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Is this an Accurate Assessment of Obama's Speech?
Justifying a Scandalous Dereliction
By Charles Krauthammer
The beauty of a speech is that you don't just give the answers, you
provide your own questions. "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could
be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes." So said Barack
Obama, in his Philadelphia speech about his pastor, friend, mentor, and
spiritual adviser of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.
An interesting, if belated, admission. But the more important question
is: which "controversial" remarks?
Wright's assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented the
HIV virus "as a means of genocide against people of color"? Wright's
claim that America was morally responsible for 9/11 - "chickens coming
home to roost" - because of, among other crimes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
(Obama says he missed church that day. Had he never heard about it?)
What about the charge that the U.S. government (of Franklin Roosevelt,
mind you) knew about Pearl Harbor, but lied about it? Or that the
government gives drugs to black people, presumably to enslave and
imprison them?
Obama condemns such statements as wrong and divisive, then frames the
next question: "There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of
condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright
in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?"
But that is not the question. The question is why didn't he leave that
church? Why didn't he leave - why doesn't he leave even today - a pastor
who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the
church proudly sells) "God damn America"? Obama's 5,000-word speech,
fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an
elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that
scandalous dereliction.
His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence,
and (b) white guilt.
(a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the
other "end of the spectrum" there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of
affirmative action, and his own white grandmother, "who once confessed
her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more
than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me
cringe." But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage,
and poison others?
"I can no more disown (Wright) than I can my white grandmother." What
exactly was grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to
the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And
Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private,
yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the
first Jewish state since Jesus' time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor
did grandma.
Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference
between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's
time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race
hatred?
(b) White guilt. Obama's purpose in the speech was to put Wright's
outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he
means the history of white racism. Obama says, "We do not need to recite
here the history of racial injustice in this country," and then proceeds
to do precisely that. And what lies at the end of his recital of the
long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment
discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course.
This contextual analysis of Wright's venom, this extenuation of black
hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse
Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction
and Harvard Law nuance. That's why the speech made so many liberal
commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt, while flattering
their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.
But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the
future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved
pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new
consciousness of the young people in his campaign.
Then answer this, Senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you
expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who
curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of
3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at
Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer
and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well.
Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of
the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial
attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?
(c) 2008, The Washington Post Writers Group
