Is Obama Wrong About Wright?

Most white people and the mainstream media tend to be horrified (in a titillating voyeuristic type of way), when they 'look under the hood' to see what's really on blacks folks' mind. Two thirds of whites believe that blacks have achieved or will soon achieve racial equality. Nearly eighty percent of blacks believe that racial justice for blacks will not be achieved either in their lifetime or at all in the U.S. In March 2003, when polls were showing strong support among whites for an invasion of Iraq, a large majority of blacks were shown to oppose military intervention

the problem is that Wright's opinions are well within the mainstream of those of black America. As public opinion researchers know, the problem is that despite all the oratory about racial unity and transcending race, this country remains deeply racially divided, especially in the realm of politics

So Barack Obama is wrong. Reverend Wright does not represent outdated thinking. The critical views he expresses are all too rooted in the present. The racial divisions that Obama seeks to transcend with his message of hope and unity are not a feature of the past, but a deep structural fixture in this nation's present.

Obama will be continually called upon by the mainstream media to prove that he's not a nationalist like Minister Farrakhan, or an Afrocentric leftist like Reverend Wright. The suspicion will always be that he holds opinions closer to those expressed by Rev. Wright than those he is voicing in the campaign.

Consequently, if the Obama campaign wishes to bring this campaign to a successful conclusion, it will have to realize that it cannot run away from the issue of race and racial division, but will have to find a language that both addresses our hopes for the future while recognizing the difficulties and divisions of the present. The nation's in real trouble if its politicians and pundits continue to believe that that the only road to racial harmony is through denying the past and refusing to discuss the injustices of the present.

Michael C. Dawson