Obama a threat to defeatism
Let us begin with some ground-rule recognition.
I learned something in 1998 after I began a crusade against then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott because he was overtly involved with a Southern group called the Council of Conservative Citizens. Lott wrote a column for the CCC, preaching a doctrine in which white people were innately superior to black people — and he was photographed speaking to a gathering of the group with its banner behind him. After a number of columns, I expected the media would pick it up and hound Lott until he was forced to resign.
No such thing happened. I was furious because Lott was allowed to get away clean. There were columns here and there, but no constant questioning of the sort I know Jesse Jackson would have experienced if he had become Senate majority leader and wrote a column for the Nation of Islam’s paper and had spoken at a gathering organized by Louis Farrakhan.
The job Barack Obama is shooting for is much greater than king of the Senate, and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is not Farrakhan, but the disparity of interest in connections is what justifies to some the kinds of rants that Wright was caught making and that were played over and over by the media.
Does that make Wright correct? Does it make any form of excessive black paranoia correct? No, but it proves that the electronic and print media can sometimes glaringly underline the fact that there is a double standard.
Beyond that, I do not think that Obama has been mortally wounded by Wright’s appearance at the National Press Club, where the minister seemed intent on blithely destroying Obama’s campaign. Why else would Wright say no one need take seriously what the candidate says on the stump because he, like all politicians, says only what will get him elected?
Now comes a grand opportunity for Obama. With his North Carolina victory behind him, and Hillary Clinton perhaps forced on a death march by her squeaking victory in Indiana, Obama has been handed something. He can bring to a climax all illusions about a marginal element in the black community that far too many think is larger than it actually is.
In 1959, when Mike Wallace did a TV documentary titled “The Hate That Hate Produced,” his focus was on the Nation of Islam and other groups that considered themselves black nationalists. The position Wallace took was that all of these people were deeply bitter in their reactions to entrenched racial discrimination and had sunk into either a profoundly lunatic black supremacy or radical racial hostility in order to relieve the pain of discrimination.
By the late ‘60s, however, this bitterness and ethnic narcissism were retooled as a form of militancy, then of black “pride” and, later, of black indoctrination masquerading as scholarship.
When militants with the biggest mouths found out the difference between hot lead and hot air, they devoted themselves to the latter. They headed to colleges and universities, and, once there, they fanned out into history, sociology and political science.
What has remained in place is a defeatist line that tends to preach inevitable failure for black people who are doomed to be crushed under white racism.
Because Obama’s startling rise has begun to drill holes in the lucrative lifeboat of these defeatists, one can understand that they are threatened by his chance of going all the way. They would then be proved marginal, not major voices expressing the imbecility of the people.
Criticism is as essential as it is rational, and that is why Obama was so successful before he was pulled down into a contest about ethnicity.
Whatever happens from this point on, what this country needs is freedom from outlandish statements made in high places or about deadly serious subjects, like AIDS. It needs an inspiring optimism that is not afraid to take a punch.
If Barack Obama can again prove that there are more Americans who do not fear others than there are who do, he will have made a monumental contribution whether or not he becomes president this time around.