UPDATE:
For an excellent take on this issue, see Glenn Greenwald's post:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/03/17/wright/index.html
And this from Frank Schaeffer, son of Religious Right preacher, Francis Schaeffer, who advocated the overthrow of the United States Government--in other words, treason--but nevertheless was a friend and guest of Presidents Ford and Reagan.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/obamas-minister-committe_b_91774.html
There is a mountain of hypocrisy on the Right. If anyone on the Right had the intellectual curiosity to delve into what their religious leaders, Falwell, Robertson, Hagee, and Shaeffer have preached against the American people, they would see themselves as the hypocrites they are. Instead, the Right Wing Noise Machine continues to rail against Senator Obama's pastor, self-righteously labeling him anti-American.
They ought to look within their own churches, and what their pastors have said, and see the anti-American sermons being preached there.
*****************************************
Here is Shelby Steele's article where he calls Senator Obama a "bargainer" and demeans Obama's accomplishments:
"The novelty of Barack Obama is more his cross-racial appeal than his talent. Jesse Jackson displayed considerable political talent in his presidential runs back in the 1980s. But there was a distinct limit to his white support. Mr. Obama's broad appeal to whites makes him the first plausible black presidential candidate in American history. And it was Mr. Obama's genius to understand this. Though he likes to claim that his race was a liability to be overcome, he also surely knew that his race could give him just the edge he needed -- an edge that would never be available to a white, not even a white woman.
How to turn one's blackness to advantage?
The answer is that one "bargains." Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence."
The rest of this opinion piece of a liberal Afro-American by an conservative Afro-American is here:
What kind of bargaining did you make, Mr. Steele? Both you and Senator Obama are smart, attractive, knowledgeable men, and yet you posit that Senator Obama has arrived at this point in history through white guilt and the mask Obama wears is"bargaining?
The are many, many talented and distinguished historians, Mr. Steele. A lot of them are conservatives. How is it that you've received the plaudits and attention and esteem over many others? Bargaining or white guilt?
Steele claims Obama has attained his ascendency through taking advantage of his blackness, and implies that Senator Obama has accomplished very little:
"And he has failed to say how he would actually be a "unifier." By the evidence of his slight political record (130 "present" votes in the Illinois state legislature, little achievement in the U.S. Senate) Barack Obama stacks up as something of a mediocrity. None of this matters much."
But I and others have covered this tiresome misrepresentation:
http://progressiveerupts.blogspot.com/2008/02/barack-obamas-accomplishments-as-state.html#links
And then Steele sniffs and dismisses Obama "...as something of a mediocrity."
A man who served as the head of Harvard's Law Review (the first Afro-American to do so), who graduated from Harvard magna cum laude, (mediocrity? What planet is Steele from where one of our most prestigious institutes of higher learning hands out a graduate degree, magna cum laude, to mediocrities--this is where the piece becomes a hatchet job--that was unworthy of Steele.) Senator Obama has written--not ghost written, as many other presidential hopefuls have--two books, and who has, in his short time in the Senate, sponsored much legislation and has taken his campaign from being a somewhat Quixotic run for the presidency to a real and present danger to the well financed and politcally connected campaign of Senator Hillary Clinton. A year ago very few Americans knew who he was, and now he is ahead, in some polls, of Senator John McCain.
The most malicious part of this essay is where he calls out Senator Obama for belonging to Jeremiah Wright's church:
"...for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").
How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?
What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn't this hatred more rhetorical than real?
But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one's blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America's television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred."
Steele acknowledges the "rhetorical hatred and real hatred" of this Afro-American pastor, but I'm curious as to what his reaction was when the most famous white pastor, who had a following of hundred of thousands in the US, blamed Americans for 9/11, called the Reverend Billy Graham a "servant of Satan," and denigrated homosexuals in the most vile of terms--blaming them for all of America's ills.
I wonder if Mr. Steele remained silent over the rantings and ravings of the idiotic, divisive white pastor, Jerry Falwell (NOTE: Like Mr. Steele, the late Pastor Falwell, was afterall, a conservative Republican), and his enabler, Pat Robertson. Mr. Steele is certainly quick to point out how dangerous it is for this country to look to Senator Obama for leadership because he has belonged to Pastor Wright's church for 20 years. Pastors Falwell and Robertson were good, good friends of the Bush Administration, even to the point of Mr. Robertson's being an advisor to it. But Mr. Steele's hypocrisy allows him to be shocked by Obama's friendship with Pastor Wright. Nowhere in this article does he make mention of the same sort of behavior by the white Republican pastors. This is hypocrisy of the first magnitude.
I wonder if Mr. Steele ever asked how the conservative whites (or blacks) who listened to Pastors Falwell, Robertson, Hagee, and Schaeffer could transcend their hateful, inflammatory sermons and blatherings? Who could sit year after year in their churches and listen to their hate-speeches and bigotry against fellow Americans and not internalize that hatred?
Steele chalks up all of Senator Obama's successes to the yearning of whites to be rid of their guilt over the shame of slavery--to be on the right side of destiny. And that Senator Obama's success has been through his manipulation of this white guilt.
For an excellent take on this issue, see Glenn Greenwald's post:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/03/17/wright/index.html
And this from Frank Schaeffer, son of Religious Right preacher, Francis Schaeffer, who advocated the overthrow of the United States Government--in other words, treason--but nevertheless was a friend and guest of Presidents Ford and Reagan.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/obamas-minister-committe_b_91774.html
There is a mountain of hypocrisy on the Right. If anyone on the Right had the intellectual curiosity to delve into what their religious leaders, Falwell, Robertson, Hagee, and Shaeffer have preached against the American people, they would see themselves as the hypocrites they are. Instead, the Right Wing Noise Machine continues to rail against Senator Obama's pastor, self-righteously labeling him anti-American.
