Letters to the Editor
Asher Steinberg
Published Letters: 224 Editor's Choice: 12
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You Have A Point, But Even If We All Had Perfect Reasoning Abilities, It'd Still Be A Bad Speech
[Read the article: Obama's faith in the reasoning abilities of the American public]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I appreciate the fact that he could have given a much less nuanced speech, could have pandered much more, and could have continued on with the ridiculous lie that he didn't know what Wright's views were. So I give him credit for his candor and intellectual honesty. And I agree with DCLaw that the media will love it. But the speech had a lot of problems. Since I've bungled typing this post a couple times now, I'll just list them.
1. It doesn't explain why he stayed in the church. Disowning Wright would not be tantamount to disowning the black community, as he suggested, nor would it be analogous to disowning his racist grandmother. Grandmothers aren't chosen, aren't replaceable, and ultimately, their political or racial views aren't that important to our relationships with them. If a pastor espouses bigotry, on the other hand, that's a problem. The whole purpose of being a pastor is to provide spiritual guidance. You can't do that very well if you endorse hate.
2. He's wrong on race, and relatedly, on what's wrong with Wright, for the following reasons:
2(a): Obama says that what's wrong with Wright is that he believes that change can't be made, that our union isn't perfectible, and that no progress in race relations has been made. That's not true. Wright believes in change or he wouldn't have endorsed Obama so stridently or coined the phrase "the audacity of hope." There's no reason to think he's not cognizant of the progress that's been made. Wright simply thinks that not enough has been made. On this, he's right. What's wrong with Wright's remarks, his crazy views on HIV and America being equivalent to Al-Qaeda aside, is his rhetoric. Demonizing "rich white people" doesn't foster change.
2(b): Obama thinks that so much progress has been made that we've reached a point where "your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams." Helping minorities doesn't hurt whites, and to a lesser extent, systemic discrimination against minorities has withered away to the point where the best solution for minorities' problems is (a) self-help and (b) working together on common goals. Black anger's counterproductive and racial resentments just distract attention from "the real culprits" for our problems. These culprits include, but are not limited to, corporations shipping your jobs overseas, lobbyists, special interests, and the racially indeterminate "few," also known as "the rich." In this respect, Obama just proposes to exchange one set of bogeymen for another - one which just happens to be far more politically convenient. Turned off by racial resentments? Let's bash "the rich," because they're way less numerous than "white people," and polls show that even most rich people identify themselves as middle-class, so that's safe. Don't like thinking about affirmative action? Well, we can always blame your lost job on NAFTA and Mexico. After all, Mexicans can't vote. The other problem with all this talk of non-zero sum race relations is that it just isn't true. Your dreams do come at the expense of my dreams, and vice versa. If a white kid is bused to a school he doesn't want to go to so he can help integrate it, someone else's dreams are being fulfilled at the expense of his. If a city doesn't integrate its schools because whites don't want them to, whites' 'dreams' are being fulfilled at the expense of blacks'. If we ever have real education reform in this country, funding at some schools will drop so funding at others can rise. Or take one of Wright's examples, three strike laws. They're popular with whites because they do do an effective job of protecting them from recidivist criminals. But they're unfair to people, disproportionately black, who grow up in poverty and turn to crime. If you refuse to even acknowledge that some policies help one race at the expense of another, then you're not going to have an easy time getting whites to embrace, say, education reform or affirmative action. You can't just attempt to delude people into believing that they don't come with a price for whites; you have to argue that they also come with benefits that offset that price. Instead, here's Obama's argument for education reform:
we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids...
Telling whites that "those kids" are really "our kids" isn't going to convince them that they need to pay higher taxes or stop financing schools with property taxes and try a system that's more equitable. The sales pitch needs to be that, yes, this will come with some costs, but it will also improve the economy and ultimately result in safer cities. Yes, your school's budget may be cut, but the system's too inequitable to stand. How anyone thinks that this speech was brilliant is beyond me. It was nicely written, unusually nuanced for a political speech, even moving at points, but ultimately it just falls into ridiculous post-racial naivete. All, of course, so Wright can be cast off as a superannuated malcontent.
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I Wasn't Aware That It Was A Mistake
[Read the article: Hillary Clinton's long strange journey on Iraq]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Given that she didn't know that there weren't really WMD's there, given that she didn't know how badly bungled the reconstruction effort would be, what makes it a mistake?
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I Think That..
[Read the article: Robbing the cradle of civilization, five years later]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If losing your antiquities is the price you pay for getting rid of a genocidal dictator, that's an acceptable price. Of course, that wasn't the only price paid, but I think it's ridiculous to attack Bush for invading Iraq because the invasion led to a museum getting looted.