Woodsmoke

Sebastian Mallaby in ‘Wright and Ridiculous’ dismissed the guilt-by-association criticisms of Obama in the Rev. Wright affair. ‘Of all the strange features of this presidential race, the tarnishing of Barack Obama has got to be the most ridiculous. […] Am I supposed to believe that Obama is a supercilious elitist or a menacing ghetto radical? […]Yes, Jeremiah Wright says some disgraceful things. But can anyone explain how that changes Obama’s qualities as a candidate?’[1] Mallaby’s dismissal may seem too pat and the questions rhetorical but he did take on a media consensus, particularly on the right, that Obama was unfit to be president by dint of his twenty-year association with Rev. Wright. That association was portrayed solely in terms of Obama’s sympathy with the bitterness and anger of Wright’s sermons and condemnations of America. Mallaby tries to unpack some of the bonding between the two: ‘The Wright affair tells us that Obama bonded with someone whose political views are sometimes toxic. But as a young man trying to make sense of his mixed heritage, Obama looked to Wright for spiritual guidance, not political tutorials; as a community organizer, Obama focused on Wright’s admirable social work, not his resentment of the white establishment. Indeed, Obama’s own views on race and politics were diametrically opposed to those of his pastor.’[2] While the gap between ‘spiritual guidance’ and ‘political tutorials’ may not be as binding as Mallaby implies – the political and the spiritual are often intertwined in Wright’s sermons as well as in earlier paradigms such as that of Martin Luther King Jr. – the fact that Wright had done ‘admirable social work’ and that Obama’s views on race are not as ‘toxic’ as his pastor’s, need to be emphasized. The demonization of Wright as well as the tarring of Obama with the Wright brush is emblematic of a desire to create easily comprehensible, monolithic stereotypes that can then be pilloried. Stereotyping and personalization play, as Murray Edelman argues, an essential part in mediated mass politics: ‘It is characteristic of large numbers of people in our society that they see and think in terms of stereotypes, personalization, and oversimplifications, that they cannot recognize or tolerate ambiguous and complex situations, and that they accordingly respond chiefly to symbols that oversimplify and distort.’[3] Written before the age of the internet and blogs Edelman’s analysis may seem patronising and naïve, but the coverage of the Wright controversy bears testimony to the power of distorted and oversimplified symbols. In fact the proliferation of mass and instantaneous media has exacerbated the ease with which caricatures or half-truths may be purveyed.

Fortunately, however, as Mallaby and other analysts were testaments of, the media is not monolithic either.[4] Eugene Robinson extended the idea of difference between Wright and Obama, focusing on Wright’s hubristic homogenization of the black experience: ‘The problem is that Wright insists on being seen as something he’s not: an archetypal representative of the African American church. In fact, he represents one twig of one branch of a very large tree. […] his basic point — that any attack on him is an attack on the African American church and its traditions — is just wrong. In making that argument, he buys into the fraudulent idea of a monolithic, monocultural black America — one with his philosophy and theology at its center.’[5] It is not just the case that the media represented Wright in a stereotypical manner – which it did – but that Wright also colluded in this process by passing himself off as the voice of the black church. The lure of absolute representation of the self and the power inherent in those representations is as irresistible for the good Rev. Wright as it is for the media, and both sides take refuge in their vision of the evil ‘other’.

