weighing in

I have some thoughts on the whole ’reverend’ thing.

First off, how exactly do we still apply ’reverend’ to people who don’t even preach a religion. I’m not sure what that was, but it’s mostly annoying if not insulting. Big Al has the same process of doublespeak. So does Jesse. Neither supports Obama. Weird. Maybe now they will.

His speech, what snippets I caught of it, was typically good. The man can definitely fire up the rhetoric. It was an appeal to a reasoned debate on the realities of race and its current impact on society. People are fed up on either side with the continued importance of race to begin with. I’m not sure I can accept that this is necessarily his view (because I don’t know that he writes his own copy). But the acknowledgments and reasoned message that he delivered was perfectly acceptable. There are issues with how we have attempted to deal with racism. By placing importance on race, even for ’reverse’ discrimination, we utterly fail to get past it as a useful criteria for assessing personal character and potential. There are real and potential divisions that must be assessed and dealt with. They will change. They won’t change as long as an impulse and political appeal to blame ’white’ people for often self-inflicted problems persists. Asians don’t have these problems. Muslims don’t have these problems (in America). Other immigrant groups have historically assimilated and achieved. Blacks did as well at different points in our history. Slavery was over 140 years ago, and ended much more recently in other parts of the world which have much less racial tension than here.
Obama’s speech describes the immaturity of our attempts to resolve our own. We’re pretty stupid. There are ’white people’ (I use the quotes because like ’black people’ it’s a bland and useless generalization) who commit acts of overt and implicit racism or bigotry. And as the reverend(s) show, the same is true of blacks. Eventually these people will have less and less influence and less to show for it. There’s always some hesitation with obvious differences (humans are wired that way from our tribal days), but I think that can be overridden over time.

Next problem. People saying ’he didn’t go far enough’ to denounce this man. I actually would have taken a different tack than distancing myself. I would have attached myself. Not to what the man said, but to the person himself. It is not necessary that people have friends and associates that have the same thoughts and opinions as I do. Its a helluva lot easier (mostly because I’m fairly convincing I suspect), but it’s certainly not essential. Intellectuals tend to collect weird opinions around them in some manner, whether by accident or on purpose. The reason people say he doesn’t go far enough really relates to the lack of understanding that faith may play in his life. It probably does not. Not nearly so much as it does to these religious news dolts who call themselves conservatives (they are only on economics). It is not necessary to have a pastor, reverend, imam or whatever who plays an essential role. He did appoint him to some spiritual/moral role on his campaign. I would suppose that’s both to give the appearance of its importance but also to recognize a long standing relationship in some way. Their argument that he should have changed churches or whatever based on disagreements does not hold water on a personal level. It does have some validity for politics, because these are not messages that people should be communicating and validating publicly. Ok, well we already know he has some poor judgment (he admitted being a doper growing up) and he tends toward a more Marxist interpretation both in his record and rhetoric. But I’m not going to complain about this silly issue.

That is a failing that he can be faulted for. Not what the reverend said. But how he dealt with him publicly up until this past week. Ok, whatever. Move on to something else more pressing please. And would somebody start the Libertarian primary or cover it somewhere.