They ought to look within their own churches, and what their pastors have said, and see the anti-American sermons being preached there.
*****************************************
Here is Shelby Steele's article where he calls Senator Obama a "bargainer" and demeans Obama's accomplishments:
"The novelty of Barack Obama is more his cross-racial appeal than his talent. Jesse Jackson displayed considerable political talent in his presidential runs back in the 1980s. But there was a distinct limit to his white support. Mr. Obama's broad appeal to whites makes him the first plausible black presidential candidate in American history. And it was Mr. Obama's genius to understand this. Though he likes to claim that his race was a liability to be overcome, he also surely knew that his race could give him just the edge he needed -- an edge that would never be available to a white, not even a white woman.
How to turn one's blackness to advantage?
The answer is that one "bargains." Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence."
The rest of this opinion piece of a liberal Afro-American by an conservative Afro-American is here:
What kind of bargaining did you make, Mr. Steele? Both you and Senator Obama are smart, attractive, knowledgeable men, and yet you posit that Senator Obama has arrived at this point in history through white guilt and the mask Obama wears is"bargaining?
The are many, many talented and distinguished historians, Mr. Steele. A lot of them are conservatives. How is it that you've received the plaudits and attention and esteem over many others? Bargaining or white guilt?
Steele claims Obama has attained his ascendency through taking advantage of his blackness, and implies that Senator Obama has accomplished very little:
"And he has failed to say how he would actually be a "unifier." By the evidence of his slight political record (130 "present" votes in the Illinois state legislature, little achievement in the U.S. Senate) Barack Obama stacks up as something of a mediocrity. None of this matters much."
But I and others have covered this tiresome misrepresentation:
http://progressiveerupts.blogspot.com/2008/02/barack-obamas-accomplishments-as-state.html#links
And then Steele sniffs and dismisses Obama "...as something of a mediocrity."
A man who served as the head of Harvard's Law Review (the first Afro-American to do so), who graduated from Harvard magna cum laude, (mediocrity? What planet is Steele from where one of our most prestigious institutes of higher learning hands out a graduate degree, magna cum laude, to mediocrities--this is where the piece becomes a hatchet job--that was unworthy of Steele.) Senator Obama has written--not ghost written, as many other presidential hopefuls have--two books, and who has, in his short time in the Senate, sponsored much legislation and has taken his campaign from being a somewhat Quixotic run for the presidency to a real and present danger to the well financed and politcally connected campaign of Senator Hillary Clinton. A year ago very few Americans knew who he was, and now he is ahead, in some polls, of Senator John McCain.
The most malicious part of this essay is where he calls out Senator Obama for belonging to Jeremiah Wright's church:
"...for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").
How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?
What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn't this hatred more rhetorical than real?
But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one's blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America's television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred."
Steele acknowledges the "rhetorical hatred and real hatred" of this Afro-American pastor, but I'm curious as to what his reaction was when the most famous white pastor, who had a following of hundred of thousands in the US, blamed Americans for 9/11, called the Reverend Billy Graham a "servant of Satan," and denigrated homosexuals in the most vile of terms--blaming them for all of America's ills.
I wonder if Mr. Steele remained silent over the rantings and ravings of the idiotic, divisive white pastor, Jerry Falwell (NOTE: Like Mr. Steele, the late Pastor Falwell, was afterall, a conservative Republican), and his enabler, Pat Robertson. Mr. Steele is certainly quick to point out how dangerous it is for this country to look to Senator Obama for leadership because he has belonged to Pastor Wright's church for 20 years. Pastors Falwell and Robertson were good, good friends of the Bush Administration, even to the point of Mr. Robertson's being an advisor to it. But Mr. Steele's hypocrisy allows him to be shocked by Obama's friendship with Pastor Wright. Nowhere in this article does he make mention of the same sort of behavior by the white Republican pastors. This is hypocrisy of the first magnitude.
I wonder if Mr. Steele ever asked how the conservative whites (or blacks) who listened to Pastors Falwell, Robertson, Hagee, and Schaeffer could transcend their hateful, inflammatory sermons and blatherings? Who could sit year after year in their churches and listen to their hate-speeches and bigotry against fellow Americans and not internalize that hatred?
Steele chalks up all of Senator Obama's successes to the yearning of whites to be rid of their guilt over the shame of slavery--to be on the right side of destiny. And that Senator Obama's success has been through his manipulation of this white guilt.
No sir, I don't see it that way. I see Senator Obama's successes as a result of people looking at the content of his character, not the color of his skin.
There will be many more thousands of words written over the phenomenon of Senator Obama's ascendency to the highest reaches of American political life, but I don't think I'll read anything as small minded, sneering, and hypocritial as this piece is.
There will be many more thousands of words written over the phenomenon of Senator Obama's ascendency to the highest reaches of American political life, but I don't think I'll read anything as small minded, sneering, and hypocritial as this piece is.
3 comments:
Steele's piece is such garbage and insults Obama on so many levels. I was really annoyed by Steele's insinuation that Obama is somehow a stealth candidate and hoodwinking us all.
He insults all of us Obama supporters that we are too dumb to see this supposed shame. I am also offended that he compartmentalizes white support to only be from guilt.
I like this part of your post:
What planet is Steele from where one of our most prestigious institutes of higher learning hands out a graduate degree, magna cum laude, to mediocrities
I just wrote my own analysis of the speech and then I saw your comment.
We keep little fans plugged in all year long. When they're not needed as fans, but just as White Noise machines, we just put them in a far corner and face them toward the wall.
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