For conservative media in the US the Wright sermons were manna, effectively pinning Obama to a fundamentalist strain in his community with little chance of explication, communication, or escape. The general media coverage was, as Mallaby pointed out, ‘a revelation about our political culture: About its failure to distinguish the important from the trivial and about the inevitability that the race card will eventually be played against a black candidate.’[6] Obama’s assertions on race may sound rhetorically improbable but there is nothing unreal, no ‘fairy tale’ about the ways in which his candidacy has helped to redefine for both blacks and whites the centrality of race in American polity and imaginative frames. Race is not merely a ‘card [that] will eventually be played against a black candidate’ but it is a way of confronting and re-imaging the politics of race. In that sense Mallaby is right about the dominant media coverage being symptomatic of America’s ‘political culture’, not only in the context of Obama’s race but insinuations of his Muslim background and persuasion. As Betsy Reed points out: ‘[…] questions about his devotion to America carry a special potency, as xenophobia mingles with racism to create a poisonous brew. The toxicity is further heightened in this post-9/11 atmosphere, in which an image of Obama in Somali dress is understood as a slur and e-mails claiming he is a “secret Muslim” schooled in a madrassa spread virally, along with rumors that he took the oath of office on a Koran.’[7] Although the rumors have been debunked they continue to circulate and the Koran – as well as its attendant desecrations – carries a particular symbolic potency in the current climate of fear. The recent case of a US soldier in Iraq being disciplined for using a Koran for target practice followed by a public apology from the US commanding officer is an instance of disrespect and alien distancing, followed by a politically expedient apology.[8] Reed’s excellent essay deals with questions of race and gender in the current primaries election cycle and focuses on the ways in which the former circulates in political and media discourse.

Reed highlights Hillary Clinton’s complicity in making Obama’s race an election issue. ‘[…] what is most troubling – and what has the most serious implications for the feminist movement–is that the Clinton campaign has used her rival’s race against him. In the name of demonstrating her superior “electability,” she and her surrogates have invoked the racist and sexist playbook of the right–in which swaggering macho cowboys are entrusted to defend the country–seeking to define Obama as too black, too foreign, too different to be President at a moment of high anxiety about national security. This subtly but distinctly racialized political strategy did not create the media feeding frenzy around the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that is now weighing Obama down, but it has positioned Clinton to take advantage of the opportunities the controversy has presented.’[9] While Clinton has not gained much leverage from her less than principled positions on Obama’s race and Muslim identity, the fact that she too has played the game shows its potency and attraction within a political field that perceives race as a primary and often negative marker of identity and belonging. In the debate between gender and race Reed argues that while ‘Clinton has’ ‘faced a raw misogyny’ ‘racism, which is often coded, is more insidious and trickier to confront’.[10] Setting up a hierarchy of victimization is both tricky and ludicrous because it creates a competitive victimhood that allows for the Ralph Peters kind of dismissal of Wright’s sermons as belonging to a global victims’ club of dispossessed rant. Such a hierarchy is also demeaning in the way in which it privileges victimhood as the sole quality or value worth considering in a subject. Furthermore the media replication of Wright’s sermons is a not so subtle replay of racial oppositions and fears.

However, Reed is accurate in her summation of the implications of racial codification within a larger context of American identity, a point I emphasized earlier. Reed writes that ‘Wright’s angry invocation of race and nation tapped into a reservoir of doubt about the very Americanness of African-Americans. “American citizenship has always been racialized as white. Who is a true American? Are African-Americans true Americans? That has been the question,” she [Paula Giddings, biographer of Ida B. Wells] says.’[11] The debate over and anxiety about the idea of America is deflected in major media discourse into an attack on the messenger. The virulence of the attack reflects in some ways the depth of the anxieties.

