Blacks who excel disprove notion America's racist

BY MICHAEL MEYERS | Michael Meyers, a former assistant national director of the NAACP, is executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition.

May 1, 2008

The unvarnished truth about Rev. Jeremiah Wright finally hit Sen. Barack Obama between the eyes. Reverend Wright is Reverend Wrong - the wrong man to be pastor to the candidate who is seeking to transcend racial divisions and to smash into smithereens the color barrier that has stymied equal opportunity in America.

Wright's talk before the National Press Club - a talk that shamed Obama and revealed Wright as a bitter, old-fashioned, paranoid and unabashed "race man," and which drew Obama's repudiation - has consigned Wright to the dustbins of history as a crackpot.

In the in-your-face fashion of Malcolm X and with the cocky demeanor of the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and all the other black firebrands of yesteryear, Wright condemns America's policies and leaders as wicked and racist.

And he promises, should Obama make it to the White House, to go after Obama, too: because in his mind, Obama will, by virtue of sitting in the Oval Office, become the oppressor of people of color. Only Wright and the blacker-than-thou crowd for whom he purports to speak are the genuine articles. This is not the gospel of black liberation, but the gospel according to black fanatics.

It's the same gospel as that of Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan, for whom Wright has so much admiration. That Farrakhan is a black racist is of no relevance to Wright because, like Farrakhan, Wright is full of rage about how things used to be in America - back when Farrakhan was preaching blacks' separation from whites. The apostles of black oppression and liberation theology are cut of the same cloth: the garment of saving the so-called black race by making something of skin color that it is not.

Farrakhan's refusal to atone for his own racism does not bother the Rev. Wright or his ilk. Only integrationists like Barack Obama trouble the black liberation theologians. Blacks who succeed - who go to Ivy League colleges and law schools and excel - trouble the race men of yesteryear, because they disprove the maxim that America is racist.

Those blacks who do succeed are dismissed as Uncle Toms and, worse, are accused of having "white minds." To Wright, blacks and whites have different ways of learning, of talking, of expressing themselves, of dancing - even different ways of worshiping and serving God.

The Rev. Wrights of this time warp gladly embrace the most segregated hour in America as a tribute to racial difference, clinging to a bygone era when blacks and whites could not gather under one roof and worship. To a time when black colleges were necessary for the higher education of a beleaguered and excluded people.

The black church and the segregated black college are the sanctuaries and the relics of black identity and culture and, notwithstanding racial progress, keep black ministers and black educators employed. Anyone who questions the functionality of racially identifiable institutions in the 21st century is considered naive, if not a traitor.

This skin-deep racial fanaticism is contemptuous of blacks and whites and others who don't identify with racial tripe. The fanatics condemn those social activists and politicians who don't believe that government is out to destroy people of color. They have always declared war against hope - that's why Barack Obama is Rev. Wright's natural enemy and big target.

The Barack Obamas of our time are not down with the angry black bigots who pastor to the flock of despairing separatists. Their role models are heart surgeons, corporate CEOs, and astronomers - not hatemongers who see white people behind every corner, waiting to block their advancement. To modern blacks, being black is not enough - it never was.

Obama's full-throated repudiation of Rev. Wright's theses and rants is long overdue and maybe just a bit self-interested. But it is most welcomed. Of course, Wright stopped listening to Obama a long time ago. Indeed, Rev. Wright is minding his own counsel, and it is a bowlful of wrong thinking and racial posturing that imperils the presidential candidacy of his erstwhile friend.

Wright must know that in the 21st century, he is an endangered species. It evinces how desperate some ethnic leaders and men of the cloth are, when they seek and get media attention around ideas about race and the devil that are passé, demeaning to their calling, and bent in the direction of tirade rather than enlightenment.