Rev. Wright and Barack Obama; Why all the cool conservatives like Spike Lee

Monday, cigarette #1

Daniel Larison predicts liberal backlash against the Rev. Wright flap:

Many Christian conservatives took criticism of The Passion as an open attack on their religion, and so overlooked anything that might give them pause about Gibson and viewed his demonisation by much of the mainstream press as a broader assault on them.

Don’t be surprised if the Christian left and progressives respond with the same siege mentality, some of which we are already seeing. What this means is that when Wright is connected to extreme statements of black liberation theology, people on the left will tend to filter out the most extreme elements and see any criticism of liberation theology as the typical response of the privileged and the majority...

To some extent, this has materialized: Ezra Klein comparing Rev. Wright to Jerry Falwell, for instance. Still, I wouldn’t expect the liberal backlash party to get much bigger, nor would I expect to see it include many Obama supporters from the college crowd. One of Obama’s biggest attractions is the perception that he stands for the post-racial America of Martin Luther King’s dream — that he is the "Tiger Woods of politics." Wright seems to prefer Malcolm X to Martin Luther King. That by itself is no crime. From the conservative point of view, it might even be a virtue. After all, which one’s Autobiography made ISI’s list of the fifty best books of the twentieth century?

Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais say what the Yale political scene confirms, which is that the generation of liberals just now coming of age thinks of itself as post-race, post-gender, and post-class. To their way of thinking, these old divisions were only ever constructs of a regime we have since transcended and shouldn’t matter anymore. They’re the sort of people who say things like this:

Wright made these comments after racially discriminatory policies had been abolished- whatever the lingering realities of racism in society, they are not the official position of the US government as they were in [Frederick] Douglass’ case.

Show’s over! Nothing to see here! Racism’s all over bar the shouting!

One party in the Yale Political Union has the excellent tradition of asking everyone who runs for YPU elected office "How has your class background has shaped your political beliefs?" Occasionally, someone will answer, “It hasn’t.” As far as I know, no candidate from the Party of the Right ever has, because most POR members know as well as the Liberal Party that not caring about class when you decide whom to hire or whom to marry doesn’t make class not matter. The same goes for race.

The conservatives I tend to like best are ones who agree with leftists (as opposed to liberals, if I can abuse the two terms for this post’s purposes) that race is not something to be transcended but something to be accepted, dealt with, and occasionally celebrated. If the liberals-like-MLK/leftists-like-Malcolm-X dichotomy is too crude, this might be nearer to what I mean: conservatives reject Kwanzaa; white leftists like it; white liberals celebrate it themselves. Martin Luther King might have been pleased by the sight of a bunch of white students at Ligon Junior High lighting the ujima candle and thinking that Kwanzaa is about universal values like collectivized farming and not about anything specific to black culture at all, but Malcolm X would have been appalled at our presumption. Traditionalists and leftists might disagree on the best way for America to get past racism, but neither one is silly enough to believe, as many liberals do, that the best way to eliminate racism is to eliminate race.

As Diana Butler Bass points out, putting Reverend Wright’s remarks within the tradition of black rhetoric rather than white homiletics makes his sermons less like “God Hates Fags” and more like "The Ballot or the Bullet,” which is to say potentially defensible (by someone other than me, that is) or, at the very least, not indicative of insanity. It also reveals why the liberals who cherish post-racial fantasies will be turned off by them anyway.