John Nichols in a posting on The Online Beat, a blog on The Nation tapped into the idea that while Wright’s sermons may not be ‘comforting’ they are ‘for the most part’ ‘well within the mainstream of American religious and political discourse’.[12] He went on to observe: ‘In more ways than Republican and now Democratic critics seem prepared to admit, Wright is the embodiment of an American religious and political tradition of challenging the country’s sins while calling it to the higher ground that extends from the founding of the republic.’[13] Nichols is referring to what Sacvan Bercovitch calls the ‘Jeremiad tradition’ in American history and self-conception. Nichols cites Thomas Jefferson: ‘“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other,” wrote Jefferson in 1781’s Notes on the State of Virginia, where he asked, “(Can) the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.”’[14] Jefferson’s fears about the wrath of God are related to the idea that America is a new Eden, established by a special covenant between God and His chosen people. ‘Because New England was God’s country, its inhabitants must expect His lash.’ This ideation created what Bercovitch calls a ‘teleology of tribulation’.[15] That slavery should be the cause of Jefferson’s fears is appropriate in the contemporary context where Wright and Obama in their different ways bring to the fore the troubled histories of racial oppressions. Nichols perceives this tradition as a positive and empowering one concluding that America needs to heed the sayings of Wright rather than caricature or condemn him: ‘America has been blessed from its beginnings by champions of liberty, by abolitionists and civil rights marchers, by suffragists and union organizers, by anti-imperialists like Mark Twain and challengers of the military-industrial complex like Dwight Eisenhower. Necessarily, these patriots have said some tough things about American leaders and policies. They have acknowledged flaws that are self-evident. Yet, they have not done so out of hatred. Rather, they have loved America sufficiently to believe it can be as good and as just as figures so diverse and yet in some very important ways so similar as Thomas Jefferson and Jeremiah Wright have taught us.’[16] Jefferson, Twain, Eisenhower, and Wright represent for Nichols a pantheon of American nay-sayers who were brave enough to stand up to the orthodoxy of their times and their refusal represents a peculiarly American form of patriotism. Bercovitch refers to these ‘prophets of doom’ and their effort to reconcile reality with mythic expectations: ‘In spite of themselves, our prophets of doom [‘God damn America’] also helped persuade the American that the vision he inherited must be made to correspond to the fact. They too helped make him feel, if only out of desperation, that the distance between what is and what ought to be demanded his rededication to the spirit of America.’[17] While Obama has not used the intemperate or negative language of his former pastor it is interesting that he too taps into this national reservoir of prophecy, of the possibility of change that will redeem America and fulfil pledges that were made at its founding moments.

Postscript

In her monthly column for Salon.com Camille Paglia touched upon what Obama’s association with the Rev. Wright meant from a somewhat different, but still hopeful angle. ‘My one nagging question about Obama, given his Kenyan lineage and broad background in Indonesia and Hawaii as well as his Ivy League education, was how well he knew the history, passions and aspirations of African-American culture. But Obama’s 20-year membership in Rev. Wright’s Chicago megachurch completely reassured me on this score. First of all, sermons constitute only one small part of any congregation’s rich religious and social life. Second, not for a moment do I believe — as talk radio shows are tirelessly alleging — that Obama’s political views are secretly identical to Wright’s. On the contrary, it was through listening to Wright, who was reciting a black liberationist theology that has been standard issue for a half-century, that Obama honed his desire to bridge the gap between racial and ethnic communities in the United States. This is one reason I believe Obama is the right person at the right time for the presidency. Where Hillary divides and sows bitterness, Obama wants to unite and heal.’[18] Where many commentators saw naivety, bad-judgment, lack of patriotism and worse, Paglia perceives the Wright sermons period as a transitional one, preparing and honing Obama for a presidency that will transcend the divisions exacerbated by Wright’s sermons and by their airing on You Tube and radio and mass media outlets. Whether her hope is wishful and whether the politics and ideological frameworks of the campaign and possible presidency allow for such a transcendence is debatable. What remains vital and more than interesting are the ways in which all sides to this media fuelled debate participate in their conceptions of America and its future.

- Subarno Chattarji

Barack Obama’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination has triggered anxieties not only about what it means to be American but has also led to a spate of speculations into the nature of blackness and the black community in the United States. Teddy Davis’ ‘Obama: “A Bound Man?”’ is one example and Davis’s article was based largely on a book by Shelby Steele, A Bound Man: Why We’re Excited About Barack Obama and Why He Can’t Win. The title in its combination of hope and inevitable loss encompasses the notion that Obama is a passing phenomenon, that America is not ready to vote a black man yet.

