Racial Resentment with Wright's Sermons: The Polite Label for White Racism?

Barack Obama really did have a transcendental racial appeal, but it was way back in 2004, at the time of the Democratic National Convention, when he was a relative unknown.

He could afford, then, to enunciate a true vision of racial equality that called forth both social reform and personal responsibility. Indeed, Obama could fire up the Democratic Party base by taking it to "de man" while simultaneously assuaging the powerful white racial guilt honed by decades of black racial victimology.

When does it all end?

Not soon, if this weekend's racial hornet's nest surrounding the 40-year commemoration of Martin Luther King's assassination is any indication.

I'm frankly still amazed at the commentary I read advancing the unmitigated racist society meme common among black intellectuals.

A prime example is this comment from Michael Dawson following Obama's Philadelphia speech on race and religion following the backlash against Reverend Wright's black liberation America-bashing (via Jacob Levy):

I'm worried it was it too little, too late.

It was too little in that while addressing race it equated white racial resentment (which scholars know is really just a more polite label for white racism) with the black anger and skepticism that comes out of past and current racial discrimination.

I suspect blacks will give Obama a break on this score, but those comments will not satisfy those large segments of white America that harbor racial resentment. It was too little when he argued that we can move forward toward racial justice for all without the "need to recite…the history of racial injustice."

It was too little because even though he strongly and correctly argued that today's racial disadvantage is based on the white supremacy of the past, we know that many, many whites do not connect the black situation today to either the injustices of the past or the present.

The history must be retold if a case is to be made to explain black disadvantage in this period. It was unfortunate when he implied that blacks were not willing to come together in multi-racial coalitions now or in the past. In the great populist and labor multi-racial coalitions of the late 19th century and early 20th century, during the Civil Rights era, and in modern times it was whites liberals and progressives that walked away from those coalitions with the predictable result of sparking much greater support for black nationalist movements such as those of Marcus Garvey, the Black Power movement, and Min. Louis Farrakhan.

Dawson's one of the top political scientists working on politics and race, which is one of the reasons I find his views unproductive.

Recent polls indicate huge majorities favorable toward an African-American presidential candidate this year. For example, in February 2007, just 6 percent said they'd be "less likely" to support a black candidate for the presidency in 2008. In addition, one of the big election stories this year in the Democratic primaries was the collapse of the "Bradley thesis." Why didn't voters go for Barack Obama after his powerful surge in Iowa? Racial "resentment? It's more likely that a women's "sympathy vote" helped Hillary Clinton come back after her poor showing in the Hawkeye State.

Dawson's at the Univeristy of Chicago, but he's formally of Harvard, having left there after University President Larry Summers was pilloried for suggesting innate gender differences in research productivity in the hard sciences. One doesn't want want to be associated with that type of intolerant scholarly environment, no siree. Not only that, there's a racial grievance project behind such resentment (or, in Ruth Wisse's words, an accusation of bias like this, "advanced by feminists and often accepted at face value by the academic community, attempts to transform guarantees of equal opportunity into a demand for equal outcome").

But hey, people don't want to talk about that.

I wonder if it ever occurs to folks like Dawson that white Americans just don't care to hear such black theological truths, such as, "Racism is alive and well. Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run." Perhaps they might prefer their sermons without such fanatical chants as, "America is still the No. 1 killer in the world ... We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."

No, I imagine folks are in no mind to carry much truck with such racial animosity. Who needs it, especially decades after America's historic commiment to racial equality has produced a vigorous African-American middle class, black executives and scholars like Dawson and Michael Eric Dyson, all part and parcel to the statistical evidence of the dramatic progress African-Americans have made since then?

See also my earlier post, "Will the Real MLK Please Stand Up?," as well as some of the other related commentary at Memeorandum.