8/2/09

When the Jeremiah Wright controversy first came to light I was certain it meant Barack Obama could not be elected president. He could not have spent 20 years in a black racist church if he did not agree with Rev. Wright's view of America.  I was wrong because I underestimated how eager Americans were to move beyond our racist past. Obama, because of his unique personal experiences, represented an opportunity that could not be ignored.

Shelby Steele writes in the Wall Street Journal (From Emmett Till to Skip Gates) that Obama reminds him of Dr. Strangelove. Steele says:

"Where race is concerned, I sometimes think of the president as the Peter Sellers character in 'Dr.Strangelove.'  Sellers plays a closet Nazi whose left arm –quite involuntarily–keeps springing up into the Heil Hitler salute. We see him in his wheelchair, his right arm–the good and decent arm–struggling to keep the Nazi arm down so that no one will know the truth of his inner life.  These wrestling matches between the good and bad arms were hysterically funny.

When I saw Mr.Obama–with every escape route available to him–wade right into the Gates affair at the end of his health-care news conference, I knew that his demon arm had momentarily won out over his good arm. It broke completely free–into full salute–in the 'acted stupidly' comment that he made in reference to the Cambridge police's handling of the matter.  Here was the implication that whites were such clumsy and incorrigible racists that even the most highly achieved blacks lived in constant peril of racial humiliation. This was a cultural narrative, a politics, and in the end it was a bigotry.  It let white Americans see a president who doubted them.

Mr. Obama's 'post-racialism' was a promise to operate outside of tired cultural narratives.  But he has a demon arm of reflexive racialism–identity politics, Rev. Jeremiah Wright and now Skip Gates. You can only put a demon like this to death by finding out what you really believe. We should hold Mr. Obama to his post-racialism, and he should get to know himself well enough to tell us what he really means by it."

It is instructive that the New York Times, which is always anxious to find proof that America is a racist society, has not commented editorially on the Cambridge incident. Steele begins his column by wondering why a nation involved with so many large concerns (health reform, economy, nuclear proliferation) would stop to comb over "a six-minute encounter between a black academic and white policeman."

Obama's skepticism about America extends beyond race relations. He does not trust doctors, insurance companies, or anyone involved in the business of earning profits. He is distrustful of our motives in foreign policy.  The demon arm is postmodern as well as racial.