Davis, summarising Steele, makes a distinction between two kinds of black leaders: the ‘challengers’ and the ‘bargainers’. The Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright are the ‘challengers’, because ‘they make whites feel guilty’. Obama is a ‘bargainer’ because ‘he agrees not to shame Americans with the history of slavery and segregation and whites respond with enormous gratitude’.[1] Steele does not perceive Obama’s possible cross-racial bargaining capacity as a positive quality because he thinks Obama has to ‘prove’ his blackness. Steele argues that in order to establish his black credentials Obama advocates a type of black agency which is contingent on whites (and their approval) and if this is so blacks will remain at the bottom forever and they will continue to need government help. ‘Steele thinks Obama’s alleged insecurity about his racial identity explains not only his 20-year relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright but also his continued support for affirmative action’.[2] Steele’s pop-psychological deconstruction of Obama’s racial identity and dilemmas is cited without comment, indeed with approbation, throughout the article, indicating the need for definitive frameworks to understand as well as criticize Obama. In Steele’s formulation it is not so much that America is not ready to vote for a black man but that the black leader is himself flawed and insecure and therefore unworthy of trust and votes. Davis concludes with a quote from an interview of Steele: ‘“What he is really saying is that he’s afraid,” Steele continued. “What Obama is saying is, ‘I’m afraid if I am less than receptive to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, they’re going to call me an Uncle Tom, they’re going to call me a sellout.’ The terror of Barack Obama’s life has been that blacks would reject him. That’s why I call him a bound man.”’[3] Steele was responding to Obama’s comments that he couldn’t selectively distance himself from being African-American in American society. Steele perceives Obama’s capacity for bargaining as a type of ‘sellout’ and it is interesting that the Uncle Tom stereotype is wheeled out to condemn Obama for trying to conceptually and ideologically, if not actually, challenge the idea of a black politician as speaking to an exclusively black constituency. So while it is theoretically possible to postulate the idea of the ‘bound man’ the phrase seems emblematic of community and perhaps national insecurities rather than only the anxieties of Obama.

Part of Obama’s problem with sections of the black electorate is related, as noted in the Shelby Steele/Teddy Davis analysis, to his refusal to take extremist stances and to tap into a wider sense of black nationalism. Thus while Obama has benefited from African-American support, his repudiation of the Rev. Wright as well as his more nuanced responses to matters of race, has made African-Americans unhappy. As Jonathan Tilove observes: ‘To many, [Andra] Gillespie [political scientist at Emory University] among them, Obama’s problem is that he has never made explicit what, beyond symbolism, his election would do for black America. Now, he is rejecting Wright’s racial agenda without having clearly articulated his own. “The whole thing with Barack’s campaign is making all the other black leadership be on mute,” said Kevin Alexander Gray, an activist and writer in South Carolina. “The idea is that black people should just shut up and accept him as the prize of racial advancement with nothing given in return except him being the president.”’[4] Black nationalism, according to Michael Dawson, a political scientist at the University of Chicago ‘refers to a way of thinking that “takes race as the fundamental dividing line in the U.S.” and the “primary determinant for making political judgments”’.[5] The testimony of Obama’s political workers in the field, the persistent focus on his alien background and upbringing are indicative of the racial divide and it would be too much to expect Obama to heal that rift in his person and his campaign. What is interesting in the commentary of Gillespie and Gray, however, is the reinstatement of racial identity and division, this time from a black point of view. For one black commentator ‘So much of the educated white people’s love for Barack depends on educated white people’s complete ignorance of and distance from the rest of us. Barack is the black person they want the rest of us to be–half-white and loving, or “racially transcendent,” as the press loves to call him.’[6] The anger and disillusion is based on Obama’s appeal to a certain class of white people (the ‘latte liberals’ from a Republican perspective), his ability to reach across racial divides, however inadequate that might be. The polarization mediated here is not just between black and white, right and left (the continuance of the culture wars), but within a black communitarian ideal that sees itself as authentic only when it is defined in exclusive terms. Part of this exclusivity is predicated on a memory of slavery, a collective pain and generational trauma and Obama, although his Philadelphia speech referred to the well-springs of communal anger, has largely steered clear of the divisive terrain represented by this memorial and historical landscape.[7] At one level this could be seen as an attempt to escape history, a political sleight of hand whereby race is fore-grounded but not brought to the forefront to upset the idea of racial transcendence. At another level Obama’s soft peddling of race may be connected to the ways in which many black leaders have thrived on constituencies of victimhood, and his desire to move to a more positive frame.

