Letters to the Editor
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Can't move when you're stuck in the mud
Obama isn't moving anywhere. More and more info on Rev.Wright is popping up to suggest that he's a typical race baiter. As that factors into the debate, Obama looks like a fraud. As he casually puts his mother and grandmother down, he makes himself that much difficult to accept as a uniter rather than a follower of Wright's beliefs. No, we are not moving beyond race. We are going to be treated to a nasty campaign that whips up old ghosts from the past. It may be that we never get past race in America.
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@banyantree
Beautiful.
Simply beautiful.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
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We don't get it
Weeping for Brunhilde....bravo! I would consider you my new spokesperson.
We white folks by and large 'don't get it'. To wade through a history and culture saturated in racist beliefs, superstitions and practices is nigh onto impossible and come out with some sort of unbiased clarity about how we all do/don't get along.
To not grasp some of the generational dimensions of race in America is just ridiculous.
I am the mother of a bi-racial child. After congratulating myself for my 'brave' open-mindedness in having a realtionship with a black man, I started to have to face my own and that of the white world I moved ins' patronizing and clueless brand of 'tolerance' I heard some of the most narrow, dare-I say-it typical comments from my white liberal friends. Everything from 'welfare cadillacs' to sexual prowess showed up. It has taken me years to acknowledge and grasp the depth of racsim in polite society. I have had the task of raisng that child, now a man, in a society who often views him as an object of fear. We have seen it, lived it, tasted it and worked through it for over 22 years---and it ain't over. Just ask my son.
Barack Obama addressed this very notion in referencing his grandmother. He was candidly and honestly relaying what some of us know to be true. He is just the kind of leader to generalize about a 'typical white person' Joan---there are a lot of us.
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Barack Obama's granny wasn't "typical" of anything. She was a high-achiever in her own right.
This woman, blithely dismissed as "typical", became the Vice-President of a bank. Very few women, born in the l920s, would have attained such a position. In addition, she raised her daughter's child, enrolled him in a private school, and nursed his mother in her final days on earth. Mrs. Dunham has been an outstanding person and for her grandson now, through political expediency, to call her "typical" reflects very badly on his own character. The media is loving this, of course, but Obama made the mistake of believing that the gushing would go on "ad finitum". As an observant church-goer, he should have remembered the admonition "Put not your trust in princes and in kings" and least of all the potentates of 24-hour media coverage.
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It's the Double Standard
At the beginning of this discussion I posted a link and an excerpt from an article that outlines Clinton's much bigger problem with religious association, and I asked Joan: If you think Rev. Wright and the follow up is so important, how can you ignore this?
Alan Bennett and people in other threads have asked me why I want to smear Clinton and defend Obama. That's ironic. Never once did I say I want to make the questions I ask about Clinton the center of the campaign -- I am asking for the same treatment of both campaigns.
If you think Rev. Wright matters (and I don't) then you must defend Clinton's associations included in the article I posted at the start of these posts. (http://www.alternet.org/story/80248/)
I agree with most letter writers here that it is entirely disingenuous to pillory Obama on the most minute of details, or the slimmest slice of words of someone important to him, and then claim to be asking legitimate questions -- UNLESS you are applying the same standards to Clinton. Joan does not. Clinton supporters here do not.
If you look at my posts, I do not worship Obama and have pointed out his corporate ties and his ambiguous statements. No one is perfect and I try to keep only loyal to my own values. I wish I could discern any coherent set of values in those who are pushing the Wright story. So far none are evident.
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The souls of white folk
At risk of offending Joan Walsh, I have to point out that she contradicts herself -- she says, move on, to Obama, yet harps on what isn't even a gaff. All of us are typical in one sense or another, despite our specificity and uniqueness. To discuss the broader issue you must generalize. There was nothing in Obama's generalization that was offensive or mistaken.
I think it is time for us white folk, especially those of us like Joan who claim to have spent her life trying to close the racial divide, to stop demanding more of Obama, and start demanding more of ourselves. We could begin by asking ourselves the key question that so many of us try to evade, pretending that we somehow are objective in these matters. That question is this:
If, somehow, you could at birth chose which race you would be born into, knowing all you know about our contemporary society, would you choose to born black or white?
Answering that question clarifies our white folk's understanding of the real racial advantage we enjoy in American society. So before addressing whatever speck you see in Obama's eye, take the board out of your own first. Maybe you won't be so blind in the future.
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Joan, you're dealing with reality.
And far too many of the other posters are living in the Land of Wishful Thinking.
I've been a senior campaign staffer, I know how voters think. The minute I heard that comment, I said to myself, "Well, there goes the little old lady vote."
Because elections hang on those moments. They shouldn't, but how does "shouldn't" help us beat John McCain?
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@aklowe
To you too, I say thank you for your beautiful and inspiring contribution.
Some of the responses here are small-minded and petty.
I find them dispiriting and they confirm my innate cynicism about the people of the United States, a cynicism I, as a black person, had from an early age.
And everytime I fall back on my own comfortable cynicism I do precisely what Obama is calling on us all not to do.
I struggle with this. How to maintain open-minded optimism about the goodness of people while at the same time reading such implausibly narrow-minded comments from readers of Salon and the Times.
I think to myself, if the readership of publications like these can evidence such an astounding lack of genuine reflection, of "transcendence," then my God, imagine what all the rednecks are thinking. How did I ever entertain for a second that maybe even the rednecks could be open to Obama's message?
But that's cynicism. That's my cynicism and I'm struggling to at least neutralize it.
It's hard.
I'm a black person with an ivy league education, a breadth of travel experience, and wife from eastern Europe and two bi-lingual children.
And yet, for all my cosmopolitanism or whatever you want to call it, Wright's anger and distrust of the government is something I share. Oh, and I go to an Anglo-Catholic church, the solemnity of which is the polar opposite of the boisterous atmosphere of Wright's church.
The point being, for all that, I remain black and inasmuch as I am black, I feel Wright's anger and frustration.
And many of the comments here play into that frustration in that I see people who are literally incapable of stepping back long enough to reflect upon something that demands reflection rather than parsing and offense-taking.
But many of the comments here do reflect exactly those habits of mind and way of being in the world that will be necessary if we are to overcome.
There's just so much to say...
Let's keep listening in a spirit of charity.
And I do apologize for my own impatience with the people whose comments I've found small-minded.
I don't mean to shut off communication by saying this, I'm just trying to be honest.