Category Archives: culture

ask not what your country . . .

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Well . . . my guy is in trouble, and maybe I have to own up to having been naive about Jeremiah Wright. It’s too bad, but I’m not alone. Both Eugene Robinson and Bob Herbert have disowned Wright in op-ed essays today, both of them (interestingly) making use of the ‘throwing somebody under a bus’ metaphor. Here’s Robinson.

It’s understandable, given how Wright has been treated, that he would want to attempt to set the record straight. No one would enjoy seeing his 36-year career reduced to a couple of radioactive sound bites. No preacher would want his entire philosophy to be assessed on the basis of a few rhetorical excesses committed in the heat of a passionate sermon. No former Marine would stomach having his love of country questioned by armchair patriots who have done far less to protect the United States from its enemies.

Given Wright’s long silence, I thought he had taken to heart Jesus’s admonition to turn the other cheek. Obviously, I was wrong.

I’m through with Wright not because he responded — in similar circumstances, I certainly couldn’t have kept silent — but because his response was so egocentric. We get it, Rev. Wright: You’re ready for your close-up. […] Historically and theologically, he was inflating his importance in a pride-goeth-before-the-fall kind of way. Politically, by surfacing now, he was throwing Barack Obama under the bus.

Like Robinson, Bob Herbert finds a good deal of ego in Pastor Wright’s current speaking tour and suggests that Wright is paying Obama back for speaking critically of him.

All but swooning over the wonderfulness of himself, the reverend acts like he is the first person to come up with the idea that blacks too often get the short end of the stick in America, that the malignant influences of slavery and the long dark night of racial discrimination are still being felt today, that in many ways this is a profoundly inequitable society.

This is hardly new ground. The question that cries out for an answer from Mr. Wright is why — if he is so passionately committed to liberating and empowering blacks — does he seem so insistent on wrecking the campaign of the only African-American ever to have had a legitimate shot at the presidency. […] My guess is that Mr. Wright felt he’d been thrown under a bus by an ungrateful congregant who had benefited mightily from his association with the church and who should have rallied to his former pastor’s defense. What we’re witnessing now is Rev. Wright’s “I’ll show you!” tour.

Consequently and predictably, George Will gloats in this morning’s Washington Post as he urges his media buddies and the pols to hound Obama about Wright.

When North Carolina Republicans recently ran an ad featuring Wright in full cry, McCain mounted his high horse, from which he rarely dismounts, and demanded that the ad be withdrawn. The North Carolinians properly refused. Wright is relevant.

He is a demagogue with whom Obama has had a voluntary 20-year relationship. It has involved, if not moral approval, certainly no serious disapproval. Wright also is an ongoing fountain of anti-American and, properly understood, anti-black rubbish. His speech yesterday demonstrated that he wants to be a central figure in this presidential campaign. He should be.

All this is distressing enough on its face, but George Will “in full cry” is almost too much to take. My disclaimer about Wright does not in any way endorse Will’s petty and self-righteous presumption to instruct the rest of us about what is “properly understood, anti-black rubbish.”

But Wright surely understands pushback. He has to be highly intelligent, and he couldn’t have had the career he has had without considerable savvy in regard to how race games are played in the political arena. I’m reminded, as I was in an earlier post about Wright, of Shelby Steele’s characterization of the good pastor.

Racism is this minister’s great strategic advantage; it gives him an almost demagogic power and a racial moral authority that distinguishes his church from his competitors. He offers his parishioners as much racial redemption as religious redemption . . . effectively, he defines the black identity as a faith in the pervasiveness of white racism.1

Wright, himself, may believe in the pervasiveness of white racism. If so, he would not be alone in experiencing frustration at the persistence and stubbornness of institutional racism and white privilege. I have believed that his more strident language is to be understood as an attack on racism institutionalized. But I think Wright’s recent speeches have rendered such considerations moot.

So, what to do?