The New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch, is not a liberal newspaper but it carried an analysis of Rev. Wright’s speeches in the context of victimhood that is worth considering. Ralph Peters in ‘The Rev & the Global Victims’ Club’ reduced Wright merely to the level of a demagogue who thrives on a sense of historical dispossession, but he also pointed to certain contradictions and contexts not mentioned by other analysts. Peters wrote: ‘Blame is delicious. And easy. Progress takes work. Nor is it in the interest of demagogues to see their followers graduate from society’s margins toward the center. Social, economic or political success undercuts their fundamental argument that their poor will always be with us.’[8] Parts of this argument are unexceptionable, particularly the ways in which leaders in all parts of the world – and Peters gives examples from the Middle East to Latin America to China – thrive on historical memories of dispossession and the idea of being victims because victimhood seems to erase historical responsibility for the past and especially the present. Within the African-American community this is a point that Bill Cosby and Obama (among others) have stressed in varying ways: that blacks need to take responsibility for their own lives and futures rather than blame the past and the government. While this argument is important, Peters also implies that since blacks have moved to the center and since America is a land of opportunities the blacks have only themselves to blame for their plight. This argument is disingenuous at best given systemic inequities which have led to large numbers of blacks without decent schooling, or the high rates of incarceration among the black community. Thus while there is a need to move beyond the rhetoric of victimhood – as Obama does – there is equally a need to focus on the dispossessed and the angry within the black community. Peters refuses to contextualize Wright’s anger lumping it with the demagoguery of ‘white supremacists, polygamist child molesters, UFO cults and the less scrupulous “advocates” for troubled minorities’.[9] The catalogue deliberately trivialises black issues by association with ‘UFO cults’ and the implication that ‘troubled minorities’ generally have unscrupulous advocates.

Peters then goes on to place his generalizations within the context of America since the battleground in all these debates is the imagining and refashioning of the nation. ‘Fortunately for us, this paralyzing cult of victimhood is the antithesis of the ethic that allowed the United States to achieve the quality of life the vast majority of us enjoy today. What built our country was the get-up-off-your-butt belief that God, by any name, helps those who help themselves.’[10] The reiteration of a founding myth of energy and progress based on a Protestant work ethic is imaginatively powerful but historically problematic in its elision of moments when America has placed itself in the position of the victim. The re-writing of the Vietnam War in popular culture (Hollywood in particular), literature, and political language has created the iconic image of American soldiers as victims of their government, the Viet Cong, the media, the anti-war protestors, or a malevolent combination of all these. Post 9/11 America positioned itself as a victim of terrorism – which indeed it was – but that positioning allowed for an erasure of histories of US violence within and outside its borders. As Suman Gupta observed: ‘In one fell swoop on 11 September those who could be perceived as perpetrators (the West) and their allies had turned into victims, and those who could be conceived of as victims (the objects of Western power politics and self-interest) had turned into perpetrators.’[11] Peters does not deal with these troubled contexts because for him ‘victimhood’ is a minority disease, an affliction from which mainstream America is miraculously immune, and Rev. Wright represents a recrudescence that only bolsters the argument that ‘the global victims’ club’ have nothing really to complain about. Between the explaining away of victimhood through trivialization (Peters) and the fixation on victimhood (Gillespie and Gray) there seems to be little middle ground. Are Obama’s silences on some of these issues evasions or are they indicative of his realization that mere rhetoric will not address the problem? These questions are not within the media matrix under consideration but there are more thoughtful responses to some of the problems raised by Wright and the response to Wright and what he represents.

-  Subarno Chattarji.

