I don’t have much to add to the Barack Obama-Rev. Wright kerfuffle.  It’s in part due to my own growing exhaustion with the day-to-day horse race, but it’s also due to my own concerns over Wright from early on in the campaign.  The more I learned about the Trinity United Church, the more I wished the sensational emails about Obama’s alleged Muslim background were true.  That’s how creepy I think Trinity is.  Electorally speaking, it’s better that this comes out now rather than later.  Obama was due a vetting over this, and you would rather it be when white, middle-class Pennsylvania is up for grabs in the primary than when it’s up for grabs in the general.

But as E.J. Dionne points out today, Wright isn’t the first black preacher to make the white, middle-class in this country uncomfortable.  And I think that’s what this is really all about.  While many of the things said by Wright are in fact reprehensible and indefensible, the broader problem here is that Wright is striking the scabs of old wounds that have long divided Americans.  Dr. King had the kind of color-blind hope in the universality of the Constitution that only someone who was spared from the so-called culture wars could hold.  Dr. King never saw the total application of the southern strategy.  Dr. King never witnessed the politicization of crime and drug use in the African-American community as a means to mobilize frightened white voters.  He never saw the Willie Horton ad, nor did he see Jesse Helms’ “hands” ad.  He didn’t live to see a drug war which has been waged on people of color, cultivating a society where more black men go to prison than college.  He never saw successive Republican candidates chip away at the underlying fears of a white community in flight, as they fled the cities and burned their Democratic voter cards for the security and optimism of Ronald Reagan.  Martin Luther King, Jr. saw terrible things done to his fellow African-Americans, but what he didn’t get to see–in full–was the way in which they would be used as a political wedge issue to turn white men out to the polls (a strategy that once got you elected governor of Alabama, but later became nationally viable for the Republican Party).

Had Dr. King witnessed these things, he too may have demonstrated the kind of “entitlement” politics we often see levied against the likes of Jesse Jackson, and yes, Rev. Wright. Wright has the advantage of historical hindsight, something Dr. King was denied. Perhaps he, too, would be accused of “black nationalism” today. We’ll obviously never know. But we do know what this is about, and it’s not necessarily black racism or white racism. It has more to do with Middle-Class exceptionalism, and it’s an appeal to the worst form of white populism that America has to offer. While it has been fruitful for a select few in an electoral sense, it has conversely been harmful for the country as a whole. The portrayal of African-Americans as bitter, angry, frustrated, or worse yet, “unpatriotic,” has commonly been utilized by a certain segment of the population as a way to make blacks appear as ungrateful, or “not quite ready” for higher office. This is the nasty underbelly to the Wright fiasco. While John McCain has also aligned himself with questionable men of faith, he has done so in a seemingly acceptable fashion. For all of the terrible things said by Rev. Hagee, never once has he talked like an oppressed minority. Never once has he implied that “the system” has held back a minority in this country. Instead, Hagee speaks of the reverse. His sermons and tirades against Catholics and other religious minorities comes from the perspective of the accused and “silent” majority, the party that’s under assault while being in the moral right. His words don’t assume greater guilt, thus making him a marginal figure.

But not Rev. Wright. The kinds of things he says, why, they imply a level of systemic guilt. They imply that white people–all white people–benefit from a system that has simultaneously worked to keep African-Americans down. His words speak of complicity, guilt and bitterness. All of these are ideas that the modern GOP worked long and hard to use for political ends. By exonerating white America of their guilt, their complicity and their history, the Republican Party helped to forge an electoral coalition built on white, middle-class exceptionalism. In an ironic twist of Dr. King’s words, they asked to be judged by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin. They were done with the guilt, done with the history and done with the bitterness. Society never gave them anything, so why must they give anything to Black America?

The 1980’s closed the parenthesis on racial oppression, but only in the minds of a few. For others, while time healed some wounds, others were left to become infected. This is the contrast in the debate over Rev. Wright, and his more sensational remarks are only a part of it. It’s his less sensational comments–specifically about the very real wrongs of the past–that truly sting the most.                  

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