I think my guy has to take this on. Regardless of what anybody may have hoped, this presidential election is now as much about race as it is about anything else — whether events, or the media, or the Clintons, or Republicans, or Obama himself, or all of the foregoing are responsible. I’m inclined now to think that this doesn’t benefit the Clinton campaign, though I’m sure Clinton’s advisers are searching for a way to use it.

Try this thought. Barack Obama has been presented with a challenge to practice leadership, not as a candidate, but as the presumptive heir to executive leadership of this country, a position he could lose if he fails to rise to the demands of this moment. Call it a racialist moment, if you will. That doesn’t matter — he has to deal with it. God knows he’s got to be exhausted and perhaps angry and frustrated. But he has to put these things aside.

I don’t know what he has to say, but I know he has to make another speech. Oratory is his great strength. By this means he has almost begun a serious reformation of our politics, and it is the present means he has at his disposal. He shouldn’t debate another time; that will just give Clinton another opportunity to bait him.

Then again, maybe I do know a bit of what he has to say. Perthaps, as Shelby Steele puts it, Obama should let us know “who he is–what beliefs he would risk his life for.”2

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1A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, (New York, 2008), p. 70.
2Ibid., p. 134.

Uncertainty, aporia, and Benedict

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Nicholas Knisely has kindly noted my reaction to his blog about relativism, science, and Pope Benedict.

. . . Julian is asking a basic question of any one who tries to connect the insights of modern physics and theology (and/or philosophy); “Should an understanding of the nature of reality in one field have to be accepted in another?”

The short is answer is that I believe they need to be.

I don’t disagree, but that doesn’t mean that I agree entirely. I don’t know of any requirement that one field’s insights be accepted by another. Moreover, it’s been almost an article of faith in the humanities and social sciences, since the so-called linguistic turn, that academic discourses, like cultures, are incommensurable.1 I’ve mostly thought incommensurability a wrong-headed notion, but there are cases that argue otherwise. If there weren’t, epistemology might be reducible to psychology or vice versa. On the other hand, postmodern literary criticism has owed much to Marx (especially as understood by Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Herbert Marcuse, et al.), to Freud (especially as understood by Lacan), to Heidegger (especially as understood by Derrida, Sartre, Gadamer . . .).

I also said I think uncertainty in physics and epistemological uncertainty have different bases. They come together in Kuhn’s critique and in the spate of theorists who have followed Kuhn, but one is grounded in a famous series of experiments with light and the other is grounded in a discourse that includes Kant and Hume but goes back to the beginnings of philosophy. These thoughts leave me with the partially unsatisfying observation that it is sometimes useful and possible to think across disciplines and sometimes not. Sometimes différance is not only inevitable but desirable.

I teach a course these days in which students read a variety of modern and postmodern classics in an exercise I hope will enable them to make connections between ideas they have encountered in separate domains. Recently we discussed Eliade’s Myth of the Eternal Return, wherein the author tells how an ethnographer, traveling in the Balkans in the 1930s, discovered a story to the effect that a particular young man had been enticed off the face of a cliff by a jealous mountain fairy. Shepherds found his body and returned it to his village, whereupon his human intended, the source of the fairy’s jealousy, uttered a formal lament in verse, “full of mythological allusions, a liturgical text of rustic beauty,” which was quoted as part of the tale.

When the ethnographer discovered that the intended was still alive, though now elderly, he visited her. She gave a prosaic account of the tragedy that differed materially from the tale the ethnographer had heard and most particularly did not include the mountain fairy, though she did say that she and other women of the village “had repeated the customary ritual lamentations” at the funeral. When the ethnographer confronted the villagers with the intended’s account of the death as an ordinary accident, “they replied that the old woman had forgotten; that her great grief had almost destroyed her mind.”

