Civil Rights Roundup: 10/13/08

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news

The Virginia GOP chair compared Obama to Osama, and then refused to back down after critique from the McCain campaign ("While Barack Obama is associated with domestic terrorist William Ayers, the McCain campaign disagrees with the comparison that Jeff Frederick made."). It's a civil rights issue because I'm coming around on my earlier views as to whether the Obama-as-terrorist charges are racially tinged or not.

See also this NYT story.

On the other hand, McCain's resistence to bringing up Rev. Jeremiah Wright is heartening, if frustrating to many of his supporters (including, unsurprisingly, Gov. Palin).

Frederick County, Maryland, is weighing the consequences of its recent immigration crackdown. According to the article, since an agreement was reached with ICE, "9 percent of all people arrested and taken to the county detention center have proven to be illegal immigrants," a number the local sheriff considers a success.

The Austin American-Statesman takes a look at how Latinos are responding to immigration and other issues.

A Fresno Catholic priest came out as gay and gave a sermon urging his parishioners to reject Proposition 8. He was immediately stripped of his post by the local bishop.

In the face of surging US prison populations, policymakers are looking at alternatives to incarceration for non-violent offenders.

The Michigan Department of Civil Rights is trying to assuage a wave of voter fears that they will be targeted by suppression and disenfranchise efforts. One of the "myths" they're trying to dispel is that you can't vote if your home was foreclosed. Well, glad to hear it, but if so it won't be for a lack of trying.

Finally, the dean of the University of Nebraska law school is defending affirmative action, and questioned the results of a Center for Equal Opportunity (gag) study which purported to show the school "discriminated" against White applicants. The law school has six African-Americans in its entering class of 146 this year. CEO chief Roger Clegg (remember him?), who has been leading the charge against race-conscious admissions across the country, flatly said he'd rather the school turn "lily white" than preserve affirmative action.

Feeling It

In the comments to this Southern Appeal post, we had yet another discussion about the meaning of Jeremiah Wright's "chickens coming home to roost" sermon, and whether it was morally condemnable. I argued that Wright was making a positive, not normative, claim: We supported terrorism in, among other places, Latin America; now we're experiencing it here at home. And it turns out, being victimized by terrorism really sucks. There is no explicit normative component to this argument, which makes it difficult to condemn. Had Wright taken the normative step of saying: "because we engaged in terrorism abroad, we deserved to experience it here at home", that would be unjust. But he didn't say that. Indeed, I argued, if anything the implied normative dimension of his statement was that -- having experienced terrorism for ourselves -- hopefully it would expand our empathy so that we do not ever again support such terrorist atrocities enacted upon other human beings.

Today, The Washington Post reports on a study that demonstrates that people become desensitized to injustices perpetuated by their group upon others when they are reminded of injustices they themselves experienced. Americans, for example, are far less concerned about innocent Iraqi suffering brought on by the Iraq war when primed by 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, than we are if primed by the Nazis invading Poland. Jews are less likely to express sympathy for Palestinian suffering when primed by the Holocaust than when primed by the Cambodian genocide.

The study's authors concluded that people who experience injustice and victimization are prone to "lash out" in an effort to make sure they do not experience it again. But this tendency does not necessarily restrict itself at the actual perpetrators of the crime -- creating new classes of victims and new circles of pain and retribution.

In this light, the role of ministers, rabbis, pastors, imams, and other spiritual leaders, in the role as moral guides, have a particular obligation to counter this instinct. The authors also say that the instinct for revenge can be, with effort, turned -- from "never let this happen to me again" to "never let me be the type person who causes this to happen again". That is the message that mass atrocity should create in is. The easiest thing to do, when one is victimized, is to promote more pain. The hard thing, but the right thing, is to try and build a world where that pain no longer is created.

Judgement Day

I may be the only political observer out there who feels more comfortable talking about Black political thought and theology than "mainstream" White conservative evangelical Christianity. So while I feel pretty good giving context to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, I don't have the requisite background to know if there's any reason not to take Sarah Palin's pastor at face-value. Because while Rev. Wright certainly had some guests who weren't as Jew-philic as I would have liked, I don't think any of his mates thought that Jewish deaths represented the just judgment of God. (And with Rev. Hagee still lurking in the background of my memory, isn't this the second time we've had to deal with this issue?). She's already been dealing with the allegation that she was a Pat Buchanan supporter (David Bernstein has mostly convinced me that she was not, but at the same time I think Harry's Place is not being entirely off-base when it wonders if Palin would have sported a David Duke button had he dropped by town. After all, most Jews think, at best, the difference between the two is one of degree, not kind.). The info about her pastor will only inflame the situation (to be fair, he seems across-the-board crazy, rather than focusing solely on Jews).

Now, here's the problem: Palin's new emergence on the political scene means that she's a totally unknown quantity to Jews. With Barack Obama, he did in fact have a long pedigree dealing with Jews and Whites -- we had data points on him personally which demonstrated he wasn't going to launch on an anti-White and anti-Semitic crusade once in office. And he has also done an excellent outreach job to us as a community, something I am very grateful of. Meanwhile, Palin is being tied to possibly the most reviled organization in the Jewish community that isn't actively launching suicide attacks on us -- Jews for Jesus. It's possible she does not subscribe to their creed, and maybe we should give her the benefit of the doubt. But unlike Barack Obama, she just hasn't spent much time courting Jews on a national stage. I don't think we're unreasonable to ask for some heart-to-hearts -- particularly given that she comes from a community (evangelical Christianity) that has not always been the most respectful or friendly to Jews in the past (being apocalyptically pro-Israel doesn't get you as far as one might think).

