This Is Not About Jeremiah Wright

Speaking as a white man who was raised in a lily-white town (our concession to diversity was the two Jewish families in town), and having lived through the civil rights movement of the '60s and '70s, I'm thinking that Obaman's speech on race in America has much more importance than simply defusing the (largely fake) outrage over anything his pastor said. Add in these comments from Condoleeza Rice:

"Black Americans were a founding population," she said. "Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together — Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That's not a very pretty reality of our founding."

As a result, Miss Rice told editors and reporters at The Washington Times, "descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that."

"That particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today," she said.

It's not like no one has ever said anything like this before, but Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan -- even, to a certain extent, Martin Luther King, Jr. -- all phrased it in the rhetoric of the Black Liberation movement, which whites simply didn't understand. It was angry, it was accusing, it was unpleasant, and the immediate reaction was not to hear the meaning. That's why so many were so ready to label Jeremiah Wright's words as "inflammatory" -- by the standards of the mainstream culture -- white middle-class culture -- they were. By the standards of black culture, they're not, really. They are strong, forceful words from a culture that values verbal ability very highly.

What Obama and now Rice have done has been to phrase these ideas and these feelings in words the rest of us -- the mainstream -- can understand, and deliver them in a way that will not allow us to reject their meaning immediately. We are finally, in the nicest way possible, being forced to actually listen.

(Footnote: For a comment on the reaction from the right -- and not necessarily the foamy-mouth right -- see this from Callimachus at Done With Mirrors.