I asked my students to suppose that the ethnographer had tried to interpret this tale of the unfortunate young man and the jealous fairy princess to the villagers who told it by reference to Eliade’s theory of myth. Suppose he said to them something to this effect: “Here’s what you’re doing. You’re defending yourself against the novelty and irreversibility of history and the finality of death by preserving a memory of this young man not as a particular, personal, historical being, but as the mystical, transpersonal hero of a tragedy, fusing the individual with an archetypal category.” If the ethnographer had said this to the villagers, don’t you suppose they would have thought him strange, perhaps a little crazy, just as they thought the elderly intended senile?

I’m arguing that there is a common sense that belongs to positivist ethnographers and a common sense that belongs to Balkan villagers and that they are not the same, though both seem in this case to employ a category we might call matter of fact. But I don’t mean this story as an illustration of incommensurability. I see it rather as an illustration of the perils of translation. I have no doubt that ethnographer and villagers could have sat down and smoked, shared draughts of the local brew, and found commonality. Doubtless there would have been stories for them to share (tales for them to swap), and at some point the conversation could have become like that reported by a Greek folklorist I heard speak years ago as he was traveling in Oklahoma looking for correspondences between native American music and his own native folk ballads. He described a meeting with an elderly Choctaw chief in which he (the folklorist) drummed and sang a song (which he also sang for us). Upon hearing the song, the old chief’s face broke into a thousand smiles, and he exclaimed “Indian song!” “No, Greek song!” countered the scholar. Nevertheless, there had been a meeting across incommensurability. The old chief had found that a foreign song was not Greek to him.

But there’s another lesson. In rejecting our hypothetical ethnographer’s theorizing of their story, the Balkan villagers would have been more right than wrong. It has been a dream of the geisteswissenschaften to construct a metalanguage into which the languages of common sense can be translated, a dictionary of culture like the key to all mythologies that George Eliot parodies in Middlemarch. I personally think this idea is a hangover from the culture of Latin learning, but whether it is or not an English double negative is reducible neither to Latin grammar nor to simple algebra. Resort to the dictionary produces what translators call a trot. Real translation calls upon the same sometimes tedious negotiation required by other human attempts at understanding across cultural boundaries, carried out for the most part at the level of common sense (translation is theoretically impossible, but we translate).

Which brings me to Benedict.

In the essay on relativism to which Dean Knisely refers, the Pope argues against positivist reductionism in much the same way I have here. Reductionist science naively substitutes its own categories for the categories of discourses and phenomena it rediscribes. But Benedict, in this essay, unfortunately does something very similar in claiming that a naive relativism must of necessity be the philosophical foundation of democracy. American democracy is pluralist, not relativist.

However, Benedict’s real target is relativism with respect to religion and ethics. Here, tolerance and freedom are to be mistrusted as the enemies of the supremacy of Jesus Christ, and a distinction between relativism and pluralism is meaningless. Moreover:

In the relativist meaning, to dialogue means to put one’s own position, i.e., one’s faith, on the same level as the convictions of others without recognizing in principle more truth in it than that which is attributed to the opinion of the others. Only if I suppose in principle that the other can be as right, or more right than I, can an authentic dialogue take place.

Thus, the very practice of democratic discourse becomes what Benedict calls “[t]he relativist dissolution of Christology, and even more of ecclesiology.”

I almost wish I could take Benedict’s point that reason and faith must inform one another to be the primary argument of this essay, but I can’t. I rather think the point is to defend a traditional understanding of the church, that is the Roman church, against its competitors in modern life: Kantian skepticism, secular democracy, eastern religion, new age philosophy, pragmatism, protestantism (Benedict’s chief exemplar of bad theology is Presbyterian), modernism (as exemplified by Bultman, Barth, et al.), and most particularly liberation theology. He argues in order to confound those whom he takes to be his opponents, but with respect to his own position Benedict does not argue. Rather, he proclaims.

In short, in the revelation of God, he, the living and true One, bursts into our world and also opens the prison of our theories, with whose nets we want to protect ourselves against God’s coming into our lives.

