be covering the story if a Republican candidate had been for twenty years a faithful follower of a religious leader who repeatedly preached racist, paranoid, anti-Americanism. It would be the absolute death of any such candidacy, and NPR would certainly not be working to have its mainly white, liberal listeners "understand" how such talk might be grounded in history.
Until we apply the same standards to people, regardless of race, we are not engaging in "racial healing" and we certainly aren't "transcending race."
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:42 AM
|
|
