The danger that Jeremiah Wright poses to Barack Obama
March 18, 2008 nytimes.com
Every few days, it seems, there is a resignation.
Someone from the Obama camp lashes out against Hillary and has to go.
Someone from the Hillary camp makes an inappropriate remark and it's goodbye. It's all fun and games.
Is the case of Rev Jeremiah Wright any different. Do his comments (his ranting sermons were taped, including his phrase God damn America) pose a bigger threat to Obama than any of the other incidents?
Shelby Steele, the African American author of Bound Man, a compelling book on Obama, believes that the Wright stuff is indeed more damaging:
Human visibility is Mr. Obama's Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a "blank screen."
Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").
How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother.
What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity.
timesonline.typepad.com |