My presumption on Palin is that her views on Jews are standard evangelical fare -- outward positivity (enemy of my enemy -- Islam -- is my friend) and some personal respect, mixed with a desire for our social extermination (via conversion) and very little grasp or concern with the issues that actually are important to Jews (or why, or how, they're important to us). Fortunately, this means my bar is not being set high -- it would not take much for her to dispel those sentiments. At which point, I would happily oppose her on pure political grounds. I'm not going to pretend that by assuaging the concerns of the Jewish community she's going to get my vote. She won't. But I greatly prefer opposing someone because I disagree with their policy stances than because I think they're actively or covertly hostile to me as a person.

How I Read Rev. Wright

After I wrote my well-received post on Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Black Conservatism, my former history professor contacted me and asked if I would like to lead a seminar on it for his African-American history class this term. I happily agreed. But when I met with him a few days ago, he said that we might have to change the topic. "Wright is old news," he said.

But it seems he spoke a bit too soon. While Obama's resignation from the Trinity Church was not precipitated by Wright but by comments from Rev. Michael Pfleger (who is not completely unknown to me but with whom I am far less familiar with), it certainly has brought back into the limelight the Black Liberation Theology that Trinity preaches.

The knowledge of politically engaged people is, as a rule, wide but not deep, save for a few issues. I include myself in this. Even though I consider myself relatively engaged, my knowledge of most issues is basically what a reasonably intelligent person would glean from reading The Washington Post or The New Republic. That's enough for me to feel reasonably okay talking about Iraq, or foreign policy, or economics, but it's more accurate to say I possess information rather than expertise. It is rare that I would feel confident second-guessing the "factual" coverage on these issues, for example.

By contrast, I do consider myself to have a pretty deep knowledge of Black Political Thought -- to the degree where objectively I simply have a stronger background than most of the mainstream media coverage of it. I've read from most major American Black political thinkers, left and right: Fredrick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton, James Cone, Derrick Bell, and Clarence Thomas (the only major missing name is Thomas Sowell). I'm sure economists want to gouge their eyes out when they see how the mainstream media covers budget questions, because I'm feeling the same way about how Black Political thinking is being utterly butchered throughout this whole campaign season. Unlike most people, I've actually read more of Jeremiah Wright than you'd get on YouTube or CNN clips. And having both that direct exposure to his works, as well as the background in Black Political Thought (and Liberation Theology specifically) to put it in context, makes all the difference in the world. It bothers me that people who have no relevant background in the field, have done no reading of the thinkers in question (not even Wright himself -- let alone Cone or Carmichael!), feel so confident in making assertions on the subject. Do people do this in economics? I ask this seriously -- I would not, I think, venture such bold opinions on an economics question, because I know I am no economist. Yet it seems when the subject is Whites talking about Black Political thinking, this restraint does not apply. And that is worrisome -- it implies that Whites assume they automatically (by virtue of being White?) possess all the relevant knowledge by which to cast judgment.

A while back, I received in the mail two collections of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons: What Makes You So Strong (1993) and Good News: Sermons of Hope for Today's Families (1995). I was supposed to review them, but never got around to it -- so consider this my review. Over the past several months I've been perusing them, and it has created a strange disjuncture between the portrayal of Rev. Wright and his Trinity Church, and the actual words he's spoken and commitments he's made as a pastor.

I obtained the books as part of a project I am working on regarding Black Political Thought, and I opened them expecting Wright to be a pulpit-version of the controversial founder of Black Liberation Theology, James Cone. But quickly, I discovered that this was not the case. Though he has a doctorate, Wright is not an academic theologian. He is a minister, and as such his concerns are more localized. The vast majority of his sermons focus on personal and collective uplift. It is, in this sense, quite (Booker T.) Washington-esque -- strikingly so, when read (as I did) side-by-side with Washington's writings. He wants Black parents to demand their children succeed in school. He urges Black families to stay together -- and that Black men show commitment to their spouses and children. He works against the scourge of drug addiction and gang violence. Whatever relationship that has or does not have to White racism is not his primary concern.

Does Wright discuss White racism? Absolutely, though not at the once-every-three-words clip that Fox News implies. But the context is not "hate Whitey." It's really more, to be crass, "screw Whitey." As in: White folks aren't going to solve your problems (why on earth would you be foolish enough to trust them to? Have you noticed a kind of pattern in that regard for 250 years of American history?). You have to solve your problems (Clarence Thomas has cited this same logic as his reason for embracing a libertarian-conservatism, saying "It reminded me of the mantra of the Black Muslims I had met in college: Do for self, brother."). And that's the bigger theme: personal responsibility and racial uplift. Wright tells parents they have the "right to demand excellence" as well as obedience from their children. He urges that interdenominational disputes in the Chicago religious community be cast aside because

You need every last one of those preachers. We need one another. We have enough crack cocaine in our community and enough ignorance in our community to be working from now until Jesus comes. Those aren’t your competitors. Those are your companions.

