04.28.08
The Reverend Wright Strikes Again!
Well, if I had any doubts as to Reverend Wright’s belief that America is still a structurally racist society they are now all completely dashed. His speech at the NAACP confirms that he thinks the black community is still being systematically targeted by a white, European dominated society. He did not go into detail but he suggested that African-Americans and European-Americans are fundamentally different when it comes to language and learning. He did not say this was due to genetics or social training—the former would be a dangerous argument in my estimation.
There is a difference between arguing that there is still too much racism in America and arguing that society as a whole is racist. The former is true; the latter is largely false. Just as it is untrue that male chauvinism still exists on a structural level in the United States, no matter what the deconstructionists say.
The idea that one can be “different but not deficient” may extend to certain areas of life, but not to all. For example, I like spicy food and I know others who do not. This difference does not make me or the people I know deficient. However, if two students take a test and one gets 80% while the other gets 50% they are not only different but one has shown him or herself to be deficient. The question is can this argument be extended to culture?
It gets a little murky here because one has to start placing value judgments on certain ways of looking at the world and on human behavior. For instance, should everyone be forced to adhere to the “Protestant ethic” of hard work and frugality? Should we all be judged by the same standard regardless of how much we have had to struggle because of our personal backgrounds? The list is endless and gets more socially and politically prickly as we go on.
The nub of the problem is that we all have to have a metric by which we judge ourselves and those around us. We simply cannot operate as a society without having some standard. We decided as a society fifty years ago that we would no longer use race, gender, etc. as criterion by which to judge an individual’s worth or their political rights. However, there is still a standard, however fluid it might be. The United States is still largely a meritocratic society, although not perfect in this respect—and, Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, Colin Powell, Oprah Winfrey, etc. are all proof of this truism.
I think the question is just how much of what Reverend Wright views as “black culture” does he want to see either integrated into, or made acceptable to, our “white, European dominated” society? Will the wearing of dashikis by both white and black make us a more integrated society? Will the adoption of the pentatonic scale by the white majority bring about racial healing? By the way, Celtic music uses the pentatonic scale, and so does Chinese folk music. What, in fact, is Reverend Wright proposing?
What is so disturbing about what Reverend Wright preaches is that it does not clearly lay out the “standard” by which we will judge ourselves and those around. I am not talking about the facile judgment of some with regard to fashion, speech, or music. I am talking about establishing a standard of behavior that is “useful” to both individuals and society, without regard to race or gender. Without some common standard of behavior we cannot deal with each other equally at any level, making society impossible.
As for how this will affect the coming primaries, I think Clinton will now win handily in Indiana and North Carolina will be in play as Reverend Wright continues to take his message public. It is inconceivable that Barack Obama over a period of twenty years was not exposed to this message of African-American exceptionalism. This will be on the minds of voters as they go to the polls. They will ask themselves, “Yes, Barack Obama has said he disagrees with the ‘some’ of what Reverend Wright says but where do they agree?” How the voters answer this question in their own minds will be determinative.
