Lets Ask For Forgiveness - Road to the Middle Class

FOR MONTHS and months the suspense has been palpable. Here was Barack Obama, the first African American candidate for President of the United States who wasn’t Jesse Jackson, promising to heal an angry and fractured nation with nothing less than Hope and Unity.

But what did he mean? Was he promising to close up America’s racial wounds? Was he offering to end the era of white guilt? It was hard to tell.

As everyone knows, politicians are forbidden to speak plainly and truthfully to the American people. Anyone that does so is immediately accused of a “gaffe” and thoroughly humiliated. So Barack Obama, as a good politician, has been careful not to spell out what he really meant by the code words of Hope and Unity.

But last week the Swift-boating of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright by the evil right-wing noise machine forced Obama out into the open. In a speech given last Tuesday he revealed what Hope and Unity means.

It means: Change? What Change? Who said anything about Change?

On Tuesday, March 18, 2008, speaking to the nation during Holy Week, Barack Obama had the opportunity of a generation, the chance to make himself immortal, to place himself in the history books alongside the greatest American heroes.

With the support of about 90 percent of black voters, according to opinion polls, he might have taken a great risk, and utterly repudiated the racist Rev. Wright, pastor of the church he had attended for over 20 years. He might have said that, while racist anger might have been understandable in African Americans 30, 40, or 50 years ago, that time was now past. It was now time to move on from racist recrimination and hate to a new post-racist America, joined as one nation in Hope and Unity, and he, Barack Obama offered himself as the one to lead the way.

But he didn’t. Instead he equivocated over the racist hate speech of Rev. Wright, and threw his white grandmother under the bus.

So now Obama’s moment has passed—even if he becomes president—and we have to decide what to do next.

America’s race problem was eloquently encapsulated last week in an American Thinker piece by Ed Kaitz. He wrote about a conversation he’d had twenty years ago on an airplane flight with a young African American prison psychologist. He had talked with this impressive young man about the Vietnamese shrimp fishermen of the Louisiana Gulf Coast, folk who had come from Vietnam with nothing. Now, through hard work and persistence, these immigrants had come to dominate the shrimp industry, and their kids were “already achieving the top SAT scores in the state.” How come, he asked his new black acquaintance, young black kids couldn’t do the same? The answer was stunning.

“We’re owed and they aren’t.”

It takes your breath away, doesn’t it?

Back in the 1960s civil rights era, as conservative African American Shelby Steele tells it in his Dream Deferred, America confessed to its racial guilt. But the ancient ritual of confession, penance, and redemption was aborted. Whites confessed their sins. Then white liberals horned in to decide what white America would do to redeem itself from racial shame. Ever since whites have been kept “on the hook.” But it was never decided when whites might have paid their indeterminate sentence of shame and allowed “off the hook.” Blacks were owed, and that’s all that anyone needed to know.

The next step is obvious, and ought to have been obvious to Senator Obama as he wrote his speech for delivery in the Holy Week before Christ’s crucifixion.

What, after all, is Christianity all about? It is about forgiveness. It is about forgiveness for the worst act that could ever be imagined.

What is the worst thing that can be done to an adult human? The answer is obvious: to kill a mother’s son. What is the worst thing you can do to God? You kill his Son. The just penalty for such a crime is unimaginable. But in Christianity God says: I forgive you, all of you.

Down the ages, wrathful gods have usually required sacrifice in payment of sins. In Christianity, God calls an end to this. Let’s have an end to the blood feud and its expiation in the blood sacrifice, God says. I’ll sacrifice My Son, and that must be an end of blood sacrifice.

What counts in Christianity is not sacrifice, but forgiveness. That’s a good thing, because when you start to forgive then you start to live.

Black conservative Jesse Lee Peterson was a typical young black man who reckoned he was owed. In From Rage to Responsibility he tells all about his rage for the parents who rejected him and his hatred for pretty well everything else in the world: stepfather, white people, American society, and God. But then he heard a preacher on the radio and started praying for understanding about his life:

The dark void in my heart began to glimmer with the light of hope... I began to feel genuinely sorry for hating my parents... I felt a tremendous burden to make things right with them.

So he went to see his mother to tell her he was sorry for hating her, for being angry at her his entire life.

As soon as I had said it, I felt tremendously liberated. I saw her cry for the first time ever.

Then his mother told him that she was sorry too, for not being a better mother.

We learned last week that Barack Obama doesn’t have the courage to say that the hate and rage of Rev. Wright is wrong and has no place in America. He lacks the courage to say to white America: I forgive you. That’s a pity.

So now the ball is back in our court.

I have an idea. Why don’t we all go to Barack Obama and Rev. Wright and ask for forgiveness?

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

print view

Post a comment:

TAGS

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Racial Discrimination

[T]he way �to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,� Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300�301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District

Physics, Religion, and Psychology

Paul Dirac: �When I was talking with Lema�tre about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However [Georges] Lema�tre [Catholic priest, physicist, and inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.�
John Farrell, �The Creation Myth�

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Pentecostalism

Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization

mysql close