Isn't it true that a person can be known by the company he keeps?After reading Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father, I'm left perplexed by his denunciation of Jeremiah Wright this week.
Obama's pleading ignorance on Wright's character is contradicted by what he says in his own book.
The Wright he saw speak at the National Press Club IS the same person he met 20 years ago.
What's more, Dreams reveals a long-standing pattern of Obama choosing friends and associates who see the world exclusively through a prism of racial division.
Before he joined Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama knew that Wright had dabbled in "liquor, Islam and black nationalism" and was a proponent of black liberation theology, as outlined by James Cone, in his book Black Power and Black Theology.
Cone states that "black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy.
"If Obama weren't as erudite as he is, one could maybe believe that he didn't know anything about black liberation theology.
But, let's get real!He's nothing, if not well-read.
Wright is roundly credited with leading Obama to Christianity.
His Audacity of Hope sermon, which moved Obama to tears, and for which he names his second book was a turning point in his life.
In Dreams, Obama quotes from the sermon, that hope sits on a world "...
where white folks' greed runs the world in need..
..
"Can we accept that that didn't raise a question in Obama's mind as to whether Wright spoke in divisive terms?Maybe it did.
Maybe it didn't.
If not, then is Obama's thinking so aligned with Wright's that he was blind to his racially-charged message? In Dreams, Obama mentions Trinity's Black Value System and its "disavowal of the pursuit of middleclassness.
"To understand what that means, I went to the Church website.
The site explains that, according to the "methodology on control," it is believed that "captors" identify a "talented tenth" of the subjugated and then try to separate them from the others by (and the following are quoted verbatim): 1.
killing them off directly, and/or fostering a social system that encourages them to kill off one another, 2.
placing them in concentration camps, and/or structuring an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons, 3.
seducing them in a socioeconomic class system which, while training them to earn more dollars, hypnotizes them into believing they are better than others and teaches them to think in terms of "we" and "they" instead of "us" These teachings weren't and aren't secret.
They're on the Church website, for goodness sake, so how can we believe Obama was not aware of them?His attempt to distance himself from Wright rings hollow, given that Wright never misrepresented who he is.
In fact, Reverend Wright's belief system fits seemlessly with other friends and associates Obama references in his book.
Ray.
Obama's highschool friend in Hawaii.
Ray tells Obama that they are "playing on the white man's court,...
by the white man's rules.
"According to Ray's logic, "any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning," because whites are ultimately in control, even of what blacks are allowed to think.
His exchanges with Ray leave Obama pondering what happens if a black person refuses to accept his powerlessness.
Obama muses, if you "...
lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good.
Paranoid.
Militant.
Violent.
Nigger.
" Malik.
A follower of the Nation of Islam, Malik sometimes shot hoops with Ray and Obama.
Around this time, Obama is searching for an authentic identity and says Malcolm X's autobiography spoke to him.
As he considers Malcolm writing that he wished the white blood in him could be expunged, Obama realizes that his "own white blood would never recede into mere abstraction.
"This leaves him wondering what he would sever if and when he leaves his white family "at some uncharted border.
" Frank.
Well known Communist Party member and radical poet/author Frank Marshall Davis, with whom a teenaged Barack and his grandfather hang-out.
Frank draws a clear divide between white society and black society, seeing American blacks as having only two choices:stay true to your color, or else you sell-out your people.
He warns Obama that college is "an advanced degree in compromise," and that the "real price of admission" is, "Leaving your race at the door.
Leaving your people behind.
" Consequently, at Occidental College in Los Angeles, he does anything he can to convince himself "that I wasn't compromized" and to "avoid being mistaken for a sellout.
"To accomplish this, he intentionally chooses friends from among politically active black and foreign students and selects Marxist professors.
In the dorm, he "discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.
"Franz Fanon, by the way, is the author of Black Skin, White Masks, which describes blacks as having a divided self-image.
According to Fanon, this happens when black "subjects"lose their ethnic identity and imitate the cultural norms of white "colonizers".
Marcus.
A friend at Occidental who Obama describes as authentically black; he's a "most conscious brother.
"Obama quotes him as saying, "White people don't see us as human beings.
"Because Marcus' "lineage was pure," Obama says, it made him feel a little off balance, like he could never catch up to him because of his white parentage.
Sadik.
A Pakistani friend Obama lives with after transferring to Columbia University, whose tourist visa was expired.
While living in Manhatten, Obama attends Socialist conferences at Cooper Union, African cultural fairs in Harlem and Brooklyn, and attends a speech by Black Power's Kwame Toure at Columbia.
It becomes clear to him that if he achieves financial success and succumbs to it's trappings, that he really would be selling-out his people, as Frank had warned him years ago.
So, he concludes that with success, "You would find yourself on the side of the line you never intended to be on.
"What line?The color line, one presumes.
Unnamed Girlfriend.
This is perhaps one of the most poignent stories Obama shares.
He says he was in love with a white woman while at Columbia, but broke up with her after he decides they had no future together.
He says their worlds were too different, and he didn't want to risk living in hers.
He had earlier observed, "The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves.
Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.
" Rafiq al Shabazz.
Rafiq is a fellow community organizer in Chicago, where Obama moves after graduation.
A Black Nationalist, Rafiq causes Obama to again question the value of cultural assimilation.
He questions the virtue of judging people by their individual character, versus by their race.
Maybe his mother was wrong that everyone should stand on his own merits.
Maybe race trumps all that.
He writes, "If nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence.
" But that's all in his past, you might say.
Obama's thinking has moved beyond racial and socioeconomic divides.
After all, his goal is to unite America.
Yet, he observes in the Dreams' epilogue that the study of law is, in part, "a glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power -- and all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition.
" So America's legal system is here to keep the powerless in their place, right?Obama's own story in Dreams From My Father brings us full-circle back to the question of Reverend Wright, and whether Obama is genuinely shocked by Wright's divisive words.
Truly, a man is known by the company he keeps.
Barack Obama.
Relationship with Jeremiah Wright