A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on March 17th, 2008 in General

Robert Novak ventures out of his own bunghole long enough today to show that he’s about as dumb about race in America as he is on everything else. Need proof? Take a look:

Ferraro’s specific remarks were so impolitic that there is no chance they were designed by Clinton’s campaign.

and then skip down to this idiocy:

In such a prolonged contest, Obama will enjoy overwhelming African American support. The question is whether the Clinton campaign can resist pointing this out in an effort to mobilize white backing. It certainly has not resisted so far, demonstrated by feckless Gerry Ferraro’s mimicking what she heard from Bill and Hillary.

So Ferraro’s remarks did not come from Clinton’s campaign - they just came from Hillary and Bill Clinton. Is it possible for a remark to come from the candidate but not be a part of the campaign? Only in some fantasyland where candidates are not part of their own campaign.

Novak wants to defend the thought behind Ferraro’s remark by citing voting patterns:

When Obama won last Tuesday in Mississippi, where the number of blacks and whites in the Democratic primary were even, Obama won 92 percent of African Americans and lost whites by 3 to 1.

and

A week earlier, when Clinton kept her campaign alive with a decisive win in Ohio, exit polls gave her a 3 to 2 edge there among whites (nearly as high among men as women), while Obama was winning close to 90 percent of blacks.

So here’s what Ferraro, according to Novak, was really saying - Obama would not be where he is if he did not lock up the “black vote”, which he is able to do with more ease than others could because he’s a black man. Shorthand - he’s lucky he’s black.

But Obama did not start out with astronomical support among black voters (actually, Clinton did). His support among blacks, from what I can tell, is based on two things: 1) he proved he could win in lilly-white Iowa; and 2) the Clinton campaign has attacked him for being a “black candidate”. As a result of those two factors, black voters are seeing a black candidate who appeals to white voters being derided for being black - and it makes a difference to them.

So that explains the support among blacks for Obama (potentially - I’d be interested in hearing from any former Clinton supporters who have moved to Obama as to why they moved - particularly if they are black women, where the biggest change has taken place). So why are whites flocking to Clinton so strongly? And why is the reaction against Rev. Wright so strong among some whites?

That’s the legacy of racism that we don’t want to talk about, I think. For those of us who have studied black rhetoric and black movements a bit, Rev. Wright is actually quite tame. Don’t believe me? Listen to Malcolm X’s ” (and if you can listen to the brother speak, do so - you are missing a lot if you just read it) The Ballot or the Bullet“:

Anytime you have to rely upon your enemy for a job, you’re in bad shape. When you have — He is your enemy. Let me tell you, you wouldn’t be in this country if some enemy hadn’t kidnapped you and brought you here. On the other hand, some of you think you came here on the Mayflower.

Listen to Stokely Carmichael’s “Black Power“:

We have found all the myths of the country to be nothing but downright lies. We were told that if we worked hard we would succeed, and if that were true we would own this country lock, stock, and barrel. We have picked the cotton for nothing; we are the maids in the kitchens of liberal white people; we are the janitors, the porters, the elevator men; we sweep up your college floors. We are the hardest workers and the lowest paid. It is nonsensical for people to talk about human relationships until they are willing to build new institutions. Black people are economically insecure. White liberals are economically secure. Can you begin to build an economic coalition? Are the liberals willing to share their salaries with the economically insecure black people they so much love? Then if you’re not, are you willing to start building new institutions that will provide economic security for black people? That’s the question we want to deal with!

But most white people of their day dismissed both Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. They don’t understand why black people are so hung up on their own race. Hey, slavery ended a hundred and more years ago and Jim Crow has been gone for half a hundred - get over it!

Let me ask - how long must pass before you “get over” your grandfather being lynched? Your grandmother being raped? Your father being beaten or simply humiliated because he was driving through the wrong town or neighborhood? How long must pass since the last time you were called “nigger”? How do you get over the crime of being within your skin one hundred percent of the time (note: read James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son)? When Rev. Wright says that HIV was a government experiment, he isn’t saying something that militant blacks haven’t been saying for years. When he says that the government helped smuggle crack into LA to sell to black street gangs, he’s not only repeating what has been said in the black community, he’s repeating a story that received more than a little attention from legitimate news sources - but most Americans don’t want to contemplate what it might mean, even if it were only ten percent true.

Because most whites haven’t heard this sort of rhetoric - let’s be frank - it scares them shitless. What they don’t understand is that when a black person says “The white man holds the black man down,” (though I’ve never heard a black person actually use that sentence in those words - other than Richard Pryor) it has two meanings. First, it means that the power structure of this country has historically been, and continues to largely be, run by interests that are held by white people. Second, it means that even those of us who are white who are not part of that power structure have, historically, been more likely to support that power structure than to support a radical egalitarian reordering of it.

Don’t believe it? Read those statistics from Novak again. Then look at this:

One difference between the two states is the influence of race on voting patterns. Among white men in Wisconsin, 11 percent said race was an important factor in their vote. In Ohio, 27 percent of white men said race was an important factor.

These are statistics among Democratic voters in northern states. So there is no blaming “those stupid Southern Republicans”. That’s a truth that a whole lot of us would rather not face. We want to think that we can move past race without dealing with the fallout from four hundred years of race-based classism. We can’t. It’s like trying to get past appendicitis without addressing the bad appendix. But we also have to be careful that in addressing the problems of race that we don’t get caught up in race victimization as an identity. For that, we have the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee to use as an example. It isn’t that our history needs exemptions for guilt, but we do need to acknowledge that guilt in a forum that frees people of today from the sins of the past.

I don’t hold a lot of hope that those who use race to determine their primary vote will do anything differently in the general election. That doesn’t bode well for a general election with Obama as the Democratic nominee - except that Republicans suck so much right now that a twenty point disadvantage based on race still makes it competitive. More than an election, though, this peers into the darkness of our national spirit. Even at this point, we cannot give people permission to simply be people. And all of the political correctness in the world won’t change that.

In fact, it makes it worse. We are adults. We understand that sometimes words hurt our souls - and sometimes they even hurt the souls of people who speak them. But we also have to understand that hurtful words sometimes need to be spoken so we can get beyond the hurt.

I once heard Kwaze Mfume say that so long as white Americans don’t understand what it means to be black and black Americans don’t understand what it means to be white, then there is still much work to be done. Here’s an exercise to move towards that - if you’re white, think about the first (or last) time you used the word “nigger”. If you’re black, think about the first (or last) time you were called by that word. Now explain to the rest of us how and why and what it felt like (and if you blog it somewhere, let me know about it - leave a link in a comment or email me at texan-at-this-domain). (Or, if you belong to some other minority, and that experience is more germane, tell us about that.)

There is opportunity here - dangerous opportunity. If we take advantage of it; then perhaps a few less bungholes will be expounding nonsense about race. I’ll be thinking about my challenge myself - and you know I’ll share it with you when it’s ready.

Technorati Tags: Robert Novak, race in America