You know, when you see it in this context....Philonise Floyd: "I feel relieved today."
— Eli Stokols (@EliStokols) April 20, 2021
He says he's thinking of Emmett Till, "the first George Floyd."
Obama's memoir of his first campaign for the presidency (which is as far as I've gotten) puts his first experience with the more controversial statements of the Rev. Wright in a context of his campaign and how those comments, reported by Rolling Stone, affected his nascent run in the primaries. But immediately after that (he relates spends three pages on it), his chronology conveniently allows him to put Rev. Wright in the context of other black pastors, more public veterans of the civil rights movement:
Maybe if the Rolling Stone article had come out earlier, foreshadowing problems to come, I would have decided not to run. It's hard to say. I do know that--in a bit of irony, or perhaps providence--it was another pastor and close friend of Reverend Wright's, Dr. Otis Moses, Jr., who helpd me push through my doubts.
That paragraph leads into another three page discussion where Obama relates the counsel he received from Dr. Moss, who frankly gets better shrift than Rev. Wright did. Moss's advice is less "prophetic" than Wright's preaching at his church. Moss tells Obama that he, Obama, is "part of the Joshua generation," where Moss and Dr. King were part of the "Moses generation." But Obama experiences this in purely political terms:
More practically, it was thanks to the willingness of Dr. Moss and other former colleagues of Dr. King's--like Reverend C.T. Vivian of Atlanta and Reverend Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference--to lay their proverbial hands on me, vouching for me as an extension of their historic work, that more Black leaders didn't swing early into Hillary's camp.
Obama even implicitly addresses, and rejects, Rev. Wright's ideas by quoting extensively, but selectiely, from a sermon by Rev. Lowery that Obama attended at the commemoration of the march across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, in 2007.
"Let me tell you," he began, "some crazy things are happening out there. People say certain things ain't happening, but who can tell? Who can tell?""Preach now, Reverend," someone shouted from the audience.
Lowery relates an anecdote about visting the doctor and finding out there is "good" cholestorol and "bad" cholestorol, and from that he launches into an analogy:
"But like cholestorol," he continued, "there's good crazy and bad crazy, see? Harriet Tubman with the Underground Railroad, she was as crazy as she could be! And Paul, when he preached to Agrippa, Agrippa said 'Paul, you crazy'...but it was a good crazy."The crowd began to clap and cheer as Reverend Lowery brought it home."And I say to you today that we need more folks in this country who are a good crazy...You can't tell what will happen when you get the folks with some good crazy...to go to the polls to vote!"
Obama is putting Wright in a context, and implicitly separating himself from Wright's bad crazy, in order to benefit electorally from good crazy. There's nothing implicitly wrong with that. But it distinquishes Obama, the unchurched self-identified Christian, from Biden, the lifelong and still devoted Catholic Christian.
Obama puts himself comfortably in the context of the American civil rights struggle, but he discounts the religious root of that struggle. True, he mentions the civil rights leaders he meets, and who accept him as a potential leader, are pastors and ministers; but he doesn't understand what that means. He's closer to Trump than not, though he doesn't go so far as to exploit religion the way Trump did. Obama only speaks of a metaphorical "laying on of hands," a practice he honestly doesn't seem to understand any more than Trump did; but Trump made sure his actual ceremony was recorded, so he could brag about it. I actually had hands laid on me when I was ordained, and it is not something you can take lightly, or ever again refer to metaphorically. It's not a sacrament, because it is not for the people, not part of leitourgia, the work of the people. But it is as powerful as any sacrament I've ever experienced, and it is unique, non-repeatable. Obama uses the metaphor because he's heard of it, and he wants to steal it's import for himself. It's rather telling that I can't imagine Joe Biden ever being so figurative; nor Jimmy Carter, two of the most religious Presidents we've had in my lifetime.
I'm not trying to denigrate Obama, just distinguish him. Between Obama and Biden we have Trump, and one President led to him as surely as the other President is determinedly leading us away from him. I don't blame Obama for Trump; we the people did that. But there are curious similarities between the two men, similarities common to a secular environment and the nature of American politics (an indelible nature in many ways), that you don't see in Joe Biden. It is those small differences that are so significant, that are so important right now.
Biden's comments about the Chauvin verdict put events in a context that reaches back at least to Emmett Till. That's precisely before my time, because I was born the year Mr. Till was murdered. The pain of that murder is still alive among Blacks today; and that's understandable. In fact, it's partly because of that context that Obama couldn't speak to the civil rights struggle that never really ended, the way Biden can. Had Obama spoken the way Biden did last night, the outrage would have been trained on the messenger. "You lie!" would have been the cry, and not just in the halls of Congress. Think again about the Obama Administration. Has Mitch McConnell promised, again, to make Joe Biden a one-term President? Why not? He claimed his remark was wholly anodyne, that he spoke only as a political partisan and member of the opposition party. Really? Was that all? And where is the "genius" of Mitch McConnell, his ability to work the minority in the Senate as rigorously as he worked the majority? Why is he suddenly so powerless and ineffective against a much more liberal white man in the Oval Office, than he was against the centrist first Black President? 12 years older, is he? Lost a step, has he?
