Whitey

17Jun08

D @ LGM highlights this particularly insane right wing rant about how it’s totally wrong to defend the use of the term “whitey”. I thought this passage was worth noting:

In Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope he describes the very first sermon he ever heard given by Reverend Wright, the one in which the man said (among other things) “White folks’ greed runs a world in need.” Obama not only quotes the speech approvingly and makes it clear it moved him, but appropriated its title for his book and made it central to his campaign.

That Reverend Wright didn’t say “Whitey’s greed runs a world in need” is irrelevant.

I had hoped the following things were self evident:

  • Greed is a major societal problem
  • White people pretty much run the world
  • Sometimes people being greedy can lead to other people being needy
  • Generally speaking when complaining about people using racial slurs, you need actually find an example of someone using that particular slur.

    • Filed under: Culture, Politics, United States   |  3 Comments
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    3 Responses to “Whitey”  

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    1. 1 gcotharn on June 17, 2008 said:

      The problem with the statement is that Rev. Wright did not say “misguided” folks, “bad” folks, “evil” folks, “fallen” folks, or “fallible” folks.

      Spoken in a vacuum, the statement is no big deal. We all say things we later wish we had phrased differently.

      However, the further problem is the founder of Black Liberation Theology, James Cone, named TUCC as the church which most embodies his BLT message. McClatchey News quotes Cone from the 1980s:

      “Together, black religion and Marxist philosophy may show us the way to build a completely new society.”

      and from April 2008:

      “I’m not a Marxist. . . . I’m a theologian, and I want to change society. I was searching for my way forward. I want a society in which people have the distribution of wealth, but I don’t know how quite to do that institutionally.”

      Here is Cone’s most famous quote:

      “Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community … Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.”

      Our nation is not about institutionally distributing wealth, and our nation is not about a “white enemy”.

      This puts Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s quote into new light. BLT is – still is – THE theology of TUCC. Voters will not believe Barack was absent when BLT economics and politics and theology were preached. I don’t believe it. I believe Barack was attracted to TUCC because of BLT – as evidenced by his citation (in his book: Dreams of My Father) of “White folks greed runs a world in need” as being part of what originally attracted him to TUCC. Barack cited that quote – not in the heat of any moment – but, rather, during the reflective writing of a book. That indicates Barack has a quibble, at some level, with white folks (as opposed to folks who are misguided, bad, evil, fallen, fallible, et al). Consider Barack and Michelle’s premise about how citizens discount and generalize and generally do bad things to “the other.” What is that premise – if not primarily a generalization about and a condemnation of white folks?

      I cannot see into Barack’s heart – and thus would never speculate what is there. However, Barack gives every indication that he has intellectually bought into some racial b/s.

      Reply
    2. 2 christophercolaninno on June 17, 2008 said:

      Alternatively you could base your opinion of Black theology on something more then decades old cherry picked quotes from one author, who isn’t in fact the founder of Black Theology.

      While you’re at it you could base your judgment of Barack Obama on something other one passage in his book where he said he liked a sermon. Such sources of information could include the hundreds of speeches, and interviews he’s given or perhaps a section of one of his books where he says what he thinks about race. You could see if anyone credible that’s ever meet Barack Obama thinks he’s a racist communist. Surely these methods aren’t a reliable the some dude on the internet says so methodology, but there has got to be some way to figure out this pressing issue out.

      Reply
    3. 3 gcotharn on June 17, 2008 said:

      My bad re “founder” of BLT. I was sloppy in my characterization. James Cone is, however, fairly characterized as an imfluential proponent of BLT. I will endeavor to be less sloppy in the future.

      I doubt Barack is racist, insofar as I consider personal racism to be hatred in one’s heart. I’m also confident Barack does not consider either BLT or TUCC to be racist, and possibly you do not, either.

      However, TUCC is a BLT churh, and I consider BLT to be racist ideology. Your point, in your original posting, was to discount the implications of “White folks greed runs a world in need.” My counterpoint is that there is plenty of background context with which to place that quote – not inside a frame of racial hatred of the heart – but, rather, inside a frame of having intellectually bought into racist horse manure.

      Regarding sources, I have read Shelby Steele’s November 2007 book about Barack and race: “A Bound Man”. Maybe some of Steele’s observations will flesh out my point.

      Steele delves extensively into Obama’s excellent early book: “Dreams of My Father.” Obama writes, with some self-knowledge and some self-blindness, of his search to belong to the black identity in America. Steele:

      The issue of race–so nicely contained and deactivated in the Barack Obama political persona–is very much alive within the man. Black identity has been a lifelong preoccupation. By the surface facts of his life–the mixed race background, the childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia–it would be easy to assume that he might be indifferent to the whole business of race and identity. There is a tendency to see Obama as a kind of “new man,” someone spared the fate of being simply black or white in America.
      ~
      But Obama is not such a person. His books show a man driven by a determination to be black, as if blackness were more an achievement than a birthright. And this need within him puts Obama at odds with himself. His plausibility as a candidate comes, in part, from the perception that he is not driven to be black, that he is rather lightly tethered to his race. But the very arc of his life has been greatly influenced by an often conscious resolve to belong irrefutably to the black identity.

      Steele writes that racial pride is a good thing; yet the racial exceptionalism of “black identity” in America (which demonizes and denigrates white people) is a bad thing. Steele writes of the irony of a racial exceptionalism which demands conformity. My paraphrasing:
      to be authentically black, you must denounce your white mother and your white relatives; and you must denounce their values – which might be the very self-reliant values which enabled your success. You must embrace victimhood as virtue. You must embrace victimhood ideas which you know, if you think about them honestly, to be untrue. However, if you don’t wholeheartedly embrace the lies, you cannot belong. You don’t get to be “authentically black.” You are in a bind. You cannot, if you have a drop of black blood in you, belong to the white identity. You cannot, if you refuse to embrace the lies, belong to the black identity.

      Steele says Barack’s fervent desire to be authentically black
      1) leads him to ignore(at least in his political positions) the lessons of self-reliance which aided his achievements, and
      2) REQUIRES that he embrace the victimhood lies, and all the trope which that implies, and all the political positions and programs which go along with the trope.

      Steele in an interview with WaPo:

      The problem here for Barack, of course, is that his racial identity commits him to a manipulation of the society he seeks to lead. To ‘be black,’ he has to exaggerate black victimization in America. . . . Worse, his identity will pressure him to see black difficulties — achievement gaps, high illegitimacy rates, high crime rates, family collapse, and so on — in the old framework of racial oppression.

      More from “A Bound Man”

      That he would join a church this steeped in blackness, with so many other churches available, only underscores his determination to be transparently black.
      ~
      How can Obama sit every week in a church preaching blackness & not object that he was raised quite well, thank you, by three white Midwesterners? Obama is the kind of man who can close down the best part of himself to belong to this black church and, more broadly, to the black identity.

      It’s a bit off topic, but I also liked this

      So Obama is not given to “fresh” or “new” ideas. It is hard to be an iconic Negro and original at the same time. He works within convention not against it. When you are an iconic Negro you are original, not in your thinking, but in your person

      Reply

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