BARACK OBAMA, JEREMIAH WRIGHT, 

AND THE RACE CARD

May 5, 2008 

There is no more sensitive issue in American society than race.  Unless you understand the history of slavery, emancipation, and the struggle for civil rights in America, you can’t understand America.  Americans, to their great credit, have struggled mightily over the years to rise above race.  Jeremiah Wright’s statements and his relationship with Barack Obama are only the latest episode in the current chapter of that historic struggle.  How this episode plays out will tell us a great deal about how much progress we’ve really made in the last 40 years.  Regardless which candidate wins, race relations in the United States will be better or worse when this election is over, but they won’t be the same.

Barack Obama came to national prominence as a candidate for President of the United States.  Unlike previous African American candidates, he presented himself, not as a black candidate for president, but as a candidate for president who happened to be black.  He held out the promise of moving the country into a new phase of our struggle with race.  A phase the overwhelming majority of blacks and whites welcomed regardless of which candidate they supported.  Americans, Republicans and Democrats, discovered that it was possible to oppose Obama for president but still take pride, as Americans, in his candidacy.

Because he was relatively new to the national political scene, however, Americans knew little about him.  They accepted him for what he appeared to be--an articulate, intelligent, liberal candidate for president who called for “change,” withdrawal from Iraq, and an end to partisan bickering in Washington, DC.  He deliberately avoided playing the race card as previous black candidates for president have done, and Americans saw him as a new kind of black politician.

What the entire Wright affair has done, however, is reinsert the race card back into the deck.  Wright reinserted it when people heard him accuse a "white-dominated" American government of inventing AIDS to kill blacks.  He stoked black racial sensitivities when he declared that attacks on him were attacks on the “black church.”  Criticizing Wright’s beliefs and Obama’s judgment isn't necessarily playing the race card.  During his appearance on Fox News Sunday, Obama himself said they were legitimate issues.  But they do play on existing racial prejudice and raise racial issues in voters’ minds.  Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic Party, goes so far as to accuse anyone of raising these issues of "race baiting."

Wright’s recent speeches on national television to the NAACP in Detroit and the National Press Club in Washington, DC, only further injected race into the campaign.  He reiterated his controversial beliefs about AIDS, 9/11, and Louis Farrakhan, making it difficult for anyone to claim they had been taken out of context.  And the positive reaction by African Americans in his audiences raised questions about how many blacks agreed with him.  Recent polls indicate that as many as one quarter of African Americans agree with some or all of Wright’s controversial statements. 

African American ministers who do not share Wright’s views, however, disagree.  The argue that only a small number of blacks subscribe to “black liberation theology” and Wright’s accusations.  But as Obama’s white opponents and their campaigns have attacked him on the Wright issue, many African Americans, whether they agree with Wright or not, see the attacks as inappropriate, unfair, and in some cases, racially motivated.  But as clips of Wright’s sermons repeatedly appear on TV and pundits spar over the Wright-Obama relationship, Obama’s national approval ratings and his relative standing with Hillary Clinton and John McCain have declined.

The Wright issue likely has surfaced too late to deprive Obama of the Democratic Party’s nomination.  Without a majority of elected delegates and the popular vote, super delegates are reluctant to give Clinton the nomination.  Because if they did, it could spark a civil war in the Democratic Party, keeping African Americans away from the polls in droves in November. 

If Obama wins the nomination, you can be sure the battle with John McCain will be as difficult and as hard-fought as any we’ve seen.  The candidates themselves will do their best to run “respectful” campaigns and avoid planning the race card.  But state parties, Senate and House candidates, and independent 527 groups on both sides will pull out all the stops.  Some of the attack ads against Obama and McCain no doubt will cross the lines of racial and political propriety.  North Carolina Republicans are running ads linking local candidates with Obama and Wright.  Moveon.org already is running negative national ads against John McCain.  And they’re just warming-up.

When everything is said and done, Americans will go to the polls and elect a president.  The republic will survive.  Americans will go about their lives.  How much long-term damage, if any, a rough-and-tumble, racially-charged general election campaign will do, we’ll find out.  But the stakes, as always, are high, and Republicans and Democrats have shown a propensity to do “whatever’s necessary” and what works.  Negative attacks work.  If we come through this campaign without setting back race relations in America, and there is no reason why we shouldn’t, it will be testament to just how far we’ve come.