He doesn’t proclaim more than this in the essay on relativism, but he hints at the rest of the proclamation by reference to the dissolution of ecclesiology, and in one of his American homilies, he spells it out entire.

In the exercise of my ministry as the Successor of Peter, I have come to America to confirm you, my brothers and sisters, in the faith of the Apostles (cf. Lk 22:32). I have come to proclaim anew, as Peter proclaimed on the day of Pentecost, that Jesus Christ is Lord and Messiah, risen from the dead, seated in glory at the right hand of the Father, and established as judge of the living and the dead (cf. Acts 2:14ff.). I have come to repeat the Apostle’s urgent call to conversion and the forgiveness of sins, and to implore from the Lord a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Church in this country.

This is traditional Papal rhetoric, expressive of solidarity with the ages,2 and the claim to be Peter’s successor is neither accidental nor without special significance for contemporary Americans who for whatever reason do not share the Roman faith. I am remembering a Catholic funeral I attended here in St. Louis recently, in which the priest, just before the offertory, explained that non-Catholics were not welcome at the altar and advised us to remain in our pews and pray for the eventual restoration of God’s church.

Americans lionize celebrities. Benedict has come and gone, having more or less poked his finger in the eye of American public life which just gave him more visibility as a public figure than he is likely to encounter anywhere else in the world. He has articulated a view of the church that recognizes neither my baptism nor Dean Knisely’s ordination. And he has proclaimed again the historic claim of the Roman church uniquely to hold the keys to the kingdom of God. His absolutism is not Kantian, but an absolutist he is; and though he seems to be trying to reinvent himself as Pope by distancing himself from the role he played as John Paul II’s grand inquisitor, he is chiefly concerned, I believe, to proclaim and maintain the authority of the church and particularly the authority of the priesthood, in a time of scandal and other stresses. His apologies to victims of sexual abuse did not criticize any bishop. Indeed, he seemed primarily to be bent upon shaping and refining a theory of American life that gives special prominence to the Roman church.

The readings of today’s Mass invite us to consider the growth of the Church in America as one chapter in the greater story of the Church’s expansion following the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

And with respect to the future:

Young people need to be helped to discern the path that leads to true freedom: . . . The challenges confronting us require a comprehensive and sound instruction in the truths of the faith. But they also call for cultivating a mindset, an intellectual “culture”, which is genuinely Catholic, confident in the profound harmony of faith and reason, and prepared to bring the richness of faith’s vision to bear on the urgent issues which affect the future of American society.

In another homily, Benedict decries the diminishment of the church’s authority in American society, “which rightly places a high value on personal freedom.” Personal freedom, that took literally ages to acomplish for ordinary persons like me and even longer for other citizens of my country, a condition whose absence continues to signal death and destruction in the world, one of the chief accomplishments of the Christian west, Benedict dismisses as paltry, even while he seems to praise it, contrasting it with real freedom, “God’s gracious gift, the fruit of conversion to his truth, the truth which makes us free.”

One might dismiss this last claim as conventional sermonizing but for it’s context. Here is a Pope, standing on an American stage yet speaking for the ages; but the message sounds a lot like Richard Neuhaus. It’s impossible to hear it without being aware of the political baggage it carries. I live in a Catholic Archdiocese whose Archbishop has excommunicated two women for having the effrontery to be ordained Roman catholic womenpriests, who has excomunicated the board of a local Polish congregation in a property dispute, who forced a local high school to cancel a scheduled commencement speech by Claire McCaskill, whose daughter was to be in the audience as a graduate, who has threatened to deny communion to John Kerry and other politicians whose views conflict with Catholic teaching. I expect him to be elevated to the college of cardinals any day now.

