White denial: Obama, race and America's selective memory by Hal Crowther:
A lot of Americans are like German tourists, who never harmed or perhaps even met a Jew, and are amazed to find a chilly reception in Tel Aviv. Though Jim Crow was considerably more recent than Adolf Hitler, lapel-pin patriots and insulated media hypocrites experience acute shock--or feign it--when they hear the heated rhetoric of black pride and empowerment from people like Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I'm still shaking my head over a Wright-bashing column by Time magazine columnist Joe Klein, invoking "liberal masochism" and "liberal self-laceration" to condescend to Bill Moyers, a journalist worth several hundred Joe Kleins. I hope Klein is always remembered for this grudging micro-concession, inserted parenthetically into his predictable denunciation of Wright: "He surely does have a historical beef." A "beef," Wright has? Play that over a couple of times, if you're not an African American. Would four centuries of enslavement, murder, rape, intimidation, segregation and humiliation entitle your people to a "beef"?
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Comments
The whole Wright thing struck me as a tempest in a teapot. I say this because my SO is black and I've seen the subtle racism he still has to endure.
It irritates the crap out of me. In a couple of cases I've actually pulled the people aside and told them I don't appreciate their discounting him because of the color of his skin. I now him as an intelligent and absolutely brilliant artist among many other things, none more or less important.
My father is one of those people. Almost every time I speak with him which I limit to 4 or 5 times a year he always has to launch into a racist screed. I can actually tell when it's coming and I whisper sotto voce into the phone "Here it comes".
I've told my father that part of the reason we don't have such a close relationship is because of his racism.
Posted by: Tony P | August 2, 2008 6:58 PM
Too many people are attached to a mythologized version of American history to acknowledge the largely violent, expansionist and racist character it has frequently displayed. That's really all this comes down to.
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | August 3, 2008 12:55 AM
Historical beef? Historical?
RIGHT NOW 1/8 black american males will spend part of their lives in prison.
No other country in the world imprisons a minority at that rate. It is 2.5 times the likelihood black male had of imprisonment in South Africa under apartheid.
America is a representative democracy. Approximately half of American's have used marijuana at least once, and that rate is almost identical between whites & blacks. America has very harsh laws against marijuana use. Black americans are almost 3 times as likely as whites to be arrested for marijuana, more likely than whites to be convicted, and receive longer sentences on average.
Do americans think anyone in the world doesn't know what is going on, what you are doing? The war on drugs and other "tough on crimes" initiatives don't explicitly discriminate against blacks like apartheid did, but every white american who votes for them knows what their real purpose is.
You (America) have at this very moment more than 1 in 22 of your black males in prison. South Africa's apartheid at it's height never came anywhere close to that.
Posted by: S.o.G. | August 3, 2008 7:43 AM
"South Africa's apartheid at it's height never came anywhere close to that"
Perhaps because the whites were a minority in apartheid South Africa. Let's not give apartheid any more credit than it deserves, ok?
Posted by: Paul Murray | August 3, 2008 8:58 PM
Years ago I heard a certain Reconstructionist rabbi say that he believed Jews were paranoid, always looking for an antisemite under the bed.
Someone listening said that after 2000 years of torture and humilation, and several years of being cooked in the oven and being gassed, Jews have a right to their paranoia.
But no one has been been lynching negroes lately or denying them a seat on the bus. Rev Wright is wrong.
Posted by: King Solomon | August 4, 2008 7:02 PM