Progressive World Review

        A lot of controversy has been generated over remarks made by Pastor Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama’s ensuing speech.  Wright has been called an “America hater” and been accused of “inciting racial hatred” but has Wright said anything that unreasonable?  I’m not about to defend Wright’s every utterance, I’d just like to take a look at a few of the more serious charges he’s made.

        Among Wright’s accusations, “The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.”  This is based on theory that the origins of AIDS was the result of a poorly concocted polio vaccination given to natives of the Belgian Congo.  I have no idea if there’s any validity to this theory but it’s important to note; this theory wasn’t invented by Wright, and, true or not, we know what happened with the Tuskegee Syphilis Study where black men with syphilis were deliberately denied treatment so that the advancing effects of the disease could be studied.  This sounds like something out of Nazi Germany but in fact it happened right here.  The men involved were lied to at every stage of the study by the same government that they’re expected to trust now.  So whether this theory is true or not, it’s easy to understand how a black man like Wright might believe it’s true

        “The government gives them the drugs …” Referring to the CIA’s involvement in drug trafficking, setting off the crack-cocaine epidemic that disproportionately affected poor blacks.  This one is largely true, and while there’s no evidence to suggest that the CIA was deliberately targeting blacks for drug addiction, what happened was the CIA turned a blind eye to Contra drug traffickers allowing them to smuggle drugs in order to raise money for their fight against the Sandinistas, resulting in a huge influx of crack-cocaine into this country.  This was doubly harmful, not only because of the direct damage from the drugs themselves, but many of the users and street dealers ended up in prison as a result.  Adding insult to injury, crack-cocaine offenses, commonly used by poor blacks, carry much higher sentences than regular cocaine, mostly used by whites.  In this light Wright’s statement makes much more sense,

The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people…God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.

It’s the last part of this statement that appears to cause the most trouble.  “God damn America,” that’s the unforgivable sin.  Never mind that blacks were brought to this country in chains, never mind Jim Crow and the lynchings, never mind the pervasive poverty affecting blacks disproportionately to their numbers.  The American people would like to think this is all in the past but Katrina gave lie to that notion.

        There are two distinct things going on here.  First is the tribalism, the herd-instinct that won’t allow many Americans to get past the blasphemous statements against America.  And second, the denial, the pure denial of the offenses both past and present.  Obama attempted to explain where Wright’s anger comes from in his speech,

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings

But denial prevents many from hearing it.  Nowhere is this is more evident than in Charles Krauthammer’s column in The Washington Post.  In it he claims that essentially, both Wright and Obama’s speech are frauds created from “white guilt”,

… 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 he proceeds to do precisely that. 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 where does he suppose this guilt comes from?  He speaks of “white guilt” as if it’s an entity in and of itself, as if it has no source.  Did slavery and segregation not happen?  Only in the fevered imaginations of intellectual liberals I guess.  And there’s nothing that a liberal loves more than a good flogging of “racial guilt.”  In reality, guilt is always strongest among those in denial, the more guilt, the more denial.  Only those such as Krauthammer can separate the guilt from the horrendous crimes that preceded it.  Only the likes of Krauthammer can condemn a man for saying “God damn America” when America has so clearly damned the man.

        What Krauthammer and his ilk will never understand is that it’s not guilt that motivates the liberal.  I don’t feel any guilt from the crimes of others.  What motivates me, and I’m sure most like me, is empathy, a true compassion for the suffering of others.  But what motivates me the most is the understanding that none of us will ever truly be free until we’re all free.

–Paul Wilden

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