Chicago Sun Times columnist Neil Steinberg writes from the heart and uses a powerful noggin in support of that organism. Today, again, Neil Steinberg sticks his neck out with commentary on the debate about race, begun when Barack Obama's bat-guano crazy Uncle Jeremiah's bitter and hateful lectures on themes of victimhood and loopy conspiracies sprinted around the media. Barack Obama was in the jack-pot for not explaining exactly how his close and decades-long discipleship to Wright does not, in any way, affect his own view of America.
Like a good politician, Senator Obama changed the subject and deftly avoided answering the question and simultaneously crafting an artificial National Dialogue on Race: Black America ( really, the Victim Cottage Industry) tells everyone else how horrible whites are, have been and shall always be, while the monologues plays out. This National Dialogue consists of the position that White Supremacy makes life hell on earth for black Americans - now, nod with conviction.
Dollar Store black author and showman,Michael Eric Dyson celebrated the Anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination with this bit of prose:
“Before 1965, King was upbeat and bright, his belief in white America 's ability to change by moral suasion resilient and durable. That is the leader we have come to know during annual King commemorations. After 1965, King was darker and angrier; he grew more skeptical about the willingness of America to change without great social coercion.
King's skepticism and anger were often muted when he spoke to white America , but they routinely resonated in black sanctuaries and meeting halls across the land. Nothing highlights that split -- or white America 's ignorance of it and the prophetic black church King inspired -- more than recalling King's post-1965 odyssey, as he grappled bravely with poverty, war and entrenched racism. That is the King who emerges as we recall the meaning of his death. After the grand victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, King turned his attention to poverty, economic injustice and class inequality. King argued that those "legislative and judicial victories did very little to improve" Northern ghettos or to "penetrate the lower depths of Negro deprivation." In a frank assessment of the civil rights movement, King said the changes that came about from 1955 to 1965 "were at best surface changes" that were "limited mainly to the Negro middle class." In seeking to end black poverty, King told his staff in 1966 that blacks "are now making demands that will cost the nation something. ... You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then."
Neil Steinberg offers a profound antiphon to the all-too familiar voices in the Media who would verbally nod with conviction over Dyson's pettifogging nonsense:
Of course they had cause ( to riot -infinitive, my own) -- their lives mired in poverty, cramped by lack of opportunity, rubbed raw against racism, and their best hope for change, a man of enormous wisdom and eloquence, cut down by a white racist.
But were they right to do it? I'd say no. Who did they hurt? They hurt themselves -- burned their own community, killed and wounded each other, largely.
Connect that to today. I'm not commenting on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, personally, because I don't know him and refuse to judge him based on snippets posted by political shills. But his infamous "God damn America" is an attitude not unknown in the black community, where victimhood and bitterness and anger are too addictive for some to avoid.
We see this attitude in Wright's congregation, and its fervid, knee-jerk reply to critics -- we were wronged! Which shows they don't understand that many Americans don't know and don't care about the troubles they've seen, but do notice and do care when somebody trashes our country -- a riot of the heart, as it were. Like the West Side rioters, they only hurt themselves or, rather, they hurt the first black candidate with a real shot at the White House.
Click My post title for Neil Steinberg's fine Column