Yeah, I don't think so either. But what Biden said about systemic racism we can now hear, "thanks" (I use the word advisedly) to George Floyd, but also thanks to the fact Biden is not a black man. We white people will listen to a white man address race in America (well, some of us will). Black men sound too "angry," just like women still sound too "shrill" (Vice President Harris is already being advised to smile more). We have a long way to go. My brief here is that we will not get there this way:
Or this way:It must be a living force in other cases. It must be a living force in the history of the law. It must be a living force that draws the ugly past and the ugly present forward into a better future. https://t.co/YgFIe2gqLa via @CharlesPPierce
— Esquire (@esquire) April 20, 2021
Salutary as those sentiments are. No, this is not a time for sentiment or good intentions or even self-examination on a national scale. "Ask not what your country can do for you," John Kennedy said, "but what you can do for your country." A lovely sentiment (I heard it repeated in PSA's in my childhood, and even I was stirred by it as a child), but hardly a lasting one. We listened; and then we became yuppies, and the '70's happened (a time of extreme political violence, despite the only memories of it being disco and John Travolta dancing), which gave way to the '80's, and then the '90's; and you can draw a straight line from that decade to where we are now. No, this is not a time for sentiments: this is a time for a change of heart.Bearing witness forces us to act on our fundamental duties to each other as citizens, and our fundamental duties as human beings. https://t.co/DbnVphADB8
— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) April 21, 2021
Can we do that? We can only try. And what is the venue for that? The only one I know is through religion. Will we make that effort? It's the only way I know to reach "A Promised Land."
Walter Brueggemann, in one of his lecture-sermons I listened to a while back contrasts the Zion framing of the Law with the Sinai framing of the Law, Zion being the Temple-political establishment and the Sinai faction being those who prophetically counter it with the more radical egalitarianism of the Books of Moses. Rev. Wright would, in my opinion, represent the Sinai framing whereas Obama is more comfortable with the Temple-political elite framing of things. I wouldn't necessarily follow Obama's interpretation of Rev. Lowrey and the Christian Leadership people, I think he might be seeing them through his own lens or framing.
ReplyDeleteI can see no other way forward except through The Law, the Prophets, The Gospel, perhaps through Islam though I would have to see some practical progress made through Islam of the kind that will take in the United States. I think that in Muslim majority countries any progress will have to be done in the context of Islam, that's just a fact. More than ten years ago I wrote a piece to that effect for Echidne's blog and, as I recall, it was not a popular idea.
Secularism is a dead end, totally and intrinsically.
Blogger ate my first reply (it does that), but I especially like your Sinai v. Zion frame.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, Obama implicitly presents Lowrey, et al., in contrast to Wright, to make Obama look better and to wash off even more of the "stink" of Wright that, since at least 2007, he's always resented having attached to him. He seems even more dismissive in his memoir than he was during his first Presidential campaign.
I have seen a couple of posts on the Derek Chauvin trial where people have made a distinction between justice and accountability. I tend to agree that the verdict was to hold Chauvin accountable for this actions, but it doesn't represent justice. Justice is a much harder. Even if George Floyd lived, he still lived in a world of injustice. As this year has hammered home, to be a person of color in America is to live with constant injustice. To be poor in America is to live with injustice. His addiction may have flowed from the injustices he suffered, but has its own forms of injustice. In Rev. Wright I see a call for justice, so much more than accountability. Again I am reminded of the Reinhold Niebuhr quote, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope." I don't think even approaching racial justice in America will be accomplished in my life time, or even my children's lifetimes. But I do see this in the words of Rev. Wright, that we must move toward that justice.
ReplyDeleteRacism in America is ultimately a white society problem. Obama could never speak as directly to it as Biden. The victims need to speak their stories and call for justice, but it is ultimately the perpetrators (or those that stand aside) that must deliver that justice.
I have prayed for George Floyd's friends and family, for those that loved and miss him. I have also tried (and mostly failed) to pray for Derek Chauvin. In that hope for justice, there must be a hope for even Derek Chauvin to be saved. Not in some "come to Jesus" saving, but in an awakening, an awareness of his actions and an atonement. For if there isn't that hope of that kind of being saved in him, how cant there be in our society or even myself. In the wake of the George Floyd murder, the leader of the denomination I currently attend called racism an existential crisis for those that believe. An existential crisis for whites that believe. It is by believing it goes to the heart of our faith, that I think we have any chance to move forward so that maybe my grandchildren or greatgrandchildren can live in a better world.
(I received Obama's book for Christmas, but given my current life living apart from my family for work, the pandemic and so much more it hasn't yet been opened. Thankfully there is finally progress. We sold our house last month, and bought a house this week (the housing market is insane, only buy if you are under duress). We should move this summer. Maybe then I can pick up the book)
And as proof we haven't really gone all that far, this is our local school system our two youngest children attend.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.rochesterfirst.com/news/education/4th-grade-worksheet-in-pittsford-on-colonial-slavery-highly-insensitive-in-tone/