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1The best single defense of incommensurability I know is Stanley Fish’s Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change, (Cambridge, MA, 1999). Renato Rosaldo and Paul Feyerabend have argued persuasively on the other side. See Feyerabend’s review of Rosaldo’s Culture and Truth (Boston, 1993), in Common Knowledge 3 (Fall 1994) 16-22.
2Kathleen Hall Jamieson has written a good deal about Papal rhetoric. Her analysis of the language of Paul VI is especially useful to me here. See “The Metaphoric Cluster in the Rhetoric of Pope Paul VI and Edmund G. Brown, Jr.,” (The Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980) 51-72.

on the other side of the border

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This morning I did a Google search for “Jeremiah Wright, who broke the story?” Apparently, there are as many answers to my question as aspiring claimants to various sorts of notoriety. Suffice it to say that everybody under the sun is taking credit for, or is credited with, having made the Wright sound bites available. And as is usual when things go viral on the .net, a kind of vicious reduction has taken place. Pastor Wright has been objectified as a small collection of sound bites, endlessly played. What interests me today is that almost everybody, including Barack Obama, seems to believe that there is an agreed set of cultural norms that Wright has violated, a border that his language has stepped across so that Wright is on one side of an American fence like the one going up along our southern perimeter. Wright has now had to cancel several appearances and speaking engagements, as the objectification has continued.

I think if I were Wright I might get myself some really good lawyers and go after these media types. Wright isn’t a candidate for public office. He has been co-opted into a political campaign for nefarious purposes. He has been knowingly and maliciously misrepresented and mischaracterized. It doesn’t matter that his own words have been used against him in the snippets of memetic imagery that are used to represent him. Snippets such as these invite the supplying of a context, and while many have praised Obama for his speech in response to the phenomenon, most have continued to deprecate Wright. How bad the deprecation can get is perhaps illustrated by the remarks of Victor Davis Hanson and Pat Buchanan. But it’s really not useful merely to point out that Buchanan and Hanson’s claims are racist. They are — but that’s almost beside the point.

On the other hand, the trouble with Wright’s hyperbolic gestures is that they reflect such extreme claims for recognition of (and respect for) group identity that they reify it. And the trouble with that reification and the attendant oversimplification of complex issues, is that they “encourage separatism, intolerance and chauvinism,” as Nancy Fraser puts it in a recent New Left Review article. Still, those who are bothered by Wright’s alleged anti-Americanism etc., might want to take a look at the New Testament: Matthew 23, for instance, where Jesus utters a long rant against the authorities of his people and its principle city, foretelling their destruction by divine retribution for their sins. Jesus’ rants (this one and others) are well within the tradition of prophetic preaching already established in his time, as are Pastor Wright’s. Whether such rants are useful in a social situation seeming to call for cross-racial dialogue, or whether they will help Barack Obama get elected, are separate issues. But Pastor Wright is not a racist or a traitor to his country as he is being portrayed.

And it should be remembered that Pastor Wright is not addressing Barack Obama’s audience in these remarks that have been so widely disseminated. He is addressing a congregation of Americans whose ancestors were brought to these shores via the middle passage. Indeed the long history of the black church in America is not irrelevant here. A few years ago I visited the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, bombed in 1963 by KKK members. There is in the basement of that historic church a fairly large model of a slave ship, intended for use by Sunday School children. In my West Texas Methodist Sunday School, no slave ships were part of any narrative I was asked to assimilate, not even when we sang “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound . . . ” –that was about personal salvation.

Some days before my beloved and I traveled to Birmingham, I had taken a walk down Arsenal Street here in my home town of St. Louis, where race is important–you better believe it. As I was walking, a young black woman came walking towards me with a small child I assume was her daughter. They were chatting and laughing until the mother saw me coming, whereupon she grabbed the child up in her arms and hurried past me, her face averted, no eye contact. The model slave ship at 16th Street Baptist Church marks the real border that divides black and white Americans. The members of that historic congregation in Birmingham, like the members of Trinity UCC, Chicago, like Pastor Wright and the young woman I passed on Arsenal Street, are on one side of that border; and the majority of mainstream Americans are on the other. That’s why Obama had to disown Wright to the extent that he did.

