Conservatives like Charles Krauthammer and Michael Gerson have claimed in recent Washington Post columns that in his March 18th speech on race, Barack Obama tried to equate his grandmother’s fear of Black males passing on the street and Geraldine Ferraro’s comments about Obama’s political fortunes being based on his blackness with the “vitriolic and anti-American” comments of his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. He didn’t do that. What he did was describe the roots and expressions of racial resentment that Americans carry with them and suggest that at least some of them stem from legitimate fears. By acknowledging and validating these sentiments he tried to open up a conversation about race that begins with a mutual concession- all Americans have felt pain, resentment, invisibility and misunderstanding connected to their race at some point and the beginning of healing is the validation of all of those emotions and reactions on all sides.
Analogies are often inexact, clumsy and dangerous. In the U.S. attempts to take contemporary episodes of injustice and drawing parallels to First Nation dispossession, Black chattel slavery, or the Holocaust are particularly fraught with political landmines. Now conservatives would like to add to this list whites who have lost careers for making racial insensitive comments, victims of ‘reverse racism’ due to affirmative action policies, and taxpayers who have seen their money go to support things like busing, generous welfare handouts, benefits for undocumented immigrants and shelters for the homeless- all of which benefit irresponsible colored people at the expense of middle class Whites. Their point? We’re all victims of racism, therefore, no one is a victim of racism.
I have written against the notion of hierarchies of oppression. Playing one- ups- manship when dialoguing with others over the pain of repression and injustice cheapens all of our struggles for liberation from domination. But this position is different from claiming that all groups in society have been oppressed or that all episodes of oppression are equal. The notion that the relatively mild discrimination that German or Swedish Americans have faced over the course of U.S. history is the equivalent of slavery or the near genocide of the First Nation peoples of the North American continent is full of shit. This is the kind of false equivalence that conservatives love to make in their campaign to diminish the historic and present day legacy of White supremacy. Full of shit yes, but plenty of folks are eager to believe it and so they do.
Racism is not about hate- that’s bigotry- it’s about believing in innate, biologically based racial traits that make certain groups superior to others. Normal people don’t hate flies. They’re just sometimes annoyed by them. They avoid them, swat them when they get in their face and- if they begin to multiply too close to home- find ways to sequester and kill them en masse. The White supremacist views Blacks and Latinos like they view flies. Hate is an all consuming emotion reserved for real enemies. The White folks who do hate Blacks or Latinos are bigots- just like Blacks who hate Whites. They hate precisely because they feel impotent and powerless not because they feel superior.
Obama erred not because he tried to get folks on all sides to acknowledge the validity of some of the race based fears and anger of others as a first step towards moving forward, but because he didn’t fully contextualize the fear and anger that gave his pastor’s words credibility in the Black community. In his speech Obama declines “to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country.” But he missed an important opportunity by declining to do so. Assuming that Americans know anything about history, particularly the darker sides of it, is assuming quite a lot. Without knowledge of this history and cultural setting Wright’s words do appear vitriolic and nasty. Alas, first and foremost Obama is a smart politician running for President. Observers should get use to witnessing the many ways in which this fact will override his ‘teacher as idealist’ persona. Roger White, March 2008