Sabotage, Division, or Sedition

With all respect to Obama’s Philadelphia speech in March – truly an excellent piece of oratory – the senator from Illinois is responsible for at least two serious weaknesses which had nothing to do with Wright – his soft-jingoism in aligning himself with Israel and disregarding the truly catastrophic consequences of US policy both for Palestine and for Muslims everywhere – and his failure to address the fact that the majority of people who are going to war for the US are the poor, a substantial number of whom are Black Americans. The same was true of the military in Reverend Wright’s day, forty years ago, when US soldiers were being recruited to kill “gooks” instead of “rag-heads.” These poor are being made even poorer by the wars the US has been fighting for decades against what used to be the Third World (and is now merely the lower half of an increasingly polarized economic system).

Now, even black nationalism has been resurrected as a straw man to blame Wright’s vocal and independent criticism of yes – the rich, white male rulers of the US – for being “racially closed-ended and culturally closed-ended.” Wright’s polemic must be like a nightmare for those who currently run the US government since nearly all the top jobs of the Bush regime have been held by people who were starting their careers when King and Malcolm were assassinated. Their attempts to discredit Obama using Wright rely on pervasive media-maintained amnesia. In Philadelphia, Obama tried to cast another spell which would return his “broom” to an inert state, by associating Wright’s preaching with the experience of some prior angry generation, as if a disproportionate share of prison “chain gangs” today were not comprised of African-Americans, as in those bad old days. Was Obama saying that Black Americans today do not have a right to be angry? By accusing Wright of sowing division, he was calling for a return, not to the spirit of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but to the Booker T. Washington tradition.

However, to talk today requires a different and perhaps deeper courage when confronted with so many mirages of equality. It is tempting to be confused by these oases of opportunity and forget the desert of inequality through which most people are still struggling.