An interesting and persuasive view of Wright, in some ways contrary to mine, is that of Jonetta Rose Barras, who, in a Washington Post piece entitled “He’s Preaching to A Choir I’ve Left,” seems to express enough good will to wipe out the border I have described. “[T]oday,” she says:

there is an entire generation of young people who know nothing of segregation, who see one another as individuals, not as symbols of a dark past. They do not look into white faces and see, as I once did, a burning cross, a white sheet and a vicious dog on a police officer’s leash. This is the coalition pushing for a new America.

Barras’ optimism and good sense give me hope, just as Obama does. If I’m not so optimistic as she is, perhaps that is because segregation and Jim Crow have shaped my life as surely as they shaped the lives of African Americans of my generation. I’m on the other side of the border from Pastor Wright, though I have spent well-nigh sixty years trying to overcome the fact. We were both of us born into a racist society that assigned us to two different categories, and regardless of what friendships we may have or how we may seek to practice good will and love, we remain in those categories. Our racist culture permits nothing else.

If I’m not so optimistic, perhaps it’s because I understand why Obama had to disown Wright. It isn’t just that what Barras calls Wright-speak is “harmful and ultimately can’t provide healing” and is “outdated in the 21st century,” and Obama had to reject that. It’s that Obama had to betray somebody I believe he loves in order to remain within certain norms that have shaped his campaign from the beginning, some of which are the norms of institutionalized racism. Hanson, to whom I allude above, suggests that Obama get himself a 4×4 flag lapel pin and that Michelle Obama conclude every appearance with a chorus of “God Bless America” from now on; and if Hanson means to be funny, the butt of the joke is not the collective of white, working-class Democrats.

So perhaps it’s OK if some of us, who like Pastor Wright are hanging up our spikes and leaving the race to wonderful young folks like Barras — perhaps it’s OK if we hope that Obama will not back down from his limited defense of Jeremiah Wright and will spare the rest of us some space to defend his mentor a bit more enthusiastically than he has done.

more . . .

Obama rises to the occasion

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I believe that my guy’s speech entitled “A More Perfect Union” will be remembered as one of the great speeches — not as a lecture by a religious leader or public intellectual or social critic might be remembered, but as a great speech by a great politican. It does the things a political speech has to do. Chiefly, it addresses itself to all the various stakeholders who own a piece of any argument about race that is made in the public sphere in this country. And it attempts to avoid pitting one group against another.

If I have a criticism it is that I wish Obama’s statement had given his former pastor more benefit of the doubt, and I admire Obama’s refusal to repudiate his friendship. Pastor Wright’s language is perfectly understandable to me as prophetic utterance, even the claim that Jesus was black. His paraphrase of “God Bless America” is spot on, in my opinion, as a critique of the common chauvinistic use of that song to valorize the worst about our country. His claim that the events of September 11, 2001 were the result of US policy is a claim that was made by many others at the time (cf. Amiri Baraka‘s “Somebody Blew Up America,” for instance).

Still, I think this is Obama’s best and most statesmanlike speech to date in the campaign. Here’s a passage close to the heart of it, perhaps:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

I’ve just finished Shelby Steele’s book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, and I think Steele’s analysis goes a long way towards explaining what has just happened in the public drama that is the democratic presidential primary. I don’t agree with Steele’s sharp critique of Jeremiah Wright (of whom he offers a fairly long characterization without once mentioning his name), and I suspect that Steele’s title was one of those dishonest titles editors sometimes stick on books in order to sell them. But Steele’s overall argument about the roles various black leaders play in our present-day racist society seems right to me.

Steele describes Obama as a bargainer, one who gives whites the benefit of the doubt. In this Obama is different from challengers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Both bargainers and challengers provide whites with what Steele calls innocence, or absolution for the sin of racism. Steele further argues that Obama has achieved the status of “iconic negro,” a cultural category that includes such figures as Sidney Poitier and Oprah Winfrey, and for which bargaining is a prerequisite.

