Obama's dilemma.....

....is an opportunity for America to once again discuss RACE.






Before Barack Obama even addressed the controversy over his pastor and the racist and anti-American portions of some of his sermons that have been publicized recently, Shelby Steele wrote, in the Wall Street Journal, an insightful, thought-provoking, excellent essay on his candidacy and the influence of race as an ingredient in modern American politics.

The piece has so many truly compelling paragraphs, that I hesitate to excerpt any here, lest you skip reading it entirely, which you should, but these are particularly enlightening:


"How to turn one's blackness to advantage?
The answer is that one "bargains." Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.

This is how Mr. Obama has turned his blackness into his great political advantage, and also into a kind of personal charisma. Bargainers are conduits of white innocence, and they are as popular as the need for white innocence is strong. Mr. Obama's extraordinary dash to the forefront of American politics is less a measure of the man than of the hunger in white America for racial innocence."


(I would interject the clarification that I am not in need of having this innocence conferred upon me, but rather, having it recognized as something I already possess, by virtue of the fact that I am not racist, and am innocent of racial discrimination or prejudice.)


"But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. Mr. Obama has said of himself, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . ." And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama's Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a "blank screen."


Echoing a common criticism of many opponents, notably Hillary Clinton, the "blank screen" that is Barack Obama may now be more believably understood to be a result of intent, rather than an inability of Obama's to specify how he would accomplish so many of the progressive goals he's idealized about. Setting aside the race issue for a moment, once we get past his charismatic rhetorical skills we see that Obama is just another big government liberal who wants federal bureaucracies to manage health care and education, redistribute wealth, and who doesn't understand the importance of our success in fighting radical Islamists in Iraq.


Before I return to the race issue, let me just say that Obama, if he's nominated, needs to be defeated simply because he'd promote socialistic policies that would bankrupt this country.

He wants to give everyone who wants to go to college $4000 per year for four years! Not loans, not limited grants that you'd need to compete for, but free money for everybody that wants it. (Then to "repay" America with community service.)

His loudest promise is to provide a health care plan for every American by the end of his 1st term, and one that "cuts costs for the typical family by up to $2,500 a year". How's the math on that going to work out? Insure everyone (providing medical care for everyone, whatever care anyone needs), including the 48 million that he claims are uninsured now, and still somehow manage to reduce the costs for everyone? Impossible. (Here's a quote from his speech in Spartanburg, SC last November: "...I'll pass a universal health care bill that allows every American to get the same kind of health care that members of Congress get for themselves and cuts every family's premiums by up to $2500. And mark my words - I will sign this bill by the end of my first term as President.")

In his "A More Perfect Union" speech several days ago, Obama said: "...we all want to move in the same direction". That's not true. His progressiveness isn't progress. It's socialism. I don't believe most Americans really want that and, for sure, not everyone does.



Now back to the race issue and Obama's speech.

I give Obama credit for indicting Rev. Jeremiah Wright's lack of historical context, saying that "...he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country...is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past."

I give Obama credit for condemning Rev. Wright for seeing "...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."

I also give Obama credit for acknowledging that Rev. Wright "...expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country...", but then the first example he gave was inaccurate: "...that sees white racism as endemic..." I'm certain that Rev. Wright doesn't think white racism is endemic (restricted to a particular place). He believes it's pandemic (widespread), epidemic (affecting many persons at one time), and chronic (long duration or frequent recurrence). And he's wrong.

Obama also appeared to be aware of something that most of us were not (because we don't travel to many different types of churches), even though Martin Luther King Jr. chastised us for it out over 40 years ago, when he said: "It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o'clock on Sunday morning." A completely different meaning of that observation- a malignant manifestation of King's sincere concern for unity in the Church- has become painfully clear to many in America just in the last couple of days. Along with Wright's racist rants being broadcast widely and repeatedly, other black preacher's sermons have found their way into the limelight of modern media, and.....they're nothing like what most of us have ever experienced in our churches, to be sure.

It's become evident that it's common, in some predominantly black churches, to hear a great deal of victim-based, racially divisive "black liberation theology" that still blames "rich, white" America for oppressing African-Americans economically, judicially, and socially, as if this was 1963.

Donna Brazile, Al Gore's past campaign manager, recently said that "Jeremiah Wright is actually one of the more moderate black preachers- just go to a church down the street from my house...", when on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos". While she's not responsible for being an expert on the preaching styles of various pastors across the country, we can assume that, in her long career of traveling around the U.S. for Democratic candidates, she's visited many churches and listened to many different preachers.

In conclusion, if these are the statements of a "moderate" black preacher... :

"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, not "God Bless America"- God damn America! That's in the Bible! For killing innocent people! God damn America for treating us citizens as less than human!"

"They will not only attack you if you try to point out wuss goin on in White America, US of KKKA..."

"Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich, white people!"

"Bill did us just like he did Monica Lewinsky- (with the pastor visually simulating sex) -he was riding dirty!"

"We (the United States) believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."

"We started the AIDS virus..." (to kill blacks). "We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty."

...then we may be farther from racial reconciliation than ever.