Getting Started

this is a response that i have used in another discussion on a similar topic. this prompt, which is as relevant now as it was when first crafted, originated in all of the hub-bub around reverend wright's comments and senator obama's connection to him. i think it is relevant to your question about, in essence, affirmative action and/or other correctives we might put in place to make up for past/current wrongs. here is what i said:

we can't start the healing, until the wounding stops (johnson, 2002).

that much of our education turns out to be foundationalized by half-truths, shaky rationalizations, or outright lies, but simultaneously masterful in its domestication and dehumanization, I presume, helps lead tens of millions to be frustrated and/or outraged by Rev. Wright's comments. a truth this incisive cuts deep, puncturing our bubbles of 'progress', 'democracy', 'freedom', and all that.

yet, it isn't reverend wright's comments that wound, nor kill. one need only look at our history to find the true culprits of mass murder, exploitation, and cover-up. until we come to grips with this history of power, abuse, and extermination, we can't hear rev. wright, and candidate obama must distance himself from truth.

we can't make the 'racial' progress that obama points to until we come to grips with the stinging facts. we can't progress until we stop doing what we've been doing. we can't make 'racial' progress until we denounce the fantasy of race and, instead, talk about 'racialization' which has consistently provided America with a permanent exploitable and expendable underclass. we can't make racial progress until we deal with white-ness.

this isn't white vs. black. this is power and oppression based on artificial categories necessary to promote a capitalistic system in which some can have and most can't. period.

white people have long joined the struggle alongside 'racialized' others throughout history. we can continue that. but, our work is not to support obama's necessary disconnect from wright (if he wants to be elected in our smooth functioning democracy). our work is to support and understand wright who, i think, is telling us, we can't heal until the wounding stops.

In addition to the fact that we can only seem to deal with Obama's theory of a post-racial world and not Wright's reality of a racialized one, has anyone else noted the new line of attack on Obama that consistently associates him with 'terrorists'?  First, it was Wright--comparing him to a fundamentalist sort of terrorist; now Palin (and soon McCain) is/are talking about Obama's connection to Bill Ayers, former Weather Underground--albeit a distant one upon inspection.  Casting aside the important role that the SDS and the Weather Underground played in resistance to the Vietnam War for a moment, why does this idea of Obama's connection to so-called 'terrorists' seem to get play in the psyche of Americans? Could it be that the media have already laid the foundation/template/rubric/conditions to cast Obama himself as a terrorist?  This has everything to do with race.  Why isn't McCain cast alongside the economic terrorists (the 'shock doctors' to coin a phrase from Naomi Klein) of our time?  Isn't he responsible for the de-regulation that has led, in part, to these devastating economic times? What was his relationship to the Keating 5 in the 1980s during the S&L scandal?  These people really destroy lives--physically, emotionally, spiritually. They steal from us and give to the rich.  Then, they make us live in fear that we cannot survive without them.  Sounds like fascism.  What the McCain/Palin ticket are engaged in is neo-McCarthyism. The Weather Underground never killed anyone. Obama isn't even close with Ayers.