Regardless how much Obama may concede that Wright’s language was “anti-American” or “hateful,” the reality is they can only be construed as such if one believes that any criticism of the USA, and of prejudiced white Americans particularly, is unpatriotic or vicious. It’s akin to the long-running right-wing notion that America is like a beloved mommy, and any criticism of her whatsoever means that you “hate America.”

Personally, I support Clinton. But anti-american and “hate speech” charges levelled at Rev. Wright are completely vicious, righty and anti-american. I am not going to get prissy because, he said “Goddamn America, for killing innocent people, etc..” Funny how media leaves those qualifiers out. And what is with the hostility toward addressing the history of Jim Crow, slavery, Vietnam, Iraq etc.? Should we all be waving like marionnetes at the flag, sing G*d bless our country, forget the history that plays into what happens today?

You should probably read his book. I happen to think everyone should.

All I can say is ditto.

Well, I might suggest you’ve posed that in a way that is logically, verbally backward. Discussions at an academic level like this one often make classification a subset of racism, but in fact, it’s the other way. Racism is a form of prejudice, a subset of classification. There was a time when race was so overriding in most people’s minds that it was hard not to think of prejudice as being synonymous with race, but today, that is not true. Middle class blacks are rarely slapped back and “put in their place” by people who believe that blacks have no business being upwardly mobile, as often, in fact almost without exception was done 40 years ago. Class is the most important signifier to us today. It has a complex interplay with race, because while in most white minds, the adjective black is not contained by the category of poor, poor is still nearly contained within with the mental category of black.

The other thing you may have overlooked is that in those examples at the end of my post, I wasn’t describing my own reaction. I was describing a reaction I’ve seen among others that is pretty common among both blacks and whites to blacks of different classes. But a distinction is often made. When whites react negatively towards poor black people, it’s called racism. When blacks react that way, it’s often acknowledged as a complex emotion, not least because often, black folks will try not to react this way in front of whites, so that when they open up their feelings, they are often in a setting where the complexity is acknowledged. I think it’s more honest to describe both reactions as classification, even prejudice. Rather than racism.

My musings may sound detached, partly because we all use tortured words to talk about these things. But I know my friends pretty well. And I live in a mixed race area that many would classify as a ghetto. Rather than say I’m detached, I’d describe the failings of what I’ve written as partly being a lack of fluency, but also as the inevitable partiality of writing — meaning that it’s impossible to express the totality of a situation. I’m responding to things that have been written, so I’m writing the other side of the argument. Afterwards, I’ll go to secondcitycop.blogspot.com and bitterly castigate some Chicago policeman for his racist post.

I think that one horrible outcome of the racial stalemate of the 60’s was that many urban white working class people gave up on government as being hopelessly detached. Cities became horrendously dangerous just as black people were moving into previously white neighborhoods. There was a complex background to this, but it became an ugly cycle, and ultimately, many cops gave up and said, black leaders won’t let us do what we need to do to keep the peace in their neighborhoods; many teachers gave up and said, urban schools are hopelessly corrupt, so I’ll bide time till retirement.

This is the more concrete situation we face today, where we are just digging out of that four decade spiral of devastated urban institutions. Paul Vallas took a school district in Chicago that was derided by cynical Republicans (who were nonetheless correct) as the worst in the nation, and “a rat hole” for money to be poured into, and made it into a district where teachers and administrators are working towards the goal of education. Chicago Public Schools are still a difficult environment, but a functional one. Bratton in New York did the same with the police department, insisting that black neighborhoods were not violent, that only poorly policed neighborhoods were violent. This was a lesson that didn’t seep in in Chicago for a decade, but in the last 5 years, we have seen murder rates and even shots fired rates plummeting. While we still have an image of poor black ghettos as hopelessly violent, in Chicago and New York, they are safer than they have ever been in the history of urban black populations.

This milieu of the evisceration and to some degree the regeneration of our public institutions will be of much greater importance to poor black people than the final destruction of every last vestige of racism. Irish and Italians people didn’t break out of their shantytowns by ending anti-Catholic prejudice — they took advantage of the GI bill, and of the ‘lace-curtain Irish’ exception, and then when there were suddenly loads of educated Irish and Italians around, the prejudice broke of its own weight. A prejudice that admits to large exceptions and loopholes (unlike the racism of past decades) is not insurmountable. What was insurmountable for the last three decades was the ingrained cynicism of the lower ranks of the bureaucracy. In this setting, the instinct to call things racist obscures much more than it clears up. Vallas didn’t turn the school system around by saying, you teachers are a bunch of left-over racists. He said, we’re getting rid of anyone who isn’t committed to the primacy of education in our schools. Bratton didn’t say, ya fuckin’ racist cops. He just told his commanders that if they had a lot of shots fired in their neighborhoods, they needed to ask for help until they figured out a way to make it stop.

This is some of what I mean by keeping things concrete. There is too much about the media narrative of racism, and not enough about what things would actually help. We’re in a setting where most people are no longer consciously racist, and reminding them that they’re still white pricks, even if they are, even if I am, isn’t nearly as constructive as reminding them that they damn well better respond to shots fired like a good cop, or they’ll lose their jobs.

;(

things are a product of how they began and how they develop, the entire scope of the progression and reach of the affects that are created make up what defines the reality of what it is, now.

and toward the end the examples of what you call ’today’s situation’ are examples of ’classification’ which are the basis of a form of prejudice, be it positive or negative, which is a form of racism.

you sound a little detached in your observations.

i think you’re missing the big picture, but i don’t think it’s of your own doing.

read more about it, dig a little deeper into it, get to know some of your book club people a little more personally.

then look at it again.

(on obama’s church’s website, i think it’s tcc.com or org, i went into the bookstore section, very interesting, i hadn’t read a lot of the books in there. black culture, black history. interesting. pick a few author’s names and go to the library.)

go dodd

perhaps you could provide proof that Senator Obama shares your same proclivities…

sheesh.