This, incidentally, is why Trinity has forged relationships with Louis Farrakhan, who for all his faults (and they are a legion) has done tremendous work in terms of criminal rehabilitation and drug treatment -- the same reasons why conservatives such as Robert Novak, Dan Quayle, and Jack Kemp urged Republicans to ally with Farrakhan in the mid-90s.

Sometimes, "screw Whitey" takes the form of turning the other cheek to White insults. Whites say Blacks don't have a history independent of White America? But Blacks do have such a history -- proud and glorious. Whites call their speech differences "dialects" but Black linguistics "bad English." Bogus. Wright believes that racial pride is a precondition to racial uplift -- you have to love yourself in order to make something of yourself. It is a profoundly conservative observation, indeed, precisely the mentality White Conservatives have been urging Blacks to adopt for years. It is a mentality that Whites hold tensely -- we want them to not depend on us, but still trust us and love us. But there is not much ground we have to demand the latter two qualities. White Conservatives want Blacks to be only partially independent because they see it only with regard to the broader White political project of small government; it requires no severance with broader American society or norms. Blacks, if they so choose, will declare independence because that's what they feel they need to do with survive -- and that remains just as true with regards to American society as it does American government. This is not hateful. There is nothing hateful about surviving.

So no, reading Wright's sermons, I never encountered anything that was hateful to Whites. I found a lot that urged Blacks to ignore Whites, and admonishments (backed up by considerable history) not to depend on Whites, but nothing that was incitement to violence or bigotry (unless it is bigotry on the part of Blacks to not put their stock in White magnanimity). Now, one could argue that the collections I read are biased -- that they would not contain Wright's most inflammatory material. There's a little to that (the "God damn America" sermon, for example, was not there -- I believe it was delivered after the books were published), but ultimately I find that prospect doubtful for at least four reasons. First, the books were published in the early- to mid-90s, well before anyone could have predicted that Wright would have the attention of the entire media. Second, the books do contain plenty of condemnations of White racism, it just isn't the focus. Third, Wright's claim to fame as a public figure when he was writing these (i.e., before he became "Barack Obama's pastor") was as a Black Liberation Theologian -- he had no incentive to downplay his radicalism in his published works. And finally, if there is one thing we know about Rev. Wright, it's that he does not exactly view discretion to be the better part of valor. Outspokenness is a pretty well-established character trait of his -- there's no reason to believe he'd pull his punches in his collected sermons.

The elephant in the room, of course, is the "God damn America" Jeremiad. This is, in many ways, an apex of Wright's preaching -- it is not an outlier, but, like the sermon delivered by Rev. Pfleger, nor is it simply the repetition of the dominant themes of Trinity's sermon (Of course, I'm 100%, absolutely positive that Michael van der Galien made that statement after a good faith analysis of a solid, representative cross-sample of the last 20 years of Trinity's sermons. It would be horribly irresponsible to say such things without having even looked at the evidence.).

Jeremiads are interesting -- they have a long and distinguished pedigree in the Christian tradition, and one defining feature of that pedigree is that the targets of the sermon are never keen on being so identified. Conservative pastors launch Jeremiads all the time, condemning America for being too tolerant of homosexuals and abortion. Wright's Jeremiad condemns America for being too tolerant of racism, sexism, and homophobia (Wright, incidentally, has been a key leader in trying to rid the Black Church of its homophobia -- a serious problem for which he deserves great accolades for tackling). For my part, I do not know how effective Jeremiads are (don't they usually get ignored until God Herself starts raining down the hellfire?). But I certainly do not object to the point that America needs to be awakened as to the reality of racial injustice here. And I do not believe America possesses some inherent quality making as immune to damnation. We, as everyone else, have to earn our blessings.

Recall what I said earlier -- about how Wright is urging his flock not to hate Whites but to ignore them. That is the linchpin of this sermon as well. It is crushing to be told you have to love your abuser -- physically, emotionally, spiritually. America has abused Blacks (physically, emotionally, and spiritually). Why should they praise America? "What, to the Negro, is the Fourth of July?" (as Fredrick Douglass so memorably put it). Why should they count on America to look out for them? It hasn't, and Wright believes, it won't. God damn America represents spiritual and psychic release from an abusive relationship. Freed from the shackles of having to love their abuser, Blacks can love themselves and lift themselves.

One might gather from all of this that I agree with Rev. Wright on every point, or at least every point I've discussed hitherto. I do not, although my position is more complicated than that makes it out to be. I've noted that, as a White person, I cannot ethically place anti-racism practice as "screw Whites". I have an obligation as a White person to break down the belief that engagement with Whites is a waste of time. But the bridge must be over my back -- I have precisely zero credibility with which to demand such engagement. So in that sense, I would hope that Rev. Wright would come to see Whites as a partner in the project of uplift, but I cannot "disagree" with him if he does not see us so.

Having made that concession, I can still indict certain strategies for Black uplift as unwise or even potentially immoral (as I've done, for example, with regards to his words on AIDS). But the basic acknowledgment of autonomy and self-determination: that Blacks have the prima facia right to determine how they want to pursue their project of liberation, has to come first. And part of allowing Blacks autonomy in this project means allowing them to say "screw Whites -- we're doing this alone."

Obama Resigns from Trinity

Interesting news. Interesting timing, as well -- what on almost any other day would be a bombshell may manage to get drowned out by the resolution of the Florida/Michigan delegate controversy (it tickles me that what is essentially an obscure committee vote on a technical question of DNC rules might dominate a news cycle over something that -- for better or worse -- has served as the juiciest bit of media gossip this campaign season about Obama).

