A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on March 25th, 2008 in General

If I say I’m not surprised that someone has turned Rev. Wright’s remarks into an attack on Barack Obama, I’d be lying. I’m also not surprised at Hillary Clinton’s response:

You know, you don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend. I spoke out against Don Imus. I gave a speech at Rutgers University saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that. So for me, if I had been a member of such a church – first of all, if I had sat there for 20 years, I think you all would have a lot to say if somebody made comparable sorts of sermons. I just think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do it, if not explicitly, implicitly by getting up and moving.

To be fair to Mrs. Clinton, she was asked about this point-blank. However, she knows how to deal with gotcha questions - reframe them or ignore them entirely. But this allowed her to say something against Obama and Wright without having to take personal responsibility for saying it. “The reporter made me do it!” Crackers.

For what it’s worth, I’ve left congregations because I didn’t like the Pastor or what he said - more than one. So it’s true that you can walk away. But when you are talking about core values, sometimes it’s better to stand and fight it out than to concede and run. Mrs. Clinton’s status in the white community is not tied to her membership in the United Methodist Church - and even less to her attendance at any given church. Mr. Obama’s status in the black community is, indeed, very much tied up in his membership in the black Church. So let’s throw out the apples-and-oranges stuff.

Hold on - aren’t you trying to create a different set of rules for blacks and whites? No. I’m acknowledging that there already is. (And, to be fair, there is also a different set of rules for women candidates.) The role of the church in black communities is different than the role of the church in white communities.

An excerpt from The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire:

This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to “soften” the power of the oppressor in deferences to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their “generosity,” the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this “generosity,” which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source.

True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the “rejects of life,” to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands - whether of individuals or entire peoples - need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work, and, working, transform the world.

You don’t have to believe all of the conspiracy theories of Rev. Wright - and I don’t - to understand that generations of oppression have left its mark upon black communities, social structures, and individuals. It isn’t about when slavery ended or reaching the limits of Jim Crow. It’s about the damage done to an entire people when they are taken by force, shipped thousands of miles away, have their existing family structures destroyed, and forced to endure centuries of legalized servitude followed by decades of the de facto defense of secondary status. Families and communities don’t just “get over” such things. The stain of slavery remains, generations after the institutions that defend it ends - that is one of the reasons why the Children of Israel were doomed to wander for forty years before entering the Promised Land (so that no one who knew slavery would corrupt the new country with the through processes and viewpoint of a slave).

But the paradigm expressed by Freire fairly accurately describes the “can’t-win-can’t-lose” situation that can be seen in some black communities. Affirmative Action, for example, has been used to lift some worthies out of racially-induced obscurity and allowed them to build better lives than would have been possible without it. The problem is that the very existence of Affirmative Action creates the conditions that make it necessary to continue the program. According to Freire, it is false charity to allow a certain percentage of blacks to succeed and claim that this is somehow supporting equality and making amends for the heritage of servitude. But it assuages the guilt of the power structure, so the power structure becomes addicted to giving special consideration to racial minorities (this is especially true when racial minorities can be used to raise a lot of money for a school - did I mention the NCAA?).

The problem is that giving special consideration to some amounts to giving no consideration to the remainder. For the benefit of the upper ten percent, the rest are written off as unworthy. Because the conditions which make programs such as Affirmative Action necessary are simply not addressed. While people like Bill Cosby are right that the black community must take actions itself, unless the words are followed up with concrete solutions, it is so much rhetoric. Or, as my brother put it today, it isn’t as if the black community has no structure or social institutions - but there is a limit to how much they can accomplish on a grand scale.

In the city where I live, our schools are celebrating the fact that only 52% of students failed the state math test and 35% failed the language section. Anyone want to take book on the chances that the elementary schools that perform the lowest are also in the sections of town that have the lowest percentage of whites? Why aren’t we making black-majority schools as successful as white-majority schools? Do we really believe that black parents don’t want their kids to graduate high school? Do we really think that black kids can’t do better?

It’s time to move beyond Affirmative Action and provide true charity - to rebuild the institutions upon which social hope are built. Until we do that, Rev. Wright may be wrong on the particulars, but he is right to cast blame on a power structure that we’ve become all too blind to seeing.

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