Wright’s Right

Over at Shakesville, Jeff Fecke hit’s the nail on the head about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of Barack Obama’s church who has the wingnut’s panties in such a collective twist:

Wright has spoken out passionately and angrily about racism. He has done so blindly at times. But is Wright racist against white people?

The question itself contains the answer.

Nobody with any understanding of history would say that racism has not been a problem in America. Nobody with any understanding of the present would say racism is not still a problem in America. And nobody with any decency would think that problematic racism was directed at white people.

…

[Wright] has, in short, known an America where African-Americans were not just second-class citizens, but subhuman. He has watched that America change from one that kept black men from voting to one that incarcerated them over petty drug charges. He has eyes, and he can read, and he knows that African-American families were given a disproportionate number of sub-prime loans even when equally qualified as white borrowers. He knows that African-American families are still mired in poverty. He knows that when David Paterson takes the oath of office on Monday, he’ll be only the third African-American governor since reconstruction—and that the second, Deval Patrick, was sworn in just over a year ago. He knows that Barack Obama is only the third African-American to serve in the U.S. Senate since reconstruction, and that he’s in the seat that was vacated when the second, Carol Moseley Braun, lost her reelection bid in 1998.

And when he talks, as Obama paraphrases him in Dreams of My Father, of “his world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere,” tell me, is that an inaccurate representation of the world twenty years ago? Ten years ago? Today?

…

It is not racist for an African-American to call out white people for our privilege, any more than it’s “misandrist” to call out men for our privilege. And even when anger is included in that call, it is not proof of hatred. Jeremiah Wright reacted to the racism he saw in America by speaking out against it, by appealing to people to work to serve their fellow men and women. That is not hatred, not any kind that I know.

Bingo. Go read the whole thing.