I'll be keeping an eye out for what Obama's reasons are, if he gives them publicly, and what the media commentary is like.

Disassociation

In the wake of my mildly famous post on Black Conservatism, one of my professors from earlier this year (History of the Civil Rights Movement) invited me to give a presentation before his African-American History class this term. I was setting up a meeting with him to discuss plans for the class, and mentioned off hand that I would be attending the University of Chicago Law School next year. He looked at me and smiled, and noted that I'd be sharing institutional affiliation with Rev. Jeremiah Wright (who attended Chicago's Divinity School). I laughed and said, "guess I can never run for President then." (among other reasons).

Apropos of that, David Bernstein has a post up seeking stories of Obama's time as a constitutional law lecturer at the University of Chicago. "Waldensian" repsonds:

I took one of his classes, and I'm a bad person. Sadly, Obama still hasn't gone far enough in renouncing me and my views.

Sadly, a roughly accurate portrayal of how I fear this whole election cycle will progress.

From Jeremiah to Jonah

Two of my Carleton professors forward me this article by Princeton Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell, on Rev. Wright's self-identification with the prophetic tradition. Harrs-Lacewell argues that the Obama campaign has shifted Wright from being Jeremiah ("among the truth tellers who regularly warn the government that divine destruction is imminent if the nation continued to oppress the powerless.") to Jonah (fleeing from his obligation to preach to those he does not want to deal with -- i.e., mainstream Whites).

I believe Jeremiah Wright likes preaching to his own people, black people, embraced by the relative comfort of shared knowledge and practice within the African American church. I do not think he wanted to talk to white America or to try to bridge the painful, difficult, often personally brutalizing, racial divide. I believe that he has great and healing things to say to our nation, but that when called to do so he has resisted because he is angry about the evils of racism, imperialism, patriarchy and partisanship.

It's a good piece -- and there are few more insightful commenters on question of race in America than Professor Harris-Lacewell. Well worth your time.

That Which We Deny

Feddie at Southern Appeal wrote a small post regarding some of the more controversial words said by Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Wright claimed his words were being "twisted". Feddie asks how one can twist claiming that the US government is spreading AIDS (which is, of course, false), or that the "chickens came home to roost" on 9/11? In the comments, I noted that this last statement was, in fact, being twisted insofar as it was being taken as a claim of American moral responsibility or causality for 9/11. What Wright actually was claiming was that the US, too, had supported state-sponsored terrorism in (inter alia) Latin America, and now we were just experiencing what we had already done to others throughout history. Several commenters ("Petrigu's Ghost", "BillyHW"), though, denied that the US, had in fact, supported terrorism and death squads in Latin America. Now, American complicity in the creation, training, and activities of the death squads is not really a contested fact. Denying it is just as false as Wright's claim that the government is spreading AIDS. Yet while Wright is considered to be a monster, there are no consequences to those who deny American complicity in terrorist activity (indeed, if anything, the public backlash would probably target the truth-speakers). How is this justifiable? There are, I suppose, ways one could label Wright's falsehood worse than Petrigu's (though in a way, that's a side issue because Wright isn't just being treated comparatively worse -- Petrigu and his ilk will undoubtedly get off scot-free). While denying America's role in the death squads might anger the victims of the atrocities, the harms in question are largely in the past. By contrast, Wright's fiction does real damage right now in terms of hindering public efforts to combat the AIDS crisis. But in actuality, I think there are real and serious contemporary dangers that manifest themselves when we allow the denial of historical atrocities to proceed. The denial that Petrigu and others indulge in -- denial of responsibility for mass atrocities -- does not just insult the memories of the victims and survivors. It actively paves the way for more similar atrocities to occur. And it is the very strength of the denial instinct that creates the obligation to overcome it. We cannot stand idly by while our cohorts -- by denying the reality of past atrocities -- lay the groundwork for present ones. I. The Harms of Denial When accused of grave moral wrongdoing, the first response of everyone is to deny. We deny knowledge, we deny responsibility, we deny the event occurred, we deny the victims even existed (anyone who's seen the Sudanese government's response to attacks over Darfur has seen this in all its horrifying glory). We deny, deny, deny. Being Jewish means observing this phenomena first-hand: not just in Holocaust deniers, but in those who deny the existence of contemporary anti-Semitism, who deny the relevance of anti-Jewish hatred international treatment of Israel, who deny the way that contemporary Christianity silences Jewish voices under the guise of the "Judeo-Christian" worldview. When one lives with oppression that is so real and tangible, and yet still sees the world deny it, one becomes rapidly attuned to just how much denial the world is capable of. There is a plethora of literature that explicates how important it is to the victims of mass atrocity that the perpetrators accept their responsibility and that the world recognizes the existence and magnitude of the violation. Victims of mass atrocity feel like the world has abandoned them to the killing fields and the rape rooms. When their story is not heard, their experience not verified, it is as if the horrors were being relived. If that was the only reason to oppose the instinct of denial, it would be enough. But denial extends beyond that, and plays a crucial role in the reiteration of mass atrocity in other contexts around the world. In my post on the resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide, I noted that such resolutions are not just about historical accuracy, or even comforting the victims and their descendants. It is a fact of genocidal activity (and other moral atrocities) that the perpetrators wish to mask their crimes. Even as they fire the bullet they have already begun burying the bodies. As Charles Briggs wrote, "The architects of genocide are often as concerned with suppressing discourse about the event as with the killing itself." Those with genocidal ambitions carefully observe the way similar atrocities are treated in the world community when determining whether to enact similar policies in their own nation. Samantha Power used the example of Serbia to illustrate the devastating consequences that silence can create:

