Fun With Ferraro

Because she just cannot shut up:

Former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro said today that she objected to the comparison Sen. Barack Obama drew between her and his former pastor in his speech on race relations Tuesday.

In the speech, Obama sought to place the inflammatory remarks of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a broader context, in part by placing them on a continuum with Ferraro’s recent remark to the Daily Breeze that Obama is “lucky” to be black.

“To equate what I said with what this racist bigot has said from the pulpit is unbelievable,” Ferraro said today. “He gave a very good speech on race relations, but he did not address the fact that this man is up there spewing hatred.”

Ferraro, the only woman to ever run on a major party presidential ticket, sparked a controversy when she told the Breeze that “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position.”

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Ferraro said she had “no clue” why Obama would include her in his speech, and said Obama’s association with Wright raises serious questions about his judgment.

“What this man is doing is he is spewing that stuff out to young people, and to younger people than Obama, and putting it in their heads that it’s OK to say `Goddamn America’ and it’s OK to beat up on white people,” she said. “You don’t preach that from the pulpit.”

Ferraro also said she could not understand why Obama had called out his own white grandmother for using racial stereotypes that had made him cringe.

“I could not believe that,” she said. “That’s my mother’s generation.”

I know, who could ever think women of that generation might just harbor a couple racist thoughts?  I mean my grandparents were terribly progressive when it came to race…. And my parents…</snark>

The thing is Ferraro leaves one of the biggest tells in her response:

 putting it in their heads that it’s OK to say `Goddamn America’ and it’s OK to beat up on white people,” she said. “You don’t preach that from the pulpit.”

One wonders where Wright said it was OK to beat up on white people since he’s long been an advocate of non-violence and even in the ‘hate’ filled sermon, there were no calls to violence.  But Ferraro heard that it was OK to beat up white people.

Fascinating.

The common theme is that somehow Wright was spewing racism. He wasn’t though and no one can point to a racist statement from the video clips. They are divisive in the notion that racism is worse than misogyny, but that’s not racist.

Pointing out the United States has a long history of racism, bigotry, and oppression of black people isn’t racism.   Saying God Damns America for its sins with racism isn’t racism.  Calling the United States of America the United States of the KKK is definitely divisive, but not racism.

He said some dumb things in his statements about AIDS, but that isn’t racism. It’s factually wrong.

No where does Wright suggest that whites are inferior to blacks or anything of the sort.  He says that whites have mistreated blacks in the United States.  That is true.  And most of his examples are true.

Even if someone makes a wrong statement when accusing someone of racism, that isn’t racism.  It might be stupid, it might be unethical, and it might be wrong, but it’s not racism.

And saying that it isn’t God Bless America, but God Damn America isn’t telling people it’s okay to say Goddamn America, it’s saying that the United States is a nation with sin on its hands and, in fact, the original sin of the United States has long been called racism and slavery.  The euphemism of the South was that it was a peculiar institution suggesting it was benign.  That is our original sin.

The problem with the clips of the sermon is that like many sermons, all the negative doesn’t tell us much about the whole meaning of the sermon.   With original sin also comes redemption and that is also what Wright preached for decades.

De Tocqueville wrote of the effects of slavery in the 19th Century:

The legislation of the Southern states with regard to slaves presents at the present day such unparalleled atrocities as suffice to show that the laws of humanity have been totally perverted, and to betray the desperate position of the community in which that legislation has been promulgated. The Americans of this portion of the Union have not, indeed, augmented the hardships of slavery; on the contrary, they have bettered the physical condition of the slaves. The only means by which the ancients maintained slavery were fetters and death; the Americans of the South of the Union have discovered more intellectual securities for the duration of their power. They have employed their despotism and their violence against the human mind. In antiquity precautions were taken to prevent the slave from breaking his chains; at the present day measures are adopted to deprive him even of the desire for freedom. 

The ancients kept the bodies of their slaves in bondage, but placed no restraint upon the mind and no check upon education; and they acted consistently with their established principle, since a natural termination of slavery then existed, and one day or other the slave might be set free and become the equal of his master. But the Americans of the South, who do not admit that the Negroes can ever be commingled with themselves, have forbidden them, under severe penalties, to be taught to read or write; and as they will not raise them to their own level, they sink them as nearly as possible to that of the brutes.

A French aristocrat from the 19th century would, in the same essay, predict the problem of freeing slaves in the American South to a degree current historians could only aspire to describe.

The practical effect of that system is what produces a very angry Jeremiah Wright who says God damns America for its sins towards our black citizens.  Anyone who honestly is Christian and thinks about this seriously should understand the context in which Wright speaks.  It’s not that America should be damned, but that without redemption, we are all damned.

Wright is not arguing for black superiority.  He is arguing for black equality and the redemption that comes with such equality.  It’s uncomfortable to hear, but it is not racism.  It is a clear-eyed look at an imperfect nation and its sins.