Michael Weiss takes me to task for insufficiently gnashing my teeth over Jeremiah Wright and his preachments. I say he's missing the point of my writing on the matter entirely.
I don't regard Wright as much more than a left-wing Falwell, whose ass
politicians
Jeremiah Wright: Yes, let's put him in context on the left periodically feel themselves required to kiss,
like Bill Clinton did in 1998. Jesse Jackson is a morally ambivalent figure. That didn't prevent him from being Clinton's go-to confessor. Remember Joe Lieberman lauding Louis Farrakhan in 2000? Democratic candidates still feel compelled
to ritually smooch Al Sharpton's rings, and Sharpton's antics --- e.g.,
doing his damnedest to get an innocent man, whom he knew was innocent,
convicted of rape --- are a match for anything Wright has done.
Michael's position --- and mine --- that associations with these awful priests constitute a mark against every candidate (though not a disqualifier), and that that standard applies across the board, is not a popular position. In particular, it's not the position of those who think Obama's tie to Wright is an exceptional disqualifier. I most certainly said, but maybe should have been more explicit to avoid misinterpretation, that context clearly justifies King and Douglass and clearly inculpates Wright. Because of the contextual discrepancies, there is no comparison between King's or Douglass's indictment of America and Wright's. (Though Wright's lack of eloquence relative to King and Douglass is hardly the problem with his preachments. Would Michael have less of a problem with Wright if he were more eloquent? I wouldn't.) And that's just the point.
I didn't excise the first two sentences from the Douglass quote to conceal the context. On the contrary, I immediately placed it in context. (When reading of a Douglass reference to America's "bloody and shocking" crime, does anyone need to be told he's referring to slavery?) Then I reiterated the contextual discrepancies between Douglass/King and Wright, not once but twice. But the sort of people who put together the Obama-Wright-Malcom X-68 Olympics video don't care about context, and their intended audience wouldn't know how to care about context. They would have attacked Douglass and King as anti-Americans, and Michael knows that. He knows because their equivalents in those days did. (They would have also attacked Michael as anti-American for his concurrence with King on Vietnam.)
Conversely, there is a surfeit of remarks from the heroes of the civil rights movement that could be ripped out of context, put into Wright's mouth, and recycled into a viral anti-Obama email that might have devastating effect. and take some --- some, not all, some --- of Wright's indictments of America and place them in the context of slavery and segregation and they are unobjectionable. Less eloquent than King or Douglass, of course, but truth doesn't supervene on eloquence. (If King had been less eloquent, he wouldn't have been any less right, though he may have been less effective.)
Wright's problem is that he thinks the power of the US government is still arrayed against black people, that American institutions are still dripping with racism, that the economy is a set up by the white man to keep the black man down. The resentments he's propagated and allowed to fester all follow from that paranoia and ill-will. But he's not a cartoon. Governmental power used to be arrayed against black people; many institutions were dripping with racism (and some, like the criminal justice system, still do exemplify subtle forms of racism); and he lived through it.
Despite his Falwellian ugliness, the other salient difference between Wright and a Falwell is that propagating hatred was Wright's hobby, not his vocation. Most of Wright's ministry is a black self-empowerment effort --- granted, with a nasty, separatist element to it. (The real precedents for Wright are Marcus Garvey and Booker T. Washington.) Of course it's somewhat self-defeating to try to lift black people into the middle class while attacking middle-classness, but Wright's contradictions stem from bitterness, not cynicism. And there were occasions when he overcame his bigotry in genuinely admirable ways. Newsweek reports:
As a leader, Wright defied convention at every turn. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune last year, he recalled a time during the 1970s when the UCC decided to ordain gay and lesbian clergy. At its annual meeting, sensitive to the historic discomfort some blacks have with homosexuality, gay leaders reached out to black pastors.
At that session, Wright heard the testimony of a gay Christian and, he said, he had a conversion experience on gay rights. He started one of the first AIDS ministries on the South Side and a singles group for Trinity gays and lesbians—a subject that still rankles some of the more conservative Trinity members, says Dwight Hopkins, a theology professor at the University of Chicago and a church member.
Obviously that doesn't exculpate the horrendous demagogy he spewed. But it mitigates the idea of Wright as a simple-minded bigot, in particular his tinfoil hat theories about the origin of AIDS. What would his congregants do after being told that the government created AIDS in an anti-black conspiracy? Go have unsafe sex? Not if they continued listening to Wright, because he spurred HIV testing efforts and heavily lobbied for safe sex. His moment of decency on gay rights also makes him different from a unidimensional bigot like Hagee, Parsley, Falwell or Robertson. (If anyone can find a reference to one of the horrific white evangelicals McCain has courted committing to tolerance for people different from them, I'll stand corrected. Similarly, what is worse, promoting a paranoid conspiracy about the origin of AIDS, or promoting the idea that condoms don't work and lobbying against a vaccine for the virus that causes cervical cancer? I'm utilitarian enough to think it's not close.)
Taking in the totality of Falwell's life and work, he really was a cartoon, unless evidence I haven't seen emerges to the contrary. Taking in the totality of Wright's, the picture is violently self-conflicted and complicated, and though on the whole unsympathetic, the reasons for Wright's character deficiencies are important to understand. Taking in the totality of King's life and work, the picture is clearly sympathetic. In either of the latter two cases, given the current political environment, it would be easy to put together a two minute hate to bring the Hannity-Limbaugh right to orgasm. Taking tiny snippets of King's life and editing them appropriately, one could make him appear to be on a par with Wright without much difficulty.