Slobodan Milosevic saw that he got away with the brutal suppression of independence movements in Slovenia and Croatia and he reasoned he would pay no price for doing the same in Bosnia and Kosovo. Because so many individual perpetrators were killing for the first time and deciding daily how far they would go, the United States and its European allies missed critical opportunities to try to deter them. When they ignored genocide around the world, the Western powers were not intending to 'green light' the perpetrators. But because the killers told themselves they were doing the world a favor by 'cleansing' the 'undesirables,' some surely interpreted silence as consent or even support.

One could also easily use the example of the Holocaust. Hitler famously remarked, "who remembers the Armenians" when deciding to carry out the Final Solution. The lack of any accountability -- even if it is only being remembered as an evil-doer -- is a crucial link in the chain that allows mass atrocity to occur. Consequently, denial about America's role in supporting Central American death squads helps recreate the a pro-murder narrative that encourages other states and organizations who might be tempted to support terror. Albeit indirectly, there is a real and salient link between the denial of America's role in the death squads, and the ongoing killing in Darfur. The latter is nourished and sustained by the former -- specifically, the former's promise that the latter will be tolerated, then ultimately forgotten. But denial's real harms might occur domestically. In my last post, I noted that people have trouble reasoning generally beyond specific problems and contexts they've experienced. When created rules or normative guidelines, we necessarily can only gear them towards problems we can perceive. This simple point becomes chilling when linked up with the logic of atrocity-denial. Insofar as Americans deny their nation's complicity in acts of terroristic violence, we remove the activities from the realm of "problems" we have to be wary of. In order to enact barriers (legal, institutional, psychic, what have you) against the perpetuation of mass atrocity, first we have to recognize in ourselves the potential for engaging in these acts. But denial reifies the opposite -- it allows us to maintain the fiction that such activities are not within the realm of possibility for the United States, and hence blocks the creation and propagation of norms that might guard against it. So long as Americans still can tell themselves "we don't engage in torture" (i.e., engage in denial about what happens in Black Sites and what waterboarding is), we have no need to promulgate strong rules against it (or at the very least, continue conceptualizing it -- and thus gear the rules against it towards -- the behavior of individual troublemakers, rather than official choices of top-level decision makers). So long as we deny that we have supported terrorism, we can refrain from doing anything to insure we don't engage in terrorist activity, because it's not "our problem." The cycle of deny-perpetuate-deny continues unabated because both elements feed into each other: denial of our history of wrongdoing makes it easier to perpetuate crimes, the perpetuation of the crime creates an event that need to be denied. II. Overcoming Denial In the face of all this denial, how do we even learn about mass atrocities at all? Well, there are a couple of ways. The first is that the injustice is so large that it simply cannot be contained. The rupture is too deep, the wounds too wide-spread. I will concede this may happen some of the time, but I do not think often, and only in the most extreme cases. Jack Balkin has written of the paradox in protecting minorities: the most powerless need the most protection, but by virtue of their powerlessness they are unlikely to have enough political weight to be able to demand accountability from elites. The second way mass atrocities get exposed is when it is in the interest of a powerful group to expose it. It is difficult for the weak to deny, not because the weak are more likely to be saints, but because they're much easier to catch. The only reason the Holocaust became anything beyond provincial was because Hitler invaded Poland, thus making it everybody's problem, not just the Jews. Exposing Wright's falsehood was in the interest of elite White power-brokers (obviously more powerful than Wright), so it got exposed. But there is no sufficiently powerful group with an interest in exposing America's support of Central American terrorism. So it stays under wraps. The third way, related to the second, is that the victims managed to muster enough strength to force the world (and their oppressors) to account for their crimes. This was the story of the American Civil Rights movement. For most of America's apartheid regime, Whites did, in fact, deny deny deny that their actions were in any way, shape or form incompatible with liberal norms of liberty and equality. The mass movements of the Civil Rights era gave Blacks enough political and social muscle to force away the veil of deniability and expose the ugly reality within. All three methodologies, though, offer only a faint hope. The first is by and large a crap-shoot, and only applies to a small percentage of cases. The second likewise only applies to those cases where the interests of a victim class intersect with that of an empowered class -- not necessarily a common occurrence. It also provides no hope to those whose oppression is (or was) being carried out by those very elites. The third unreasonably relies on those being crushed to muster enough power to turn the tables on their oppressors, which puts the cart before the horse -- gaining power can't be a prerequisite to remedying your disempowerment. What's needed is to break the cycle at the start: The instinct to deny. We must as a people have the individual and collective courage to admit -- selflessly and on our own initiative -- our own wrongs and aggressively root out others. That is the only ultimate guarantee that they will not be replicated. And it means that those who do engage in denying American atrocities -- such as Feddie's commenters -- are far more dangerous, far worse "fanatics", than anything Jeremiah Wright could be. III. Repositioning the Bayonet The tag-line of Southern Appeal is "giving the bayonet to the dictatorship of relativism." I hesitate to use this as my metaphor, since I have no idea what Feddie's position is on America's terrorist activity in Central America. Perhaps (hopefully) he finds it appalling -- the sort of unforgivable evil that must never be washed over or forgotten -- and I don't want to impute his commenters failure of morality onto him. But I'll use the metaphor because I think it's very illustrative of the final barrier to overcoming denial. Now, I suspect my views on "relativism" are different than Feddie's. But taking the anti-relativism position seriously, it has to be applied universally. That is, the bayonet has to point inward as well as outward. Yet, one rarely sees self-inflicted wounds from the relativism-seeking bayonet. It is very good at attacking others -- people we don't care about or wish to condemn. It is far less adept at piercing our own skin -- our own layer of justification and obfuscation we use to legitimize our own evil acts. So it can attack Burma but not America, German bystanders in the Reich but not White bystanders in the South, Hu Jintao for supporting the Janjaweed but not Ronald Reagan for supporting the death squads. This is why it is so often seen as ethnocentric: the relativism-seeking bayonet seems to stab everyone but its wielder. Of course, nobody likes being stabbed (hence our denial reflex), and so it is difficult for us to turn the bayonet inward. The most fervent proponents of the bayonet are the one's who seem to blanch palest (or sputter reddest) at the prospect of it targeting ourselves. Imagine of Barack Obama gave a speech demanding that the U.S. acknowledge and repent for its role in the death squads? His campaign (to say the least) would be over. Consequently, it is incumbent on the Feddies of the world to be the most aggressive in insuring that America's past and present are not rewritten, because it seems to be his fellow travelers who enable the deny-perpetuate-deny cycle to continue. If this bayonet is to have any claim at universalizability (if it isn't just relativism in shiny garb), giving ourselves a free pass is not a legitimate move. It is a false move, it is a supremely dangerous move, and ultimately it is a killing move. There must be a commitment. We cannot indulge in the luxury of denial. The risks are too great, the costs are too high. Our own mental comfort is not sufficient to rewrite history. If we are to condemn Rev. Wright (as I do) for misleading his flock about AIDS in America, then we must -- with equal fervor and equal resolve -- expel from our fellows those who would deny America's history of terrorism, of violence, and of barbarism. The bayonet must be allowed to point inward.

