I have some deep thoughts, deep I tell you, on the whole Obama and race issue. Unfortunately, each time I've sat down to write about it all I get is a puddle. Too much of "on the other hand" adds up to just muddled thoughts and not deep ones.
I didn't watch his speech on Tuesday, but I have read the transcript/prepared remarks three times. I think there are parts of it that were quite good, parts that were not so good(to be polite), and one part that made me laugh out loud. Since my thoughts on the first two are still a mess, I'll just focus on the latter for now.
I haven't seen anyone else drill into this, but in the long run I think it's one of the most interesting things Obama said on Tuesday:
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.
Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.
A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.
Correct me if I am wrong, but haven't most major urban areas been under Democratic control for what, almost 40 years? Certainly the home base of Rev. Wright, Chicago, has been. Is Obama saying that those conditions still exist or that they existed way back when and now, after two generations, government still has been unable to solve these problems? Aren't Democrats the ones running those inferior schools? And yet somehow they keep getting voted into office. I'm shocked.
And note also that line about "meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations". The most meaningful wealth that any working American could give to his children is likely to be retirement savings. Except for most Americans, 6.2% of their income, matched by their employer, goes into a government retirement plan that they do not own and cannot pass on to their children. Could it be that Obama secretly believes that Social Security should be privatized?
No, I'm pretty sure that he doesn't. In taking a look at Reverend Wright and Trinity Church, I came to the conclusion that the anti-Americanism and racism were just symptoms of the real disease. Deep down Obama and Rev. Wright are "progressives". If you take race out of the equation, what Wright said is no different than what you can get, to one degree or another, at any any of the netroot blogs. Obama has successfully masked that until now, but the mask slipped a little bit in the last couple of weeks.
If Obama truly wishes to address the plight of Black America he's going to have to confront the failure of urban and Democratic led government policy among other things. At least two generations of failure at both the national and local level. If he has the courage to do that in the coming months and secures the nomination, he just might be able to win my vote after all.
I'm not holding my breath.
More: Here's what I mean when I think that we miss the boat if we look at this issue from just a racial perspective. Rev. Wright's perspective is Afrocentric, but his beliefs are simply standard hard left dogma in many ways. Look at this from Tim Wise:
But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.
Or this from David Neiwert:
It's telling that none of them also observed that, for the most part, Wright's remarks (aside from his conspiracist comments about AIDS, which were indeed inexcusable, but which received little or no play before Obama's speech) were factually accurate, and deeply reflective of a reality that most African Americans live with -- and which most white Americans do their best to ignore, deny, and forget. The remarks that were broadcast all over YouTube and replayed endlessly on the cable talk shows were, no doubt, were impolitic, but they were also largely true.
Wright, Wise, and Neiwert are all fellow travelers regardless of race. The larger question for me is; just how comfortable Sen. Obama is with their political perspective and their view of America? If we get distracted by race and ignore that, we may be in for a rude shock one these days.
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