The spectacle of the Democratic Party primaries nomination for the US Presidential elections has occupied media space since January 2008 when Barack Obama created a sensation by winning Iowa. Media reports have dwelt on the epic and interminable contest between the first African-American and first woman candidate for President in United States, emphasising in turn the inspirational, the banal, the personal, the gimmicky, and occasionally, the political aspects of this race. Inevitably race and gender have figured in the debates and commentaries and while the intersection between the two is important – and analysed in at least one media outlet – it is the issue of race that this piece will focus on. This is not to privilege race over gender but to see the ways in which media debates on Obama are refracted through the history and contexts of race relations in the US as well as the conception of America itself.

A quantitative analysis of reportage reveals an enormous amount of column space as well as air time spent on the relationship between Obama and his former pastor for twenty years, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. A LexisNexis search indicates that there were more than 3000 entries in US news outlets from 20 February to 20 May 2008 with articles or mentions of Obama and the Wright controversy. When the search is narrowed to headlines over the same three month period the incidence comes down to 322.[1] The print media along with television as well as the internet and World Wide Web coverage are indicative of the obsessive nature of media focus. A qualitative analysis reveals some of the underlying issues inherent in the reportage as well as in the ways in which Obama’s bid for the Presidency brings to the fore overt and latent anxieties and prejudices in the US polity and the imagining of the nation.

A significant part of Obama’s appeal seems to lie in his apparent transcendence of race, a ‘post-racial’ paradise where race does not matter. This was, from the beginning, a fiction sustained by Obama himself and by his younger supporters as well as sections of the media. The fictional nature of a colour blind campaign and candidacy was revealed not only in the Wright controversy or in earlier attempts by Bill Clinton to pigeon hole Obama as a black candidate, but also in rare media reports of racism on the ground.

Kevin Merida’s ‘Racist Incidents Give Some Obama Campaigners Pause’ outlined the extent of the problem. ‘For all the hope and excitement Obama’s candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed – and unreported – this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They’ve been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they’ve endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can’t fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.’[2]

While Merida’s is a mainstream media awakening, racial profiling of Obama has been active in the blogosphere for a while. One set of family photographs emphasises Obama’s alien background highlighting his Muslim identity and apparent links to Luo opposition leader in Kenya, RaRaila Odinga ‘(who signed a Shariah pact with Muslims and claims to be Obama’s cousin)’. A photo of Barack’s father is captioned ‘Muslim, hard-drinker, was married three times, attended Harvard and returned to Kenya.’ A Kenyan family shot focuses on Obama’s brother ‘Abongo “Roy” Obama who is a Luo activist and a militant Muslim who argues that the black man must “liberate himself from the poisoning influences of European culture.”’[3] The photo montage and captions position Obama as a Muslim with dubious family and political connections and place him outside the pale of American identity and patriotism. The notion of ‘Americanness’ harks back to the founding of the country and finds repeated resonance in the American imagination as well as in politics. Hector St John de Crevecoeur travelling in and writing about the United States in the eighteenth century famously asked the question ‘What is an American?’ in his Letters from an American Farmer, and went on to answer it in archetypal terms of plurality, democracy, and hope. More recently Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post analysed the implications of being American in the context of the 2008 elections. Meyerson claims that ‘Obama’s story […] represents a triumph of specifically American identity over racial and religious identity. It was the lure of America, the shining city on a hill, that brought his black Kenyan father here, where he met Obama’s white Kansan mother. It is because America is uniquely the land of immigrants and has moved beyond a racial caste system that Obama exists, has thrived and stands a good chance of being our next president.’[4] This is the idea of the transcendent melting pot, the land where individual self-fashioning opens the way to success and communal acceptance. It is, however, a partial vision and Meyerson characterizes another notion of Americanness, one that is predicated on being white and Christian, a homogenous core that perceives ethnic ‘others’ as outsiders and aliens. In West Virginia, a state that is 95 percent white and recently voted for Hillary Clinton ‘a disproportionate number of people write “American” when answering the census question on ethnic origin. For some, “American” is a race — white — no less than a nationality, and it’s on this equation that Republican prospects depend.’[5] What is at stake in the 2008 elections is not merely the choice of a successor to George W. Bush but the ways in which America and Americans define themselves within the particular cusp of nation and race.

