The Worst Of Times Revisited

(Live blogging.)

Barack Obama is speaking to the press right now in a formal press conference. He has again expressed his consternation with his former pastor. He just called Reverend Wright's "performance" (Barack Obama's words) at the National Press Club yesterday nothing but a series of "rants not grounded in truth;" he even calls Rev. Wright's words an "insult" (among many other things).

What we are seeing, I am sorry to say, is something grossly reminiscent of the mid-1960s. The Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, Dr. King: these were the backdrop of both Barack Obama's childhood and my childhood, as we are the same age. And, just like the 1960s, we are watching a battle over racial supremacy: which black man -- or black group -- truly speaks for minorities.

Over the weekend, Rev. Wright spoke at length to the NAACP about the different "learning styles" of European whites and African blacks. He defended an evolutionary difference between the two "races," and he went so far as to argue that whites respond to the first and third beats in a musical four-beat measure, while blacks respond to the second and fourth. Related to this, Rev. Wright used the device that blacks are "different but not deficient." Yesterday, in fact, he spoke at length about this very idea, that difference does not imply deficiency.

Most people, most THINKING people, would agree with Rev. Wright that different is not synonymous with deficient. I think his locution odd and unfortunate, and I suspect it is not something that most decent people have ever promoted.

But what I want to assert is that the conflict we see is over what it means to be racist. Traditionally, racism has been attributed to those folks who do not believe that one race is equal to another. If I think being white is superior to being black, I am a racist, because, essentially and unequivocally, I do not believe blackness is equal to whiteness. That is traditional racism, and I believe that is the model of racism under which MOST Americans, including Barack Obama, operate.

Alas, what Rev. Wright has done is to flip racism on its head. His "different but not deficient" slogan now means that the racist is he who believes whites and blacks are EQUAL. Wright's response to this idea is simple: No, no, no. Not equal. Different. To Wright, whites learn in a different way from blacks, and it is wrong of whites to think blacks are equal to the task, whether that task be learning to speak English or to understand European music.

I am inclined to aver that Rev. Wright has actually advocated a type of intellectual and cultural apartheid, American-style. His is a twist on separate but equal. He maintains that the separation is due to the fact that we are all "different."

Hence, what we are seeing is a race war between African-Americans. This is a massive, and truly scary, disagreement. And it is as scary as those sorts of disagreements that led to the sorrows of the 1960s.

Just some thoughts, offered in sorrow with much anxiety.

Peace, pray for peace.

©Bill Gnade 2008/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.