The Wright Response...

I have been spending the day trying to wrap my mind around the Barack Obama Jeremiah Wright situation...

It's tough, but one thing that has become evident is that this issue exposes a lot of fault lines in the black community. As much as we talk about the diversity in the Black community we don't actually discuss the differences in the things that make up the Black experience while judging which aspects are valid and if there is a right answer.

My impressions are this... Too often young negroes too easily dismiss the struggles of older African Americans, but also many times too many young successful negroes don't recognize the struggles that were truly matters of age and those that are matters of income. It kills me to hear the judgmental rants about why couldn't Reverend Wright just keep his mouth shut which leads to the eternal question of whether or not the election of Barack Obama is a definite "good."

The underlying question is how much of a person's racial identity must they renounce in order to become President? and the follow up being at what point is it too much to give up? Now I do not believe this is a major question for Barack because his Black identity is a fairly new thing that is not fundamentally a part of who he is, it is an intellectual cloak he put on and can change for one that fits him better which may indeed be this "post racial" Tiger Woods being.

But I am negro, son of slave, and I believe in White Supremacy. Does that make me anti American? Does that make me a conspiracy theorist? Does not my education and intellect lend credence to what I believe or is believing something that is so far from what the mainstream is willing to accept nullify all of my years of schooling and the book that I have read? I mean if we are fair, arguments for God sound ridiculous. Especially if you state them like Bill Maher.

But I believe in God, I believe in Jesus, the facts of what I have seen in the world make it easy for me. Just like I can believe that certain acts of fundamental racism are possible, even if some are more likely than others. I am bothered by the belief that this makes me irrational. I am bothered by the fact that when faced with the Tuskegee experiment, cointelpro, the bombing of black wall street, agent orange, and the Iran contra fiasco that it could so easily be called ridiculous that an agency of the government was using AIDS against the Black community. See you can't have it both ways... You can't acknowledge the "wrongs" of the past without seeing that there was a point when everything that was proven to have occurred was at one point considered as ridiculous as this argument.

But that is just it, some things are real, some things are not, but we have to be careful with what we belittle, especially when it comes from an experience that is not like our own. And that is the issue with the so-called Black Experience, the young bougie experience is different from the young poor, depending on how you got to older upper middle class, your perspective can be different. The civil rights era icons are different from the reagan era Blacks, and this is not dealing with the differences between Black Americans, West Indians, or Africans, much less the individual countries inside the larger groups.

Jeremiah Wright once said that "Your Perspective determines your Perception." Mine as the grandson of a Baptist Pastor, and the son of a Black intellectual has me currently quite dismayed. I know the argument that I should make. I know the right thing to say, but when dealing with the complexities of the racial discussion and emotions caused by this entire fiasco there is only one thought that comes to mind.

God...
Damn...
America...