Fr. Neuhaus on Obama's speech:

...In applauding the outrageous statements of the Reverend Wright and his like, McWhorter writes, “they weren’t listening to them as logic, but as atmosphere.” He concludes: “I, for one, am still ready for a black president. I wonder if the rest of America is.” I’m afraid that a very large part of America is all too ready to accept Obama’s stereotype of blacks, and is therefore not ready for this black as president.

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times takes a similar line. Yes, you may think it’s crazy to say that the AIDS virus is a government plot to kill black people. “That may be an absurd view in white circles,” writes Kristof, “but a 1990 survey found that 30 percent of African Americans believed this was at least plausible.” Absurdity and plausibility, we are given to understand, are racially determined. On the AIDS conspiracy, he quotes a black social scientist at Princeton who says: “That’s a real standard belief. One of the things fascinating to me watching these responses to Jeremiah Wright is that white Americans find his beliefs so fringe or so extreme.”

Kristof writes: “Much of the time, blacks have a pretty good sense of what whites think, but whites are oblivious to common black perspectives. . . . All of this demonstrates that a national dialogue on race is painful, awkward, and essential.” Those oblivious whites are, however lamentably bigoted and dimwitted, teachable. Although it will be painful and awkward, they, too, can be helped to understand that the idea that the government unleashed the AIDS epidemic in order to kill black people is not so absurd after all.

As I said, the Philadelphia speech was in many ways an admirably thoughtful and candid reflection on race in America. Yet the no doubt unintended message, reinforced by the senator’s pundit supporters, is that white people need to be more accepting of the strange ways of black folk.

This is not the first time I've heard the speech so catagorised - as an admirable attempt to talk about race in America. I have immense respect for the intellectual achievements of Fr. Neuhaus, and in matters theological I simply would not contradict him - but I am rather tired of all this talk of Obama's speech being something other than the dishonest, anti-human horror that it was.

I admit that I am some times caugh flat-footed by the opinions of black friends...such as when, the other day, a black lady I know (and very much respect for her intellectual and professional abilities) opined that, to her, President Bush is a Satanic figure. This whole issue has also brought to mind a conversation I had during the 2000 campaign with another black lady I know - she was, naturally, going to vote for Gore and she just couldn't fathom why I was voting for Bush...to her, Republicans are racist. When I asked if she thought I was racist, she said, "no". When further pressed that since I'm a Republican, and not racist, doesn't this cast doubt upon her basic view of the GOP, she had no answer. There is an element of the undiscovered country between black Americans and white Americans - but it goes both ways; that friend in 2000 wasn't the first black friend to be stunned to discover that I, a non-racist, am a Republican. If white America have a hard time peering into black America then so, too, does black America have difficulty understanding white America.

At the root of all human divisions is a lie - it was, of course, the original lie which divided us from God, and from that day to this, lies are always at the bottom of our alienation from one another. Once upon a time, white Americans deliberately lied to themselves about black people - viewing them as inherently inferior - and this lie separated black from white, and made a very difficult to bridge gap. These days, that lie is consigned to only a very tiny minority of very fringe Americans, but it has sadly been replaced, in black America, by a series of lies just as absurd as the lies white America used to believe about black America.

I don't know if Wright is sincere, or is just a con artist keeping a captive audience - but what he peddles, apparantly every Sunday, is a series of lies. Obama's problem isn't so much that he attends Wright's church, but that Obama at least implicitly agrees with the lies of Wright - and this, in turn, means that Obama is alienated from the center of American political life and, indeed, will continually do the wrong thing if he obtains office because he believes a series of lies.

Race in America is a very thorny issue. Secretary Rice recently noted that the difficulties of race in America stem from our national "original sin" - that we held to slavery our fellow Americans who happened to be black. This is a very true statement - but the cure for this inherited ill is to tell the truth about it, and about where we are today. Obama, by perpetuating the lies which divide, has done a great disservice to our nation, and to our national debate on race.

It is to be hoped that we will, one day, have a frank, national discussion on racial issues - but that day will be postponed indefintely if our national leaders lack the courage to challenge the lies which destroy, and even more so delayed if any of our national leaders actually embrace the lies, as Obama has done vis a vis Wright.

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