Pure Blood

An outlet called Israel Insider is breathlessly telling us that *gasp* Obama's preacher, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is an ex-Muslim! Indeed, they go a step further: "like Obama", Wright is an ex-Muslim, and they speculate that they are working in tandem to secure their political ambitions as Islamic spies:

For if both men were Muslims trying to realize their political ambitions, then Wright's Church provided a valuable shelter from prying questions about both men's religious and political loyalties. It would serve to whitewash their shared Muslim past, a secret both men have every reason to conceal, now more than ever.

Now, I've never understood why the Islamo-phobes in our community see "ex-Muslim" as a bad thing (for my part, I couldn't care less if you're ex-anything, so long as you're progressive -- which is why I can support the writings of ex-Muslim atheists like The Apostate, and the political campaigns of ex-Christian Muslim Keith Ellison). But now, I think we have a clue. Islam, it is implied, represents corruption of blood. Obama, by virtue of his father, and Wright, by virtue of his young flirtation with Islam, do not have Limpieza de sangre, and thus are suspect.

It's a sickening trope, all the more so coming from fellow Jews. Unfortunately, to a far larger extent than I'd like the Obama campaign is really bringing out some of the worst in my community (despite the strong and vocal support Obama gets from many Jews, which should not be washed over).

Pushing and Shoving

What Clinton adviser Lanny Davis says:

I have tried to get over my unease surrounding Barack Obama's response to the sermons and writings of his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. But the unanswered questions remain.

.... Now is the time to address these questions, not later.

Clearly Mr. Obama does not share the extremist views of Rev. Wright. He is a tolerant and honorable person. But that is not the issue. The questions remain: Why did he stay a member of the congregation? Why didn't he speak up earlier? And why did he reward Rev. Wright with a campaign position even after knowing of his comments?

What he means:

Our best chance for derailing Obama's nomination has started to fall out of the political spotlight. Quick, let's pretend there are still "questions" that remain "unanswered"!

What's really pathetic about this particular effort is what Davis says "triggered" this latest column. Davis claims that he was forced to write after he "read for the first time" these three excerpts from Wright's sermons:

- "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."
-- Sept. 16, 2001 (the first Sunday after 9/11)

- "The government . . . wants us to sing God Bless America. No, no, no. God damn America; that's in the bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human."
-- 2003

- "The United States of White America."
-- July 22, 2007

Does anybody in their right mind believe that Davis had never seen these excerpts? These are the claims that were at the center of the controversy. You cannot have heard of the connection between Rev. Wright and Obama without having heard about the "God damn America" speech. It strains credulity to the breaking point to believe that this is all really new data for Davis. And he adds nothing new to the conversation. The only motivation for this sort of article is to pretend that this story is still a story. Unfortunately for Clinton supporters, Obama has by all objective accounts done an excellent job defusing it. Trying to shove it back into the spotlight is a waste of everyone's time.

Marty on Wright

Martin E. Marty, a theology professor at the University of Chicago, has an article up defending Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's controversial pastor.

