Obama’s Bargain
March 18, 2008
What is Barack Obama to make of the good pastor Jeremiah Wright?
The virulent, angry protestations that spewed from his mouth just five days after the tragic events of September 11, 2001 would seem harmless had his church not counted among its congregation the leader for the presidential nomination a mere seven years later. Thus, Barack Obama, on the cusp of the most powerful position on the planet, had to craft and articulate a speech to the rest of the world that he is the answer to solve our "race problem."
“I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas” Obama said in his race speech, realizing that he at once must prove his black authenticity while simultaneously comforting the “souls of white folk.” He then added that, “I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations,” again, reassuring both sides---to paraphrase: “I’ve been to school with whites and have lived with blacks.”
Obama’s meteoric rise is due largely in part to his ability to transcend race, to bring about unity and to offer America’s racist progeny a reprieve from its past. Obama, in most aspects, is exactly what America needs. He is an articulate and passionate person, no question about that. He has the “it factor” and regardless of how you feel about politics, he exudes a certain inner strength of caring for everyone. This is why his pastor has put his aspirations in jeopardy and why Obama felt he needed to make such a Martin Luther King type speech.
Obama repeated that he had already condemned “in unequivocal terms” the rhetoric of his spiritual mentor. The question then becomes why? Why should he admonish and distance himself from Jeremiah Wright? After all, it was Wright that strengthened his faith. It was Wright that officiated his wedding. It was Wright that baptized his children. For twenty years, Obama felt at home in Wright’s church that preached the black value system, afro-centrism, and used the black superiority over whites as justification for the extreme rhetoric.
Obama had accomplished what author Shelby Steele refers to as “bargaining.” “Bargainers,” Steele writes, “make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.”
Thus we see Obama caught between a rock and a hard place with his pastor. Obama is intelligent enough to understand that he needs the white vote while at the same time needing to maintain the cultural identity of being a member of the oppressed class. He must adhere to the Christian faith while accepting the “bawdy” rhetoric of his pastor. He must be the insult that many fellow black “leaders” have labeled black conservatives for thinking this way. He runs the risk of being an “oreo,” an “Uncle Tom,” a “house negro,” or worse.
How can Obama admit Wright’s impact on his life in spiritual terms yet deny the impact of twenty years of absorbing Wright’s words in regards to race, whites, Jews, AIDS, Louis Farrakhan, Muslim extremism, etc. This is the ultimate hypocrisy in all of this.
It cannot be underscored, that for twenty years Obama has seen Wright as a mentor. How can we now trust Obama’s plea for unity when his mentor fails this litmus test so miserably? If nothing else, what this controversy has demonstrated, and the subsequent race speech by Obama confirms, is this: Obama has been reduced to something he has campaigned against, that is, he is quintessentially a politician and nothing else. Worse, and possibly more dangerous, he is a politician with duplicitous feelings about race.
While Obama can bathe in the platitudes of hope and unity, he nevertheless has belonged to a church and held to great esteem a pastor that would shun his own mother. This is who he is.
W. Wayne Schields
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