David Dante Troutt

No Country for Old (Black) Men

Until his pastor’s most incendiary soundbites recirculated on the web, Barack Obama had managed to be the “post-racial,” “post-partisan” candidate to all America, if not the most beautiful, an unimposing buddy to white men, an attraction to women across racial and ethnic lines.  But Rev. Wright’s selected sermons suddenly threatened all of that just as racial divisiveness emanated from his Democratic rival’s camp, and Obama was called upon to address race in America head on.

The question is whether the master orator and personification of racial unity could show a cynical nation how to talk to about race amid a battle of metaphors about Wright.

The tightrope cliché doesn’t begin to describe the challenge Obama faced.  It is not just blue-collar white men in Pennsylvania whom Obama had to reassure, but a significant number of educated white liberals there and elsewhere concerned, for instance, about Wright’s statements about American foreign policy in the Middle East.  The endless repetition of four or five Wright snippets are often characterized as racist and hateful, but their actual content suggests a deeper fear that could join white constituencies: radical anti-Americanism.

The references to “Goddamn America” and “government lies” about 9/11 and bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki and complicity in South African apartheid and “state-sponsored terrorism against Palestinians” are probably more troublesome to many than his comments about how the U.S. presidency has been “controlled by rich white people” (it has, hasn’t it?).  It helps that the foreign policy linkages end with a statement once attributable to none other than Malcolm X—“America’s chickens have come home to roost.”

That these remarks occurred in the setting of all-black churches apparently compounds the outrage, converting any loyalty to these utterances into an act of treason.  The most virulent comments I saw repeated on websites usually invited Rev. Wright to “get the f*** out of this country.”  That sentiment is probably only an extreme version of other suspicions.  Despite the social and religious segregation that must be the precondition to such revelations about how black folks talk, many white voters seemed appalled that over in their churches “they” are not thinking the same American thoughts that I am.

This is the angry metaphor of Wright Obama took on in his speech after so assiduously avoiding race for so long.  Ignore the presidential flags for a moment.  What Obama did was to stand in the gap with humble magnificence and dignified brilliance.  Politically, however, it remains to be seen if this is just how to talk to white people about race in a speech few will hear in its entirety.  Complexity and comprehensiveness have not historically been assets in presidential campaigns.  And teaching, even from the middle, is not done.

But teach he had to because the dare Obama accepted was to believe himself so capable as a unifier that he could explain vast oceans of difference primarily to white people so that he could then do the work of unifying all of us.

Remember that this is still secretly a segregated country.  Obama reminded us that older black men (whom Chris Rock called the most racist people in the world) grew up with legal segregation.  So did Barack.  It’s just that since the 1970s, most segregation comes about through racially neutral laws and the fiscal demands on towns and small cities that create incentives to exclude the minority poor seem reasonable.  This is the main reason why Sunday morning, as Obama also mentioned, is the most segregated time of the week.  (Saturday is pretty segregated, too, if you think about it.)

Then stop and consider what we really mean by racial identity, at least between “black” and “white.”  At some essential level of cultural abstraction, what it means to be black in this country is to manage the anger of a persistent past, to understand the power of humiliation as a daily depressant and to overcome it anyway with love, laughter and growth.  That identification has lots of material expressions, but for many it is spiritually known.  And for a lot of American blacks, underlying that spiritual connection is a notion of Christianity rooted in service, redemption and liberation.  Indeed, this is true in different ways for many Christians of color around the world.

However, the nature of white identity in this context is fundamentally different—it values these dimensions less, if at all.  Sure, 25% of white men polled in Ohio may have said that race mattered to their votes, and at least as many in Pennsylvania may agree.  But racial identity is rarely an article of faith when you see yourself as merely normal.  So, whiteness often matters only when blackness enters the room.  It is not a salient feature of identity until provoked, so to speak, and then it can often be very defensive about the relationship.  A colorblind or “post-racial” society implies an end to these discomforts.  Obama’s candidacy appeared to oblige.

Along came the mysterious re-appearance of Rev. Wright’s greatest hits and, for those who looked, his motto:  Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian.  This is another reason Sundays are so segregated.  Audaciously, Obama was trying to show why they should not be while walking yet another tightrope—or from between a rock and a hard place.  That is, in the same speech in which he set forth the idea of a progressively evolving society (“perfecting a union” that once legalized slavery), he attempted to use rather than reject the metaphor of the Jeremiah Wright he knows.  People are not “disowned” because they are angry.  Reconciliation does not often occur through repudiation.  For that matter, disposability may be a consumer trait, but not a Christian one, he seemed to argue.

Why would he do all this in one speech?  This is heavy stuff.  How often does heavy stuff work anywhere, let alone a presidential campaign?  When’s the last time you succeeded by explaining the source and substance of someone’s anger?

First of all, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, it turns out, is no foolish old man.  He holds two masters, a doctorate and is considered one of the finest black ministers in the entire nation.  A more thorough review of his sermons reveals a deeply thoughtful man, tirelessly committed to assisting the weak and the poor and the vulnerable to gather their resources and overcome adversity.  Though his prophetic tradition is by no means the only one in the black church today (opposed on a long spectrum by prosperity ministry), it has variations as old as slavery and as familiar as Martin Luther King, Jr.  It espouses a model of Jesus as a liberator of the poor against the powerful, which fits not only the lives of many blacks but of whites, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans in this country.  In Rev. Wright’s prophetic stream of oratory, anger is neither hatred nor racism but a reasonable reaction to oppression.

In the sermon which inspired Obama to entitle his second book “The Audacity of Hope,” Rev. Wright describes in a warm and almost professorial tone how the biblical Hannah’s audacity was to sit in her rags atop a war-torn world, holding a harp with but one string left, and play for hope.

Obama could not and would not jettison such thinking, unusual though it might be.  It is also why the speech includes a careful recital of the structure of racism—the lasting wealth effects of housing discrimination, generations of marginalized black workers, the anguish and anger of drugs, crime and incarceration—the things a very significant number of black people really struggle with but can overcome with shared resources.

And this is ultimately the point, assuming it can be heard.  Many people of all races and ethnicities in America can appreciate this message of personal struggle in their lives, especially as recession sets in.  The prospect for unification is obvious except for the face and intonations of the speaker.  What may be most radical about Obama’s approach is that he believes he can somehow reveal to a divided electorate the falsity of their standard fault lines and lead them to a unity of interests.  (Jesse Jackson dared the same thing in 1984.)  What is good for the poorest among us may actually benefit the middle, too.

This was presumably the “movement” until last week and the real costs of unification are now clear.  What was gorgeous rhetoric is now racial and economic realism.  The results may be the same, but the country’s path to it looks a bit rockier and more difficult, informed by but not littered with old black men.  Yet they too, Obama admonished, will be forced to acknowledge that change is possible.

Now comes the fear and what we do about it.

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