Around these parts, Marty is known because he's on the board of St. Olaf's college across town, at one point serving as interim President. But he's also one of the most prominent and prolific scholars of religion of our times, authoring over 5,000 articles and recipient of over 75 honorary doctorates.

Anyone who is serious about religion in America knows to take Marty seriously when he speaks. His article is a must read.

Post-Election Huckabee

I wanted to post this yesterday, but I want to reiterate how impressed I am by Mike Huckabee's defense of Rev. Wright:

And one other thing I think we've gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say "That's a terrible statement!"...I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack -- and I'm gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who's gonna say something like this, but I'm just tellin' you -- we've gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told "you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can't sit out there with everyone else. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus..."

And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

Back when Huckabee was running, I described him someone with "a lot of personal charm and charisma" but "a lot of positions that are -- bluntly -- crazy." And that's true. But the thing about crazy people is sometimes they're crazy in the best possible way. Huckabee has a lot of good stances on many issues (such as immigration). On the campaign trail, trying to get the GOP nod, he walked a lot of them back. But now that he's free from pursuing the nomination, he can go back to saying things like this -- things that you rarely hear institutionally powerful Republicans say, but things that have a lot more power coming from someone like Huckabee than even an orator as powerful as Obama.

Black Conservatism Revisited

First of all, I want to thank all of the folks who have helped touch off this conversation and have given me so many kind words, particularly Andrew Sullivan for the original link, Rod Dreher at Crunchy Con and the Dallas Morning News, Jim Buie, Robert George, Rafique Tucker (who gets special shout-out as a fellow Marylander), and all the other folks who have left comments or emailed me. I really think this is an important conversation to be had, and I'm particularly gratified that so many people have been so willing to accept with an open mind the existence of parallel Black political orientations which don't perfectly map on to what we normally think of as "liberal" and "conservative".

I wanted to take this opportunity to tie up a couple loose threads in my brief exposition of Black Conservative ideology, the most glaring of which was relying a bit too heavily on separatism as a unifying factor of Black Conservativism. To be sure, I think that it is a very important strand in Black Conservative thought, and one that exists left and right. But someone inquired how Clarence Thomas (who is quite tied in with an important "White" institution, after all) fits into this metric. And he doesn't -- at least, not quite. Justice Thomas is clearly not a separatist. But he does, I believe, subscribe to the more critical aspect of Black Conservatism -- a deep skepticism that Whites will abandon racism, particularly due to high-minded moral appeals. But unlike the separatists, Thomas' Black Conservatism simply urges Black people to accept that racism will be there and will always be there -- and win anyway. Elsewhere I called it the "hit me with your best shot" strain of Black Conservatism -- that which does not kill Black people makes them stronger, so rather than complain or fruitlessly war against the existence of racist people and racist institutions in American life, just grit your teeth, lower your shoulder, and win the game.

Now, this may make sense for Black people. The reason I say I respect Black Conservatism is that -- in a world where racism still is an important constricting force -- it's important to let Black people decide for themselves how they want to adapt to it. I don't think I have the right to ask Black folks to constantly be warriors for integration. But, I don't think White folks can take this same position. It's one thing for a Black person to say to his fellows, "look, Whites are always going to be racist, so you got to figure out a way to survive in that world rather than wasting your energy on a fruitless quest to end racism." It's quite another for a White guy to tell Blacks, "look, we're always going to be racist, so you have to figure out how deal with that and thrive anyway." Black conservatism is a very convenient philosophy for White people, because it essentially assumes the worst in us, absolving us of our duty to overcome racism. I think our response to Black Conservatives has to be one of respect, but also of a burning desire to prove them wrong -- to show them that, yes, we can and will extend the hand.

But anyway. Ultimately, then, the unifying force in Black Conservatism is not separatism (though many are, to varying degrees), the unifying force is the belief in the permanence of racism. Black Liberals seek ways to obliterate racism, Black Conservatives seek ways to thrive in spite of it.

So that's the main thing. The other quick point I wanted to expand on was where conservative Black Conservativism differs from conservatives who are Black (someone asked why I wouldn't characterize Ward Connerly as a Black Conservative). The short answer is that the latter simply doesn't believe that racism is a major factor in affecting the life chances of Black people anymore -- their problems lie on other axes. Needless to say, these can start to bleed into each other -- the line between saying racism exists but you should simply push past it through the will to succeed and saying that racism is not really that important is thin, but it is there. Blacks who are conservative don't necessarily believe that racism continues to be a big player in the affairs of Blacks, Black Conservatives think it's a permanent feature of the landscape, but that can't be an excuse for failing.

Black Conservatives in Large and Small Caps

About a year ago, I penned a post entitled "Taking Thomas Seriously", about the particularly political ideology held by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In it, I noted that both liberals and conservatives misunderstood Thomas' orientation because they tried to map him onto "standard" (White) political categories. Thomas is a conservative, yes, but specifically he is a Black Conservative, which is a very particular philosophical tradition that does not perfectly align with plain old vanilla White conservatives.