Within these contexts and in the current climate of fear Obama’s supposed Muslim identity coupled with his blackness creates a direct as well as subliminal threat that must be subverted. In fact, his Muslim middle name and connections (such as the ‘endorsement’ from Hamas) have been repeatedly emphasised to underline the absolute ‘otherness’ represented by this candidate. While mainstream media has been largely innocent of this characterization its circulation on the internet is indicative of the profound suspicion of Islam mediated in the US by the media. As Edward Said pointed out in a book written more than a decade prior to 9/11: ‘“Islam” seems to engulf all aspects of the diverse Muslim world, reducing them all to a special malevolent and unthinking essence.’[6] In emphasising Obama’s Muslim identity in a post-9/11 world it is the malevolence of the religious association that is fore-grounded. An example of this was a letter written to a local paper by Tunkhannock Borough Mayor Norm Ball. Mayor Ball explained his support for Hillary Clinton in the following words: ‘Barack Hussein Obama and all his talk will do nothing for our country. There is so much that people don’t know about his upbringing in the Muslim world. His stepfather was a radical Muslim and the ranting of his minister against the white America, you can’t convince me that some that didn’t rub off on him. No, I want a president that will salute our flag, and put their hand on the Bible when they take the oath of office.’[7]

The central focus of media coverage and controversy has, however, been Obama’s race and the persistent racism of sections of the American electorate. Kevin Merida quotes a Victoria Switzer who was on phone-bank duty during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. ‘She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn’t possibly vote for Obama and concluded: “Hang that darky from a tree!”’[8] Merida also notes that ‘In Vincennes, the Obama campaign office was vandalized at 2 a.m. on the eve of the primary, according to police. A large plate-glass window was smashed, an American flag stolen. Other windows were spray-painted with references to Obama’s controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and other political messages: “Hamas votes BHO” and “We don’t cling to guns or religion. Goddamn Wright.”’[9] The vandalizing and graffiti are reminiscent of an earlier era when Civil Rights protestors were attacked physically, churches and houses fire-bombed, and lynching a common practice. The reaction to Obama hasn’t reached the same level of violence and intimidation but the incidents cited by Merida are indicative of a strong and under-reported current of racial hatred.

A significant part of the media debate about race, loyalty, and patriotism was triggered by the Rev. Wright’s incendiary sermons blaming America for unleashing the HIV virus to decimate blacks, characterising 9/11 as a case of ‘chickens coming home to roost’, and his ‘God damn America’ diatribe. Obama’s response to his pastor’s opinions were outlined in a major speech in Philadelphia on March 18 where he attempted to place the anger and the bitterness expressed by Rev. Wright in contexts ranging from the history of slavery to the memory of the Civil Rights movement. Obama’s speech was followed by a further spate of media attention, some negative and some hailing it as a landmark speech in American politics.

Ed Koch, a former Mayor of New York City, weighed in with a piece on ‘Why Obama’s Speech Was Unconvincing’ and asked several questions: ‘Why didn’t Senator Obama stand up in the church and denounce his hateful statements or, at the very least, argue privately with his minister? [...] What is it that I and others expected Obama to do? A great leader with a conscience and courage would have stood up and faced down anyone who engages in such conduct. I expect a President of the United States to have the strength of character to denounce and disown enemies of America – foreign and domestic – and yes, even his friends and confidants when they get seriously out of line.’[10] Koch’s argument was emblematic of the guilt-by-association logic whereby Obama was tarred with the same brush of intolerant and excessive rhetoric. In Koch’s and subsequent media articles there was little or no attempt to analyse the contexts and substance of the Rev. Wright’s works and words nor was there any sense that Obama may not agree with all that his former pastor says.

