The Real "Wright" Problem

Thanks to Reverend Wright and the media's appetite for the ridiculous coverage surrounding him, the nation must continue to endure this manufactured controversy surrounding Barack Obama. Some polls are showing that he is slipping a bit in North Carolina and that this is attributable to it, but then again polls are polls and nothing really counts like the actual vote that is slowly approaching.

Nevertheless, Hillary Clinton is playing along with the media on this, appearing on one of the most vile Fox News shows, The O'Reilly Factor. In the episode the not-so-covert racist continues to harp on the Wright effect and Hillary happily plays along. Though one must wonder if there is something deeper going on in the media and conservative circles that buzz on about Obama's relationship with Wright. What might that be?

From Too Sense:

I'm sure you've seen the video of Obama denoucning Wright yesterday, and the emerging narrative seems to be that Obama wasn't forceful enough when he said this:

You know, I have been a member of Trinity United Church of Christ since 1992. I have known Reverend Wright for almost 20 years. The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago. His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church.

They certainly don't portray accurately my values and beliefs. And if Reverend Wright thinks that that's political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn't know me very well. And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I may not know him as well as I thought, either

Of course he wasn't. What people want is not for Obama to denounce Wright, but to denounce black people everywhere who have the gall to be angry at America for how they are and have been treated. What they wanted Obama to say was that racism is uneqivocally a black problem, that white people have moved past it but that black people cling to greivances as an excuse for out of wedlock births, unemployment, or incarceration.

It doesn't matter that rhetorically and policy-wise, Obama has struck the right balance between personal and governmental responsibility. It doesn't matter that he's confronted black anti-Semitism, black homophobia, black apathy. When Obama dared to mention that white people might harbor irrational prejudices of their own--he was pilloried by conservatives and liberals everywhere who don't want to feel guilty suspecting every black teenager of being a drug dealer for "throwing his grandmother under the bus."

It really does boil down to that fear in the dominant white portion of society that does not want to accept their responsibility for racial inequalities in our nation. It is the same thing that triggers the decision for the cops in the Sean Bell trial, for Internal Affairs letting the LAPD off for racial profiling and it goes on and on. As long as the dominant white society does not come to grips with the inequality that continues in our country, this crap will go on indefinitely.

For now, those that pull the strings at the very top will continue to exploit people like Reverend Wright to keep the bottom 90 percent down by fracturing us along racial and gender lines while they hold on to the majority of power in the United States. That is the sad reality we must confront head on and destroy.