Not all Black conservatives are Black Conservatives (that is, there are conservative Black people, such as Ward Connerly, who I would not identify as part of the Black Conservative tradition), and, more importantly, not all Black Conservatives are conservative (in that, on our "traditional" left/right axis, some would be placed on the left). However, because most people, particularly most Whites, aren't familiar with Black Conservative ideology, it leads to significant misunderstanding about where its adherents are coming from when they do show up on the national stage. All this is preface to point out that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he who has nearly derailed Obama's campaign, is a Black Conservative. To be sure, he's not a conservative (needless to say, capitalization matters in this post). But he's not a "liberal" either -- his political alignment doesn't comfortably fit onto models premised on White ideological positioning. Black Conservatism, like Black Liberalism, is not wholly divorced from "standard" Conservatism and Liberalism -- but at best they intersect at odd angles.

Black Conservatism essentially operates off the premise that racism is an ingrained and potentially permanent part of White-dominated institutions. As a result, Black Conservatives essentially tell Blacks they can only rely on themselves to get ahead in America -- counting on White people to be moral or "do the right thing" is a waste of time. Politically, this means building tight-knit communities that emphasize the patronizing of identifiably Black institutions, with the end result being social independence from White America. In this, it mixes at least partial voluntary self-segregation with a significant aversion to external dependency, with Whites and White institutions being defined as outsiders who can't be trusted. Every dollar that flows out of the Black community and into the hands of White America is a dollar that is in the control of a group that, at best, has a unique set of interests that can't be counted on to converge with those of Black people. Contained within this school are thinkers as far-ranging as Derrick Bell, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Clarence Thomas, Huey P. Newton, and Malcolm X. Black groups and leaders who were/are not Black Conservatives include W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall, and yes, Barack Obama.

Black Conservatism holds obvious parallels with traditional paleo-conservatism (hence the name): the mistrust of outsiders, looking out for one's own people first (and concurrently, self-reliance over dependency), lack of faith in high-minded moralism and ideology. But since African-Americans are a minority people in the United States, some other qualities are grafted on which are less familiar to majoritarian conservatism: most notably, the nation is considered to be an outsider, making the ideology significantly less inclined towards patriotism than the average White conservative. The "anti-American" elements, normally associated as a far-left belief, actually are a closer relative to conservative xenophobia: the analogy would be White American Conservative: United Nations :: Black American Conservative : United States. Each represents a distant governmental body, run by outsiders, which represents a putative threat to group autonomy. The mistrust of authority, often characterized as a left-belief, becomes a right-ward belief once its conceptualized as mistrust of foreign authority -- within their own communities, Black Conservatives often create very rigid hierarchal models (particularly on gender issues). Ultimately, though, what Black Conservatives preach is independence: As Marcus Garvey, an key Black Conservative writer in the early 20th century put it, "No race is free until it has a strong nation of its own; its own system of government and its own order of society. Never give up this idea."

Virtually all the controversial statements said by Rev. Wright make the most sense as expositions on Black Conservative ideology. His disclaimer of the pursuit of "middle-class-ness" is a term of art; he's flaming Black people who are more concerned about looking good to White people than they are about insuring the health of their own community -- including those who haven't yet moved up the ladder. His extraordinarily grim predictions about the state of racism in America are textbook Black Conservative arguments, as are his efforts to break down the idea that America is a particularly moral government that can be trusted (rightly, when he notes that America too has engaged in state-sponsored terrorism in Latin America and supported it in South Africa; wrongly when he alleges that we infected Black folk with the AIDS virus).

I'm not saying I agree with all of his points -- I'm not a Black Conservative, and as I outlined in the Thomas post, I'm not sure that a White person can morally adopt the premises of Black Conservatism. But we can't understand what we're yelling about until we properly position it within its philosophical school. This is why I feel confident in asserting that Obama and Wright are not of a political kind -- they operate from totally different ends of the Black Conservative political spectrum. Obama is an integrationist, the very act of running for President means that he believes that there is a space for Blacks in our hitherto White-dominated government, and all of his speeches, policies, and writings have indicated he believes that there is hope for an America that is not separated and divided on racial lines. All of these positions would be derided as doe-eyed idealism by a true Black Conservatism. And if there is one thing Obama can't be accused of, it's of being too much of a pessimist.

UPDATE: Welcome, Andrew Sullivan readers! One thing I wanted to get at in this post, but didn't get to, was how Wright's remarks fit into a particular model of Black theology, which I also identify as fundamentally in line with Black Conservatism. Wright's Jeremiads differ not at all from classic White Evangelism, except in who they condemn.

Ultimately, as I told Andrew, the interplay between Black Conservatism and Liberalism is, I believe, representative of the Janus-face in the Black political psyche. All but the most hardened Black Conservatives would, I believe, admit that they would prefer a world in which racism had ended, where people of all backgrounds could live in trust and harmony. They just think of it as an idyllic fantasy; one that distracts Blacks from the every day need to survive and flourish in a world where the fantasy is not the reality. And Black Liberals, in their more despondent moments, wonder if the Conservatives are right -- if their long struggle is ultimately futile; if White people ever will truly accept Blacks as equals, brothers and sisters. Wright is more than Obama's crazy uncle -- he's the other side of Obama's message of hope. Obama represents those Blacks who still have faith in the ability of America to ultimately overcome racial stratification. Wright represents those who can no longer believe.

UPDATE #2: I wrote a follow-up post to tie up some loose ends -- primarily how Clarance Thomas' vein of Black Conservatism fits into this model (basically, I leaned too heavily on separatism as the defining element of Black Conservatism, when its really skepticism of America overcoming racism on the basis of moral appeals).