The Rev. Wright did not help his or Obama’s case by his series of media appearances in late April wherein he repeated his earlier assertions and forced Obama to formally and forcefully dissociate himself from the pastor’s ideas and iterations. Obama’s denunciations did not, however, alleviate the ‘out-group homogeneity effect’ whereby, as social psychologist David Hamilton puts it ‘on average, people tend to feel that those from other ethnic, cultural and political groups are quite similar to one another, whereas they know that people from their own groups are quite varied’.[11] The need to homogenise and thereby minimise and condemn a person as belonging to the ‘out-group’ was expressed in different forms in media analyses.

George F. Will’s article ‘A Pastor at Center Stage’ was subtitled ‘And a Parishioner with Questions to Answer’ and it raised questions similar to the ones raised by Ed Koch. Will concluded by establishing a close symbiosis between Obama and Wright: ‘He is a demagogue with whom Obama has had a voluntary 20-year relationship. It has involved, if not moral approval, certainly no serious disapproval. Wright also is an ongoing fountain of anti-American and, properly understood, anti-black rubbish. His speech yesterday demonstrated that he wants to be a central figure in this presidential campaign. He should be.’[12] It is interesting that Will ignored nuances within Wright’s arguments classifying them as ‘anti-American’ and ‘anti-black rubbish’ implying that to make such connections – between 9/11 and the conduct of US foreign policy, for example – is to be generically ‘anti-American’ (a not so subtle reminder of the ‘you’re with us or with the terrorists’ adage). Will omitted mention of Obama’s Philadelphia speech but one of his colleagues was quick to dismiss that as a ‘shameful, brilliantly executed, 5,000-word intellectual fraud’.[13] These swift and sarcastic dismissals are emblematic of an anxiety whereby the fissures and often unpleasant contexts revealed by Rev. Wright are sought to be dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic and Obama, by association, is unfit to lead the nation. While bi-culturality, multiculturalism, and the heterogeneity of the United States are justly celebrated, there is a strong resistance to these ideations and constructions of the nation, a resistance reflected in media outrage.

Obama’s Philadelphia speech was interpreted by Robert Tracinski as an attempt ‘to neutralize criticism of Wright by appealing to white racial guilt. Shelby Steele has memorably described “white guilt” as the presumption that whites are guilty of racism until they can prove otherwise, which they do by subjecting themselves to “diversity training,” by embracing “affirmative action” racial preferences–or by patiently taking abuse from the likes of Jeremiah Wright, in order to show how understanding they are of black grievances.’[14] Tracinski and Steele simplify ideas of white responsibility and guilt to the point of caricature and thereby create absolute polarities between the seemingly irrational anger of Wright and the rest of America that is truly American. To be sure this kind of polarization is ably aided by the politics of the liberal left which seems to fetishize ‘white guilt’ and the celebration of an untroubled multicultural country, but Tracinski and Steele and Krauthammer and their ilk are quick to denigrate any criticism of American race-relations, as well as its troubled history and continuities. The Rev. Wright serves as a perfect hate figure in this framework of partisan paranoia and the fear of transition that Obama represents. As Tracinski concluded with some satisfaction: ‘This is the final collapse of the noble promise of the Obama campaign. The man who had once put himself forward as the candidate who would transcend racial politics once and for all has ended up legitimizing a Christian equivalent of Louis Farrakhan–and injecting him into the American political debate.’[15] The construction of Obama’s denunciation of Wright’s extreme views as ‘legitimizing’ them is linked precisely to the idea of ‘out-group homogeneity’ whereby nuances, disagreements, subtleties of context and history are swept aside in favour of a monolithic black ‘other’, the enemy within who refuses to assimilate appropriately to mainstream roles and ideas. Even Obama’s supporters, as The Guardian reported, ‘fear that his denunciation of Wright will not be enough. Stacee Nichols, 33, said: “The state [Indiana, stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan] has a horrible history. There is still racism but it is more subtle now.”’[16] While Obama lost Indiana by a whisker the issue of race and its importance in the defining and re-defining of America and Americanness continues to reverberate in media debate.

- Subarno Chattarji.