Yesterday, Ezra Klein had this to say about the uproar over Jeremiah Wright:
If Jeremiah Wright were white, it would be a very different story, but a story just the same. The comments of Wright’s that have really driven the national conversation were not particularly race-focused. Rather, they were very, very far left — strong restatements of the traditional left wing critique of American imperialism, a dismissal of the idea that America is always and everywhere motivated by virtue, and explicit sympathy for the blowback hypothesis that suggests that though 9/11 was obviously unjust, it was also a predictable eventual consequence of our actions.
So here’s the thought experiment: If in 2004, it turned out that John Kerry’s minister of 20 years — a man who had been like a father to him, who had married Kerry and Theresa Heinz, and who figured heavily into Kerry’s autobiographical book — held the same opinions as Wright, how big of a deal would it be? My sense, as we’re seeing with the furor over Obama’s laughably casual relationship with Bill Ayers, is it would still be a firestorm. Americans recoil from the Chomskyite critique, and any Democratic candidate whose personal relationships implied a sympathy for that worldview would have a tough time of it. In fact, it looks like this is the narrative Wright is really fitting into — a narrative that ranges from Ayers to lapel pins to Obama not holding his hand on his heart during the national anthem — rather than a story of racial strife. That’s not to say it hasn’t reawoken racial fears, and it’s certainly not to suggest that Wright won’t be used by racists in the election, but I think you can imagine this being a political problem if the preacher was white, too.
At first when I read this, I found myself thinking: Ezra’s high. And also: he’s parroting Republican (and Clinton camp) talking points. But then I re-read the post and realized there’s enough to what he says that I couldn’t just dismiss his argument with a wave of the hand and a “pfffft.” First, he’s not suggesting that race isn’t a factor in L’affaire Wright; he’s just claiming that Obama’s relationship with Wright still would have been a story even if Wright, and, one presumes, Obama were white. And I suspect that’s true enough. No matter Wright’s or Obama’s race, the RNC or the Clinton camp would have tried to use Obama’s “radical” preacher against him, just as they’ve recently used Obama’s “close” ties to Bill Ayers as a cudgel.
Which leads to Ezra’s second point: that the Wright brouhaha pivots on the fact that “Americans recoil from the Chomskyite critique.” Hmm. I suppose that’s partly right, too, though I’d guess that most Americans wouldn’t recognize Noam Chomsky if he showed up at their house for dinner wearing a “Linguists Rawk” t-shirt and mumbling about anarchism, hegemonic media empires, and generative grammar.
Still, what Ezra seems to be missing is that racial anxiety is driving the Wright story. The charge that Wright is “radical” is just a culturally palatable stalking horse for: “ZOMG, there’s a black man running for president! Hide the women and children! The darkies are coming to take our country!” It’s not just that Wright’s views on American foreign policy have more in common with Chomsky’s than John McCain’s, it’s also that he’s black, so likely can’t share the values of white America. And, by extension, the same must be true of Obama. Or so goes the argument. This, it seems to me, is pretty classic race-baiting, more subtle than appeals to Negrophobia used to be, perhaps, but certainly in the same vein of the American political tradition.
In “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” Frederick Douglass asked:
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
Extraordinary antebellum rhetoric, a powerful weapon in the arsenal of a former slave turned abolitionist. For a presidential candidate in 2008, though, not so much. It’s not that Douglass’s questions and critiques don’t still resonate; they do. There’s just not much room for such views on the capaign trail. The country is probably the poorer for it; certainly our political discourse is impoverished by a broad unwillingness to listen to neo-Douglassian voices. But that’s just the way it is.
No wonder, then, that Wright’s and Obama’s critics have tried to bind the senator, through his longstanding relationship with his pastor, to such sentiments, suggesting that neither man, because they’re black, can be patriots — despite their long service to the nation. And again, that’s the real point: African-Americans can’t be patriots. Because they hate America. As with Frederick Douglass, the Fourth of July means something different for Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright than it does for Hillary Clinton and John McCain; Independence Day must always be a day of rage rather than celebration for black people. The former point may be true; just as Christmas means different things for Jews and Protestants. But the point that follows, that black people, because of the legacy of slavery, can’t be patriots, is nonsense, especially when one realizes that Douglass loved America, that his speech was a classic example of prophecy coupled with dissent: designed to point out pathologies in the body politic so the nation could begin healing itself. But this perspective was anathema for white supremacists in the 1850s, who saw Frederick Douglass only as a threat.
