The outrage over sermons by Mr. Wright demonstrates how desperately we as a nation need the dialogue about race that Mr. Obama tried to start with his speech on Tuesday.
Of course, many Americans -- black and white -- are not outraged by those remarks. Many found them exaggerated but not wholly untrue. The real scandal lies not in what Wright said but in the truth found in much of what he shouted and a country's unwillingness to face it. Nicholas Kristof writes:
Many well-meaning Americans perceive Mr. Wright as fundamentally a hate-monger who preaches antagonism toward whites. But those who know his church say that is an unrecognizable caricature: He is a complex figure and sometimes a reckless speaker, but one of his central messages is not anti-white hostility but black self-reliance.
“The big thing for Wright is hope,” said Martin Marty, one of America’s foremost theologians, who has known the Rev. Wright for 35 years and attended many of his services. “You hear ‘hope, hope, hope.’ Lots of ordinary people are there, and they’re there not to blast the whites. They’re there to get hope.”
Professor Marty said that as a white person, he sticks out in the largely black congregation but is always greeted with warmth and hospitality. “It’s not anti-white,” he said. “I don’t know anybody who’s white who walks out of there not feeling affirmed.”
Of course, the hornet's nest stirred up by the repetitive playing of sound bites doesn't come from moral horror but from a crowd reaction to well-calculated political cynicism. No one who knows Jeremiah Wright sees him as anything but a good and effective community leader.
Mr. Wright has indeed made some outrageous statements. But he should be judged as well by his actions — including a vigorous effort to address poverty, ill health, injustice and AIDS in his ministry. Mr. Wright has been frightfully wrong on many topics, but he was right on poverty, civil rights and compassion for AIDS victims.
What should draw much more scrutiny in this campaign than any pastor’s sermons is the candidates’ positions on education, health care and poverty — and their ability to put those policies in place. Cutting off health care benefits for low-income children strikes me as much more offensive than any inflammatory sermon.
Perhaps the most telling and repulsive aspect of the reaction to being pressure-hosed with Wright's sound bites is the reaction the instigators wanted: the guilt-by-association reaction. Barack Obama was the target. This was never about black-white except in the sense that racial prejudice and white ignorance fueled it. Black America has always had to understand whites just in order to get ahead. But whites, on the whole, are quite ignorant about black Americans.
Occasionally, we’ve had glimpses of this gulf between white and black America. Right after the O.J. Simpson murder trial, a CBS News poll found that 6 out of 10 whites thought that the jury had reached the wrong verdict, while 9 out of 10 blacks believed it had decided correctly.
(Well, not all of the whites who wanted OJ to get off thought he was innocent; many thought he was being prosecuted by incompetents and should not be convicted by the case as presented.)
Many African-Americans even believe that the crack cocaine epidemic was a deliberate conspiracy by the United States government to destroy black neighborhoods.
(Not all whites think that belief can be dismissed.)
Much of the time, blacks have a pretty good sense of what whites think, but whites are oblivious to common black perspectives.
What’s happening, I think, is that the Obama campaign has led many white Americans to listen in for the first time to some of the black conversation — and they are thunderstruck.
Listen in. About time.
