David Dante Troutt

Deficient Differences: How Barack Obama Deals with a Loss in the Family

Barack Obama’s emphatic denunciation of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, for a series of comments the reverend made to news outlets last week is far more than politics.  Rev. Wright reveled in a bewildering litany of racial differences.  He repeated his most charged political beliefs and characterized this tempest in the racial trope of an attack on black faith before Obama finally cut him loose.  But this spectacle is more personal than political and more universal than racial.

Instead, we are riveted by some lasting mythology about human bonds.  The Obama-Wright breach is intriguing for its psychological familiarity, and as compelling as a car crash.  If cultures and religions invent eternal myths as narrations of life, where does this story fit and what could it mean for Obama?

The obvious analogy is an inversion of the Oedipal struggle, where the enraged father seeks the death of his son but accomplishes only their mutual destruction.

Or try Roman mythology with Reverend Wright as the ruler of the universe, Saturn, whose children were prophesied one day to depose him.  As each is born, he devours them.  Yet one gets away, Jupiter, who ultimately defeats his father.  This myth even reaches into astrology where Saturn is associated with old age, melancholy and the domineering father.  Jupiter—Barack—represents goodness.

Then there is the Old Testament tale of Saul and David.  The Lord tears the kingdom of Israel from a disobedient Saul and gives it to one better than he, David, the son of a servant.  David remains loyal to Saul, fighting his battles, and becomes his son-in-law.  Yet Saul’s intense jealousy leads him to pursue David and, in plots motivated by evil spirits, tries several times to kill him.  Fleeing for his safety, David twice spares Saul’s life.  Defeated in battle, Saul falls on his own sword and dies.

Finally, in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man—from which Rev. Wright occasionally quotes—the metaphor of crabs in a barrel pulling each other down from the sides famously describes the fratricidal jealousy of some blacks for the ascension of others.

None of these is perfect, for something else happened here.  Jeremiah Wright is not Barack Obama’s father or his “spiritual advisor” (nor, apparently, his political supporter).  He was the former pastor to a man who had known neither God nor father well.  At best, Wright may have been a kind of godfather, and finding a godfather is a strange love.  It is mostly symbolic, but no less real.  Much of it is necessitated by mutual need, which may work miracles so long as certain elements remain in alignment.  For the godson fortunate enough to find this symbolic anchor amid decades of a life at sea, his “I” may gladly relinquish itself to “we.”  As many African-American men imagine, it is probably a little different with a real father.

One cannot doubt that Rev. Wright was truly proud to know Barack, to see in such a strong, capable and determined younger man aspects of himself.  They were two biracial black men, from different generations, with a strong sense of justice, who discovered each other in Chicago’s rich yet impoverished, proud yet struggling South Side.  There is no question that Rev. Wright truly wanted Barack’s political success—for what it would mean to Barack and, no doubt, the Trinity United Church of Christ and Rev. Wright’s own already substantial reputation.

It must have been difficult for a recently retired Wright to see his identification with Obama turn into a national vilification of his own work and beliefs, as the sound bytes and video excerpts erupted across the news cycles come late February.  Suddenly, his standing as a pastor, a national figure and a black man was eviscerated within days, and the price of his relationship with the rising star was silence.  With virtually no defense, that cost may have been too much.

Here, I suspect, is where the myth turns into something we have not quite seen before and the elements come undone—The Race Speech in March.  Obama had three broad but risky options with respect to Wright:  Reject him, defend him or explain him with aspects of both rejection and support.  He did the latter, making Wright the spine of the entire 40-minute address.  At the time, many suspected he used too much nuance to defuse the issue after the nomination, and that Wright figured too centrally in an otherwise remarkable discussion of racial context in America.  No one suspected it would provoke Wright to this.

Like the paranoid Saturn, Wright must have experienced gnawing envy as the star he helped launch into universal praise first distanced himself, then explained and critiqued him before a global audience.  Like Saul, his mute jealousy might have become ungovernable, as narcissistic rage overcame him.  More importantly, the “we” that punctuates Obama’s every address seemed no longer to include Wright.

So, along came a poisonous madness that could destroy them both.  Wright’s interview on Bill Moyer’s made sense and demonstrated the importance of his perspectives in a campaign that—even at this length—made little room for them.  The NAACP speech he gave in Detroit might be excused for its audience except that so much of the on-camera silliness in mocking past presidents and doing a hokey pokey around racial differences in music undermined Wright’s own defense of himself against his critics.  Yet Wright’s performance at the National Press Club seemed like the affliction of an evil (or lunatic) spirit.  There he recklessly injected himself into the news cycle at a time when the GOP in North Carolina had threatened to do it for him (and has).  There he tossed off decorum and bullied a young moderator.  His idea of equating U.S. foreign policy with terrorism, or of re-asserting the theory of government responsibility for AIDS is so off the charts, so patently off-putting that it can only be designed to undo the hope for the first black president in history.  Whom he repeatedly disparaged as a “politician.”

Why?  Because we have a little game among black folks called “the dozens,” Wright glibly explained.  Of course, becoming president is not a game, nor do black men in their 60s play the dozens like their grandchildren do.  And surely the pastor of a church with a prison ministry understands how many black men lose their lives—to violence or incarceration—for not letting a perceived slight go.

The denouement is not yet clear, but this we know so far.  In the story of the spiritual godfather and the political star, the two could not have known each other well.  They did not grow apart; the relationship was never close enough for them to be as interchangeable as many have assumed.  The separation always had potential, and now it must be final, if not violent.  The moral has more to do with choosing friends than seeking fathers.

We have seen this before, only days and weeks ago.  The suicide bombing of Obama’s candidacy by an older, jealous Wright resembles the Democratic party amid the race-baiting innuendo and resentful attacks initiated by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.  In each instance, hard-won careers will be irreparably damaged and the relationship between political leaders and core constituencies will be compromised for personal gain.  Both Wright and Clinton should be expected to defend and promote their views vigorously.  It is temperament and tactics, however, that define excesses and outcomes.

So what must Obama do?  Mostly he must do what he has done—denounce his former pastor unequivocally—then return to the root of a political journey that began just before he met Wright.

Obama can not be a great political leader until he divides “I” from “we” again and becomes the “me” we’ve been waiting for.  He is not the transformative figure we have assumed until he transcends this period of crisis.  At some point, lyrically grand speeches and moral high grounds give way to the nervous exigencies of people’s declining economic prospects.  As a former community organizer, Barack Obama understands this better than most.  He connected with Rev. Wright in the first place while trying to fortify the resources available to politically and economically marginalized people.  What joined them was also a belief that the common interests of many working-class people have been deliberately obscured.  It’s time to make that case with a forcefulness lacking thus far.  Yes, empowerment is mostly about the “we” of community members working together for themselves, but the organizer who decides to become president knows that those same people are desperate for somebody to fight for them, to stand with his humanity on the line and raise his voice above all others to demand specific changes on their behalf.

The white, blue-collar voters in Indiana want the same energetic leadership that their counterparts in Pennsylvania wanted—or, for that matter, the many who voted for Obama in Wisconsin, Illinois and other predominantly white states he won.  There is no real difference in the deficiencies they face, only tired myths.  Fortunately, mythology is still in the making and hope has no color.

David Dante Troutt’s most recent books are “The Importance of Being Dangerous” and “After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina.”  He is a professor of law at Rutgers University (Newark).

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