The same is true today. Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright are being cast as a threat to the social order, to the status quo, to the nation — because of their race. Which is why Obama has been working so hard to distance himself from Wright. Were Obama to be branded a Chomskyite, I think he could beat that rap. But if his critics successfully label him a neo-Douglassian, Obama can no more slip that noose than change the color of his skin. That Ezra doesn’t see this, that he doesn’t see that the Wright story first originated and now maintains its momentum because of racial anxiety, genuinely surprises me, particularly given the way that racism is shaping the primary. We don’t have to rely on thought experiments for evidence of this; we have both anecdata (via TPM) and actual data, in both cases indicating that Negrophobia is driving the electorate away from Obama. Come to think of it, maybe I was right in the first place: maybe Ezra was a bit off his game yesterday. In which case: pfffft.
19 comments
May 2, 2008 at 11:25 am
Levi Stahl
Ari,
I think you’re right on, but I’d even push it farther: not only is this being driven by racial anxiety, it’s being pushed precisely because of racial anxiety. Overt, or even relatively covert, race-based appeals against Obama are likely to backfire (though, I’m sure we’ll see more of them as the summer wears on); Jeremiah Wright offers a convenient sidelong way to remind everyone that Obama’s a black dude.
May 2, 2008 at 11:27 am
ari
I totally agree, Levi. It’s only going to get worse as the campaign continues.
May 2, 2008 at 11:50 am
asl
Now I understand why Douglass lost to Lincoln.
May 2, 2008 at 12:02 pm
ari
Heh.
May 2, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Ben Alpers
On a side note, the group of Americans who in fact are aware of, and recoil in horror at, the Chomskyite critique are educated, mainstream liberals like Ezra Klein. I think there’s a fair bit of projection going on in his post.
May 2, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Felix
It’s got to be some of both.
When I compare the media reaction to Wright to, say, the lack of interest in republican presidents’ cozy relations with hate-spewers like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, I see the Wright “controversy” as an example of media’s straight-up right-wing bias. There are simply different standards for Democrats and Republicans: Clinton gets impeached for screwing around and lying about it. When Bush Jr. lies, even about relatively personal matters, Dan Rather gets fired.
At the same time, I agree that this has reached the scale it’s now at because of racism. And along with the overt race-baiting, the punditry about this seems rooted in a broad ignorance among white people about black cultural norms and traditions. You’ve got to wonder if half of these talking heads have ever been near a black church in their lives.
May 2, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Dave
I’m amazed at how much empty-headed rhetoric these days can be boiled down to “RUN AWAY! LOCK UP YOUR DAUGHTERS! THE NEEEGROES ARE COMING!”
May 2, 2008 at 4:53 pm
ari
Sure it’s both, Felix. And I hope I made that clear in my post. That said, my point was that racial anxiety is driving this story, keeping it in the headlines, in other words. The radical politics are there, of course. But absent the black preacher, black church, and ties to Louis Farrakhan, this story would long since have faded from the public eye. And the lapel pin story, I think, is also directly linked to race: the idea that African-Americans just aren’t capable of the kind of patriotism that whites, like, say, John McCain, express all the time. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that McCain isn’t a patriot. I’m just saying that Obama and Wright are also, even if Wright preaches from a prophetic position and Obama refuses to signal his love of country with an enamel doodad.
May 2, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Felix
This post makes me think about how someone like Falwell was (is) never accused of being unpatriotic. Even when Falwell essentially said that we’d brought 9/11 upon ourselves, I don’t recall anyone accusing him of lacking patriotism. Not sure how much of the difference in how he was perceived comes from his representing a white constituency, a right-wing constituency, or simply because he sided with the ruling class.
But yeah, I basically agree that racism/racial anxiety is driving this played-out Wright garbage.
May 2, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Barack Obama News » Blog Archive » Postracial?
[…] Read the rest of this great post here […]
May 2, 2008 at 11:35 pm
bitchphd
Ezra’s correct, as far as he goes–but he fails to acknowledge what I believe to be true, which is that any black man running for president is going to have close connections to someone “Chomskeyesque”, for the simple fact that, well, African Americans have good reason to be suspicious of patriotic nostrums.
