Michael, do you know how many, e.g., Catholics sit in church every Sunday and don't subscribe to many of the teachings of the Church (for instance, birth control and abortion to name two of the most controversial)?
You have seen clips of a few of Wright's rants over 20 years. You know next to nothing about the person himself, other than a few controversial sermons he gave, know nothing of what he actually did over that time, what he said and how he acted when he wasn't performing at the church. Or, for that matter, even the context in which those rants took place. You don't even really know what Obama's real relationship to Wright was.
You "assume" what you want to assume. My assumption is that your assumption bears little relation to the truth. Obama has a foot in both the white and the black world. He is clearly a person who has tried to come to terms with both. His detachment and cerebral nature is one of the outcomes of that attempt. He can hear both narratives, can hear the pain and the fear and the hope of both. Wright comes out of Jim Crow and all of the frustration (to use a polite word) that came out of that wintry season, the child of slavery and hate. Obama clearly felt a need to understand that perspective. It doesn't mean that he mirrored it, that he made it his own in any simple way. There is nothing simple about the man. He is, to paraphrase a teacher of mine about his own mixed heritage, the "hyphen" between African-American, and is doing what he can to really end of the legacy of slavery and the split and lack of comprehension between the black and white cultures, among other things.
I wish him well. He has a numerous complex and perhaps intractable problems to deal with. |
