with permission i post the following note by Mr. Jay Gardner, a fellow cleric and introspective brother who offers this rather pungent commentary on race as accented by the recent obama campaign efforts. this note follows our personal discussion on the current campaign after having critical discussion about why we are reluctant to support “whoever.” warning: i had to read it twice before realizing his sarcasm (i thought he’d lost his mind initially)…but seeing his aim he offers some great fodder for discussion on your politics of race. whatcha think? on anything. wright? obama? racism? opportunism? sexism? do you think we make too much of it…
hum, i’ll comment later i’m sure….
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so maybe i’m wrong about this race thing, maybe its just in my mind; it seems to be so passé and clearly of a distant generation, and why do “old heads” like me keep holding on to something that really has no meaning or merit today. i mean our society is colorblind and racism isn’t really a valid point anymore for we are all considered on the basis of merit, right?
moreover, as sen. obama said when asked again about rev. wright’s speech, people keep asking over and over about the 5 dumbest things that someone has said! yep, rev. wright said dumb things. like systemic racism and oppression, poverty is a matter of choice, white people are poor too and nobody helps them rise to economic security and success, right? and terrorism, the u.s.a. has been a helping and benevolent nation and our foreign policy is to aid in the spread of freedom and democracy, right? i can’t understand why anyone in other countries would not love america, they love jay-z, and they love roc-a-wear, so those “foreigners” are just hypocrites.
and as for aids in blacks, again poor choices. i mean blacks should not be so promiscuous and should use condoms—that’s why we have so many black babies without 2 parents or orphaned. yep, the racial divide is not really a racial divide it’s only a matter of a “victimized” mentality perpetuated by old head religious and political leaders who need to just get over it.
oh, by the way, you might want to check out the jan. 2007, vol 97, no.1 pg 125 of the american journal of public health. it says something about racial disparity among blacks and whites with the incidence of std & hiv infection. those with the same level of risk behaviors blacks have greater than 2x the incidence of infection than whites. thus blacks are more susceptible to hiv infection than whites are. i don’t know, some ignorant person might extrapolate from such evidence either that blacks are an inferior species or that white people invented hiv to infect black people (which is ludicrous).
oh, and its interesting that i observed a white male student and a black female student presenting their theses for their doctoral work and why was there the comment by one of the professors that he didn’t think that she had the mental capacity to succeed in the work. (i’m sorry, it was agreed that her presentation was better than his was, but that’s not important.) he was told that he should do well with a little extra effort. (this is 2007 at a prestigious ivy institution). however, that’s not racism, just an isolated incident and one persons view.
and let’s not talk about cointelpro or about redlining or dwb in new jersey or jasper, texas or about sudan or croatia/serbia or afanistan or vietnam or korea. these are simply conspiracy theories about the cia’s covert actions to support dictators who are interested in american economic expansion and the fbi’s efforts to secure our economy at home.
but i digress, obama is right; rev. wright said some really dumb things, the dumbest things. but he’s an old man and subject to speaking things like old people do. but we still love’m.
but it’s terrific to be an american in america, and god bless america, the city that sits on the hill, the light of the world. it is our manifest destiny to spread freedom around the world. that is us, america the beautiful. dr. martin luther king, jr., was right, here we are judged by the content of our character and here freedom rings from sea to shining sea. and people need to recognize that the only thing that separates us from each other is us. it just makes me want to sing and dance just thinking about it!!!!
yeah, well as i commented to someone at the beginning of the whole wright controversy there are like two extremes right? the one you so deftly point out in your wit: no, there’s no race problem, the man is just old and those are problems of the past, indeed there can’t be racism today… and often this view sorta incites another one, you know because of the lack of acknowledgement and dignity inherent in the former: EVERYTHING can be blamed on racism, says the other extreme dissident view (i.e. HIV created by the US for black folk). though this is inaccurate, it’s not because America is so noble (most of us know about the whole Tuskegee experiment).
but just on dr. wright. it’s odd that so many are oblivious to the many great doings and preachments of dr. wright over the years, but that’s how it often is, right? accent the ugly, while ignoring the beautiful, if we do that on a more selfish personal level than we certainly can’t expect the media (namely, fox news, to be sure) not to highlight everything wrong…
on another note, though, we can’t not be critical as clerics of the reason why he was susceptible to such blatant attack. i mean we preachers are always liable for histrionic hyperbole, right? so in the moment of enthralling our audiences sometimes we get carried away, and sometimes say the stuff that we know will garner the most scuttlebutt our applause…so like when he says we’ve been “monica lewinskied,” we all laugh because of the connotations which are elicited…and when he says god damn america certainly he may have not been too far off…
but where they got him was the mitigation, you know…perhaps he shoulda been more careful for the careful listener (i say this now after listening to the message in the wee hours of the morn) in sayin something like “perhaps, based on the censure of the Scriptures for these objectionable Biblical nations, perhaps god is saying damn america..”
now that would be a valid thing to ponder…but hey, no one can deny that racism is an intractable enemy, and that it exists, probably most noticeably in this country. and those of us who sojourned through “that place” in jersey know it’s most heinous when buttressed by the Bible…
and as you astutely point out, there certainly is sufficient evidence to support how racisms have existed in the policy (foreign and domestic) of this country…
thanks for ur thoughts, bro…
CVT
Racism in America, I believe, is sustained/perpetuated not so much by those who openly practice it as much as those who fail to acknowledge it! Nothing can piss a person off more than having someone tell them that what they KNOW to be true is nothing more than a figment of their imagination or a flawed perception that results from their own failure or inadequacy. As a few observers have noted elsewhere, if Rev. Wright is so far “left” how is it that his “following” is/has remained so strong. It’s probably b/c ni*#as are always looking to blame someone else for their problems! If they’d stop shaking their asses, drugging, and gangbanging and get an education then they would have the same opportunites that everyone has. Bull…Though his words could have been chosen more carufully, I believe it takes someone so radical with his/her speech to try to balance this thing out. All I can say is white America is so out of touch. They’ve stolen, murdered, oppressed, conspired and a host of other things to get what they have, from the day they set foot on this land until currently. And for those who say that it was their ancestors and not them, I don’t see them refusing any of the benefits! I’ve only heard the televangelist point-of-view, but I wonder what is being propagated in the “white pulpit”? Is it the smae as the televangelist, that if we would just have faith then all this would disappear or simply cease to exist? Or, is their view in agreement with the world’s that there is inherently either something wrong w/blacks or we exaggerating in observations of racism.