Which I think makes the criticism of the underlying racism all the more complicated. Both because it’s roughly true, I think, that blacks as a group have reason to be “angry” (read: critical) of America (TM)–and thus many are–and because middle-class and upper-middle class whites would generally prefer not to have to acknowledge that. So the “white” reaction to the thing becomes an attempt to pin it on Wright, specifically (and Obama by extension), while at the same time and beneath the surface it’s an expression of white suspicion that blacks in general are probably critical of simple truisms that we take for granted (and an associated fear that If They Get Power OMG What Will They Do To Us?).
Nothing like guilt and defensiveness to make people act like assholes.
May 3, 2008 at 3:20 am
drip
I was a little surprised that not one democrat gave Obama any cover on this, but that says more about me than the dems. Ezra is more right than I because he appears to have seen that the positions were too far off the front pages of newspapers and headline news crawlers to make sense to most voters. Ari takes this one step further and correctly sees that what interests the press in what this out of the mainstream preacher is saying is that he is a black man and so is Obama. Otherwise you’d see clips of Chomsky on FOX news. And I agree with bitchphd that it’s an expression of white suspicion that blacks in general are probably critical of simple truisms that we take for granted but its not very far under the surface, in my judgment.
This all leads to the democrats’ problem of what to do about their most loyal constituency. Because many of the controversial points Wright made are the simple truisms blacks take for granted, I am not sure they can be successfully rejected and I am damn sure will be asked about these points at least once every day until November. Obama looks lost as to what to do after rejection, repudiation and denunciation have failed. The GOP holds no hope for black voters and they are boxed out by the black candidate. What a mess.
May 3, 2008 at 5:09 am
Ben Alpers
This all leads to the democrats’ problem of what to do about their most loyal constituency.
You’ve answered your own question….
The GOP holds no hope for black voters and they are boxed out by the black candidate.
The Democrats will do what they do to many of their core constituencies: take them for granted and hope that the awfulness of the Republican Party will be enough to bring them to the polls.
This almost worked in 2004, but of course close only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.
May 3, 2008 at 7:04 am
drip
You’re right. The dems will think that way. That’s surely the history. What is amazing is that black Americans serve in the military in extraordinary numbers and remain patriotic in spite of holding such “anti-American” views. Wright served in the Marine Corps and then reenlisted as a Navy corpsman, to continue his service, and he’s denied, denounced, rejected, renounced and ejected by the dems who are trying to rush to the right to see who can pick up the Reagan dems and the independents. This can’t go on forever and in states like Missouri, Virginia, Florida, and Ohio, the real battlegrounds, the votes of the most loyal constituency are important.
May 3, 2008 at 8:31 am
Cala
I agree with the premise of the post, except that I wouldn’t describe Wright as terribly left wing (which ends up only supporting the premise of the post more.) Isn’t he working out of a strain of black conservatism (tenets: forget about whitey and let’s take care of ourselves?)
May 3, 2008 at 9:19 am
ari
I think you can probably place him in the Washingtonian (as in Booker T’s brand of self help) strain of black leadership in some ways, Cala. But Wright’s views on American foreign policy surely are what passes for radical in this country. And I think that’s largely what Ezra was talking about. Also, I suppose, Wright’s perspective on social justice and the redistribution of wealth. He’s certainly no Washingtonian on the economy, I don’t think, because he doesn’t think that his congregants should all go out and learn a trade and then integrate themselves into the mainstream of the American workforce.
May 7, 2008 at 12:52 am
The Constructivist
One caveat on Douglass: in his speech as a whole, he actually does make the patriotic move, jeremiad style, with the cool twist that the Constitution does not support slavery. He was going against Garrisonian secessionism, in other words. Which is how I read Obama’s critique of Wright.
May 7, 2008 at 1:00 am
The Constructivist
Nick Bromell’s fantastic essay on Douglass’s late 19th C liberalism and its relevance for 21st C liberals approaches the Obama/Douglass angle from a different direction, by the way.
May 11, 2008 at 4:43 pm
learnlotsbetty
Felix has a great point about the ruling class, here. Both Dem candidates of of marginalized groups, even if one of those candidates is far more mainstreamed than the other. And both have had stories of arguable importance stick around in the news for inordinate amounts of time while McCain barbecues and calls his wife a trollopy cunt. Or threatens people.
OK, so the trollopy cunt thing was years ago, but still.
/derail