Liberate Me

Dennis P. hits most of the high points in Re: the matter of Jeremiah Wright, but I feel obliged to make some public admission of my own ongoing glee at the hectoring specter of white Netrootsia tearing itself up in an effort to out-denounce Jeremiah Wright for his failure to embrace Clintonian neoliberalism--Obama's position as well, despite all the Hopeandchange mumbo-jumbo--as the final step in the development of the human species on this earth. Now black liberation theology has at its core, well, theology, so I hardly count myself as a proponent, but you know, some rightwinger was playing the infamous Wright sermon today, and he said for every Oprah there's ten million black kids in jail and for every Condoleeza Rice there's ten million who can't read, and you know, it's true. What's both hilarious and distressing about white liberals is their whiny insistence on their own centrality to racial equality in this country, their reverence for the Kennedys and Johnsons of the world, and their perverse insistence that folks like Wright ought to shut up lest some hostile Republicans take over again, an attitude of almost bottomless patronization. Jeremiah Wright has hardly said anything that Mratin Luther King, Jr. didn't already say--just read the Vietnam speeches, for dogssake. I can't wait until liberal history starts blaming that uppity nigger for Nixon.