Why Clinton’s Jeremiah Wright Strategy Failed – Color of Law

To be sure, vast reservoirs of racism still exist in the United States. There are some voters in this country who do not like Black people, and will not vote for a person of color, nor anyone who is not a White man, for that matter. But given that those votes never were for the taking, let us focus on the real issue at hand. Obama’s campaign is bringing millions of new people into the process, a multiracial and intergenerational coalition of democrats, republicans, independents, and young people. For these voters, the racial buttons simply are not working. And for young people in particular, who did not grow up in a segregated America, they do not share the bigoted hang-ups of their parents. A generation of Whites who grew up listening to and embracing Public Enemy is not fazed by this notion of righteous Black anger a la Jeremiah Wright. In fact, many who have lived under the injustices of the Bush regime, the worst administration in American history, must share Dr. Wright’s sense of indignation. Perhaps, forty years after The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Black rage, justified and historically contextual, is not so foreign and shocking a concept to mainstream America. And since when did anger, filled with constructive criticism and a patriotic demand that one’s country do better, amount to hatred? It is far easier to paint the truth-teller as a loathsome crackpot – and compel African American leaders to repudiate their own in the process – than to deal with the sobering realities they articulate.