The pastor and the grandmother

In Obama's speech on race yesterday, the comparison between his pastor and his grandmother seems to be a sticking point, at least for Joan Walsh and Mickey Kaus. I even heard Juan Williams on NPR this morning saying that this comparison was weak. I thought it was brilliant.

Here's the passage from the speech:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

Here's Walsh:

I don't think Obama's elderly grandmother, who still lives in Hawaii and is reportedly too frail to travel, who was a product of her time and place and yet did her best to raise her half-black grandson, deserved to be compared to Wright, a public figure who's built his career around a particularly divisive analysis of American racial politics. It is easily the most tin-eared thing I've ever heard Obama say.

Here's Kaus:

The most disastrous sentence in the speech. If Obama's saying that those who fear young black men on the street are racists, the equivalents of Rev. Wright in offensiveness, then he's just insulted a whole lot of people. If he loses the votes of everyone who fears young black men, he loses the election. People fear black men on the street--as even Jesse Jackson once momentarily admitted--because they cause a wildly disproportionate share of street crime.

I think these criticisms reveal an inability to appreciate the shift from the objective to the personal that Obama's best speeches manage to accomplish. Obama was trying to describe his pastor as a human being rather than a public figure. He goes on to describe the deep-seated resentment that many African Americans feel towards this country. This resentment breeds bitterness and anger, and a Black man who grew up in a segregated world is not immune from that anger. Wright is someone who can disseminate the healing strengths of spiritual renewal at its best, but who has a blind spot rooted in deep and long-lasting wounds. This puts his angry comments into perspective as understandable, if still wrong and unreasonable.

At the other end of the spectrum, Joan and Mickey seem to see the old woman's fears as relatively trivial. Mickey says straight out what Joan seems to be thinking, that it's reasonable to fear Black men. But I don't think they get the point here. I don't care whether an old woman's fears are more reasonable than an old man's anger. Whether or not our fears or angers are reasonable, they cause racial division nonetheless.

But here's the core of what I want to say, what these critics don't seem to appreciate about how important the grandmother example is: it's HIS OWN GRANDMOTHER, who at some points raised him and loves him, who has said to him that she's afraid of people like him. Can you appreciate that? Have you ever had someone who loves you tell you that they are afraid of your race?

Obama gets that she is still his family, and that she still loves him deeply. And the underlying point is that Black people, with all of their anger, are part of the American family. White people, with all of their resentment about race, are part of the family.

Does Obama have to join a White church to be accepted by these White critics? Because my guess is that there isn't a Black church in this country that doesn't occasionally encompass the kind of anger that Wright has expressed. We have met the enemy, people, and he is us.

•  To be accepted by them

  he has to do what they tell him, and since he's not, it doesn't matter what he says. They've made up their minds about what they want to do with him.

  by Seeds on Wed Mar 19, 2008 at 08:58:00 AM PDT

•  Puttin the merits aside for the moment,

  your position seems to be the following: (1) people shouldn't hold beliefs that are divisive; (2) there are beliefs that are divisive but reasonable; ergo (c) people shouldn't hold certain reasonable beliefs.

  The corollary is that people should hold unreasonable beliefs for the sake of racial harmony.  I don't think it's too speculative to suggest that that probably won't garner too much applause.

  by burrow owl on Wed Mar 19, 2008 at 09:01:08 AM PDT

  •  Reasonable is different than wise

    I think it's important to both 1) understand where people are coming from and to empathize with the pain and the fears that motivate them--to see how their beliefs are "reasonable" and 2) aspire to something better than the sum of our collective reasonable fears. In this context, the opposite of "reasonable" isn't "unreasonable"--it's hope.

    by Lawprofsr on Wed Mar 19, 2008 at 09:31:30 AM PDT

•  It was the line of the speech that moved me most

  It was a powerful statement because it showed that we all have these people from a previous generation who are deeply flawed individuals, but good down to their core and they're part of us, and part of our country, and we have to teach them, but not abandon them.

  It was a very Christian moment.

  by stephdray on Wed Mar 19, 2008 at 09:01:36 AM PDT

•  The people who

  objected to that line are either professional objectors are listening with tin ears. We'll see who wins the media debate on this, though. Will we see white grandmas suddenly outraged at being tarred as racist--that would be the non-thinking way of looking at this, the knee-jerk way. Sadly that does still happen all too often.

  But it's definitely more complex than that. One can have several things going on simultaneously. Obama's grandmother's fears about black men may have had some basis in reality AND AT THE SAME TIME would legitimately hurt her grandson, who is a black man. This kind of complexity happens all the time.

  by JMS on Wed Mar 19, 2008 at 09:07:10 AM PDT

  •  All of that sounds about right.

    eom.

    by burrow owl on Wed Mar 19, 2008 at 09:12:08 AM PDT

•  Wondering

  if those same commentators had been alive to listen to an inaugural speech that took place in March of 1933,  if they would have come away saying something like "We need to be fearful".  

  by evdebs on Wed Mar 19, 2008 at 09:08:45 AM PDT

•  Walsh doesn't get

  Although I don't approve of Jeremiah Wright's statements, as an African American I certainly understand them.

  What Walsh doesn't want to get is Wright is very much a product of his time too.  Her reasoning is intellectually dishonest.

  And he is no more a public figure than my mother.  The ONLY reason he can be perceived that way is because of the news coverage.

  As for Kaus, ignorance is bliss.  What he fails to realize is that Jackson had a reason to make that statement.  Most crimes committed by African-Americans are committed AGAINST African Americans.

  Pathetic.

  by EntrWriter on Wed Mar 19, 2008 at 09:34:40 AM PDT

•  the lowest point in the career of Joan Walsh

  a white woman born in 1922, in the United States of America gets a pass on racism because, ya know, she was a product of her time.

  Yet a black man born in 1941, who served in the marines, experienced the inhumane treatment of Jim Crow, perservered despite the setbacks, and built a career on BLACK EMPOWERMENT... well he's not allowed to be resentful according to Walsh.

  its the same old bullshit.

  by tcandew on Wed Mar 19, 2008 at 11:06:47 AM PDT