White people apparently still unaware that racism exists
I’ve been promising myself I would not get caught up in the primary election snafu between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (by the way, since when did she drop the “Rodham”?), but after hearing the nonstop media circus surrounding the video snippets of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Obama’s response on Tuesday, I feel I have to say something, and it is this: Wright has wrongly received a blanket condemnation from the mainstream (white) media as being a racist, hateful pig. In fact, when you search for the snippets of those videos on YouTube, those are some of the tags: racism, hate speech, anti-American, etc. Hmmm. After watching the clips that have been circulating the most frequently on the news and internet, I have to say I’m a little surprised. I find myself agreeing with many of the points Rev. Wright makes, and in fact I would venture a guess that most or all of my white friends would also agree. So this brings us yet again to the real crux of the problem in this country, one that only becomes more apparent as the media endlessly replays clips of the sermons even in the wake of Obama’s speech: white people still aren’t getting it.
The real question is how can white anti-racists like myself help dispel the fear and hatred that the mainstream media propagates with regards to race? The work ahead is staggering. I’ve heard over and over again, from NPR to this morning’s “Meet the Press” (by the way, has anyone under 45 ever watched this show? My god, it’s like dying a slow death) that race is an issue “people” (meaning white people I guess) don’t want to talk about, and why did Obama go to this guy’s church in the first place, and how dare he compare Rev. Wright’s comments to his white grandmother’s private remarks about her fear of Black men, etc. Without even talking to my father about this, a blue-collar, middle-aged Midwesterner from a dying industrial city who’s watched his friends lose their jobs, been demoted himself, and is currently in jeopardy of losing his job as well due to the continuous rounds of layoffs his company executes, I know exactly what he thinks of all this based on media coverage that is specifically designed to play into his deepest fears. It angers me tremendously that media outlets like Fox, NBC, CNN, and the others act so sanctimonious about the “hate speech” they see in Rev. Wright’s 30-second video clips, yet continue to propagate messages of racism, classism, and misogyny day in and day out.
Still another interesting point this whole “scandal” has brought to the surface is the racial divide along religious lines in this country. My parents made me go to church every Sunday until I moved out, and I have to say that I heard things from white preachers that I would say are more inflammatory than anything I heard in Rev. Wright’s sermon snippets, and without the political awareness to boot. Homo-hating, woman-hating, and racism are regular components of many a white minister’s Sunday morning arsenal, as are conspiracy theories touting some kind of “homosexual” or “feminist” or “anti-Christian” agenda. One of the talking points about Rev. Wright that keeps resurfacing in the media is his belief in some “white conspiracy” whereby HIV/AIDS was invented by scientists or that crack was funneled into the Black community during the ’70s and ’80s to quash the civil rights strides that had been gained in the previous decades; the consensus seems to be that Rev. Wright is a lunatic for thinking such things. Well, white preachers regularly tout conspiracy theories that are more ludicrous than what Wright said; I’ve heard ministers say that homosexuals are trying to infect all straight people with AIDS, that homosexual men are pedophiles, that feminists want everyone to kill babies and are responsible for the divorce rate in this country, that Muslims want to destroy America, that the Chinese are going to take over the world and force us all to burn our Bibles and become Communists…on and on. Compared to that, I have to say I think Rev. Wright has the more valid point. (Besides, it doesn’t take much digging to see all the ways in which the government, for many years, did pull covert shit on the Black community to keep them in a state of fear and subservience, especially throughout the Jim Crow years. It’s not surprising that many people, especially from Rev. Wright’s generation who may have witnessed stuff like the Tuskegee experiment and the ’60s race riots, see the AIDS rate skyrocketing in Africa and among young women of color, see the hugely disproportionate numbers of young Black men in prison, and start to wonder if it all isn’t a concerted effort by the powers-that-be to cripple his community. To me, that line of reasoning makes more sense than a white preacher who’s convinced the government wants to destroy all Christians by enforcing a half-hearted ban on prayer in public schools.)
It’s sad but unsurprising that if Obama wants to win the primary election, he essentially has to disown Rev. Wright (even though he says in his speech he won’t, but didn’t the guy “step down” from the campaign and mysteriously decide to “retire” recently?). That these tapes are surfacing at a crucial point in the primaries–just as Obama was honing in on the nomination–is also more than a little suspect to me. I smell a rat. No, I smell my tofu scramble burning. Please comment, I’m anxious to hear everyone’s take on these events.
P.S. A white anti-racist who says, better than I do, that those few comments of Rev. Wright were right on.
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March 27th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Phew. I am soooo glad that I’m not the only person who agreed with the majority of what Rev. Wright had to say.