In article <47e2f29d.1875578@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, mellow@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
>I'm sure you're in tune with ol' Jeremiah [Wright], Rassus.
>
>We'll trust you to 'splain it those of us who don't grasp black
>nationalism.
"Stick a fork in him, baby," writes blogress Taylor Marsh of Barack Obama.
"If
he makes it to the general election, he's done." Marsh, a liberal-left
backer
of Hillary Clinton, is referring to this comment Obama made on a
Philadelphia
radio station, explaining why he likened his grandmother to his spiritual
mentor, Jeremiah Wright:
"The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors
any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical
white person who, uh, if she sees somebody on the street
that she doesn't know, there's a reaction that's been bred
into our experiences that don't go away and that sometimes
come out in the wrong way and that's just the nature of
race in our society. We have to break through it."
Marsh asks, "Can you imagine if Hillary Clinton said someone was a
'typical
black person'?" Never mind if a Republican said such a thing.
The Obama-Wright imbroglio is laying bare the racial double standard in
America. The New York Times's Nicholas Kristof hints at this but doesn't
quite
get the point:
To whites, for example, it has been shocking to hear Mr.
Wright suggest that the AIDS virus was released as a
deliberate government plot to kill black people.
That may be an absurd view in white circles, but a 1990
survey found that 30 percent of African-Americans believed
this was at least plausible.
"That's a real standard belief," noted Melissa Harris-Lacewell,
a political scientist at Princeton (and former member of
Trinity church, when she lived in Chicago). "One of the
things fascinating to me watching these responses to
Jeremiah Wright is that white Americans find his beliefs
so fringe or so extreme. When if you've spent time in black
communities, they are not shared by everyone, but they are
pretty common beliefs." . . .
Many African-Americans even believe that the crack cocaine
epidemic was a deliberate conspiracy by the United States
government to destroy black neighborhoods.
Much of the time, blacks have a pretty good sense of what
whites think, but whites are oblivious to common black
perspectives.
What's happening, I think, is that the Obama campaign has
led many white Americans to listen in for the first time
to some of the black conversation--and they are thunderstruck.
All of this demonstrates that a national dialogue on race is
painful, awkward and essential. And that dialogue needs to
focus not on clips from old sermons by Mr. Wright but on far
more urgent challenges--for example, that about half of black
males do not graduate from high school with their class.
What it really demonstrates is that whereas whites are expected to be
respectful, sensitive and fair-minded when talking with or about blacks,
there
is little expectation that blacks will reciprocate--to the point that a
black
presidential candidate doesn't feel inhibited from making a statement
about "a
typical white person."
It is true that there was a time when white Americans had to be taught to
treat black Americans with respect, and that is where our rules of racial
etiquette came from. But "racial reconciliation," the need for which we've
been hearing so much about, demands a new etiquette--one in which
everyone,
regardless of race, is expected to treat others with equal respect.
If Obama is as skilled a talker and conciliator as his sup****ters make him
out
to be, he could lead the way here. If he wants to become president, he
would
be well advised to do so. After all, he'll need white votes, and
references to
"a typical white person" are not likely to win them over.
--
It is simply breathtaking to watch the glee and abandon with which
the liberal media and the Angry Left have been attempting to turn
our military victory in Iraq into a second Vietnam quagmire. Too bad
for them, it's failing.
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