Hate, Fear and Hope

The great progress of my generation is that our hates and fears have become our political divide.

That wasn’t the case before the 1960s. Before the 1960s we were united in our hates and fears. Hatred of black people was endemic to the Democratic Party’s mission for generations. The response by generations of Republicans was to speak to those fears while doing as little as possible about them.

The idea that this is progress came to me while watching Barack Obama in Philadelphia today. It was the kind of transcendent talk I was hoping for. It even shocked some Republicans for its bluntness, because he acknowledged the legitimate grievances of people like Geraldine Ferraro, even as he urged us all to get over them.

But he also went beyond this. In talking about Jeremiah Wright (above), and about the Trinity Church he attends, he brought home the religious nature of our hates and fears as well. Then he turned the mirror on himself:

I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who
helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman
who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman
who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the
street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic
stereotypes that made me cringe.

In giving his own confession, Obama challenged us all to testify, and in that testimony to make the changes in our hearts which are a precondition to real racial progress.

Fact is, despite what Chris Matthews may say in his constant harping on
"white ethnics" which only makes his own covert racism more odious, we
all have grievances, most of those grievances have legitimacy, and we
can only make progress once we transcend those grievances and see more
clearly where the problem lies.

Obama was quite clever in this. He described the past in terms of
"slavery and Jim Crow," extending the period of legitimate racial grievance
into the working life of Rev. Wright, as deftly as Abraham Lincoln
changed the date of our nation’s founding from 1787 to 1776, replacing
the structure of the Constitution with the rhetoric of the Declaration.

Then he went further, tagging both races with ignoring the real problem:

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white
resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle
class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing,
questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington
dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that
favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of
white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without
recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens
the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

It is no longer a huge "ask" to gain a healthy majority for focusing on
the problems we share rather than the divides we fear. It’s no longer a
big ask because the Democratic Party has spent the last 40 years,
mostly in exile, building a coalition based on that premise. It was a minority coalition. It was a losing hand. A generation of politicians knew that simply by pointing to that coalition, by calling them the "San Francisco Democrats" or the "Massachusetts Democrats," they could maintain their own majority.

But that’s no longer the case.

As the Nixon Thesis fails in the Crisis
of 2008, Barack Obama does not expect all of us to lay down our racial
swords nor our religious shields. He hopes, he expects, that enough
young people will, and have, that this minority coalition of the last
generation can become a majority coalition now, and into the future,
long enough for progress to bury those hatreds as we’ve buried other
elements of our past, from blackface to signs reading "No Dogs or Irish."

This was a great speech filled with great lines. One Republican
(Joe Watkins on MSNBC) compared it to Dr. King’s "I Have a Dream" speech, before spinning on
his own axis to assert that Obama is not running to be Dr. King. Which
is true.

He just wants to lead all of us into making Dr. King’s dream real. This time, we may do it.