It is in this way that Obama is a bound man, in Steele’s view. The mask he wears as a bargainer limits him to being a merely representative man. “His supporters do not look to him to do something; they look to him to be something, to represent something.”

Barack Obama emerged into a political culture that needed him more as an icon than as a man. He has gone far because the need is great. But this easy appeal has also been his downfall. It is a seduction away from character and conviction.

But in the present speech, Obama characterized this iconic function as “the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap,” and emphasized his campaign’s dedication to solving the country’s pressing problems. Here is how a Washington Post editorial puts it today:

Mr. Obama’s speech was an extraordinary moment of truth-telling. He coupled it with an appeal that this year’s campaign not be dominated by distorted and polarizing debates about whether he or his opponents agree with extreme statements by supporters — or other attempts to divide the electorate along racial lines. Far better, he argued, that Americans of all races recognize they face common economic, social and security problems.

And in speaking of solutions to specifically racial problems Obama gave significant mention to the “quintessentially American — and yes, conservative — notion of self-help,” a tip of the hat, perhaps, to Steele and Bill Cosby.

I can’t accept Steele’s apparent conclusion that Obama is trapped, for the same reason Obama gives for rejecting Jeremiah Wright’s pessimism about our country. Steele seems to speak as Wright does, as though our society is static, to paraphrase Obama, as though we live in a society that is not only racist but unalterably so.

But I’m not sure how wedded Steele may be to this conclusion, since he ends his book almost on an upbeat, suggesting that all along he has been speaking not in absolutes but about what Obama has to overcome.

The challenge for Barack Obama is the same as it is for all free people, to achieve visibility as an individual, to in fact become an individual rather than a racial cipher.

At the beginning of the last chapter of A Bound Man Steele asks a question that I think is central to this little book. “[W]hat would a black who was neither a challenger nor a bargainer look like?” I think Barack Obama is every day of this campaign showing us that, as he continues his critique of the Iraq war, as he absorbs negative attacks, seems to learn from his mistakes and grow in judgment, and as he continues with his message of unity in the face of a determined effort by his opponents to racialize him.

* * *

Steele’s title calls to my mind Ilse Aichinger’s wonderful little story entitled “The Bound Man” — I don’t know whether Steele intends a reference. Aichinger’s story is about a man who has been robbed and beaten, and left tied up with a rope. Through a series of experiments he learns to work with his bound condition and the constraints it imposes, and through doing so he aquires a freedom he has never before experienced. “The freedom he enjoyed in this struggle was having to adapt every movement of his limbs to the rope that tied him — the freedom of panthers, wolves, and the wild flowers that sway in the evening breeze.” When he is liberated from the rope in the end, he understands his unbound condition as a loss that in the specific circumstances of the story will lead to death.

I think Obama’s individuality consists in a complex and dynamic adaptation to the constraints imposed by a particular situatedness. I think his relationship with Pastor Wright has likely played an important role in that adaptation, a role akin, perhaps, to the role Ezra Pound played in the life of T. S. Eliot. But the adaptation is Obama’s own, I believe, as Eliot’s was. Of course Eliot was not a politician. Obama has lived an unusually creative life for a politician thusfar, and that’s more a measure of the risk he takes than anything else. However, and in this I think I agree with my friend Timothy Burke, Obama’s creativity is tempered by a fairly hard-edged pragmatism. And I would add that pragmatism is sometimes a willingness to make small claims as one attempts to achieve large goals. For the rest, I think Tim says it very well:

This is what politics is, what politics has to be. This is what transformation needs. Otherwise, the best you can hope for are momentary, transient achievements that are destined to be reversed almost as soon as they are accomplished. There isn’t enough power in the greatest political mobilization imaginable to abolish significant groups of people who experience history and society differently than you and people like you experience it.

— Politics as a spiritual condition, a certain of generosity of spirit. Maybe Pastor Wright will make it into the more perfect union after all.