Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

Great Essay?
Pure demagoguery!
A whitey playing the White guilt card?
Caa-ching $$$$$$

It is as full of bullshit as what Wright was saying. It is little more than a guilty white guy who wrote a book trying to expiate his personal guilt for things done before he was born onto other whites not as good as he is because he has insight and they don't.

What country would he have traded our heritage for that would be better than America? Which one? As bad as we have been, we have still been among the best.

Maybe I'm just sensitive to this because I've already experienced it all. Been there done that, twice even.
I had dinner recently with some old colleagues that reminded me of all this. When you have been spit on cussed and reviled by all sides in a battle, you tend not care what people think.

So all you white people under 50? 40? 30? never heard about this stuff? Of course blacks have heard about, it is part of their culture. (Is it? I know it is part of the 40+ black culture.) It is hard to keep from being a victim when you are consistently taught to be one.

Are there vestiges of the dualistic systems that once were law and custom in America between whites and blacks? Damn few. If you think there are now, then you know nothing of what it meant when there were such laws and customs.

Black power brokers like Wright have made their living on the victim-hood of their "people". Just exactly like white power brokers have made their living on the victim-hood of their "people". The only difference is who the "them" are.

About the only way this Black/White, aren't we Martyrs, and God loves us best, shit will ever be mitigated is by a few million more funerals. All of us contaminated by our direct hatred of each other as the "Them" will have to die off before there is a chance.

I had hoped that Obama was going to be the first of the new breed of interracial America. Shit no, he has been grabbed by the old black and white guards and pulled back into the old power plays.

So ER et. al., if you think that this is a good essay, then I have to say, your generation has a hard row to hoe before you get the field clean of weeds.

God Damn America? God help America to be what we think it can be, and God Damn the hatred in the "Reverend Wrights" what ever their color.

Don't be surprised at the backlash that is coming. I've watched that a few times too.
 

Let's see ... the marks of a good essay include:

Written well.

Persuasive.

Imparts information.

Contains analysis.

Causes an emotional reaction in the reader.

Makes the reader think.


It's a great essay. And I don't know whether it's because you've been so immersed in this stuff for so long, or you don't get how far removed 1964 and 1965 are from the lives of people younger than you, but speaking as an educated 43-year-old man, that shit is HISTORY to me, not LIFE -- and by God if it takes a half-lunatic black preacher and a self-loathing professional full-time "white" to bust it out of the history books and back into the conversations of people, it's about damn time.
 

I've been gone for a week, and you're still talking about this stuff?

Good.

White guilt is nonsense. White responsibility is honest.
 

ER said "...but speaking as an educated 43-year-old man, that shit is HISTORY to me, not LIFE -- and by God if it takes a half-lunatic black preacher and a self-loathing professional full-time "white" to bust it out of the history books and back into the conversations of people, it's about damn time."

It would be, except the shit they're both peddling is Vintage 1970 guilt. They want to redo the 60's and 70's and that isn't the solution to the current problems. The solutions aren't race based anymore, they're human based. To go down these old worn out highways will lead us into a swamp and cost time energy and all of our goodwill towards one another.

Yes, I agree, it is time to rethink race, class, and ethnicity in America, but not under the old guard's criteria.
I had hoped that Obama's run for the nomination would generate something more than the same old stuff.

My God, I actually heard the word "Reparations" come up again on network TV.

What we need is plain old English Common Law "Equity". A concept that did not make it across the water when the colonist came to America.

Great Essay? What are you an English teacher? It is a great essay if you want to be misled or fooled.
 

Geoffrey is right here. Admitting the truth of our history and the consequences of our government's past and current actions means that as a citizen of a nominal democracy, I must take some measure of responsibility for that history. It does not mean that I must go around feeling personally guilty and trying to "make up" for the sins of my fathers and my government by being nice to people of color or whatever.

What it means is that I must stop denying my history and denying that my government's actions have horrific consequences and stop denying that the victims of my nation's history and my government's actions are overwhelming persons of color. With responsibility comes the duty to do something about that - not to "feel bad", but to act to change that reality going forward.
 

Drlobojo, I've been around quite a while too and you are making more sense on this than these young guys. Mom2
 

"we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity."

I might agree with this had I personally been alive during the aforementioned slave trade and genocide, but I wasn't. Tim Wise therefore should look to his own tie when he decides again to suggest I'm a bit late into the game; or you for that matter, ER. We're not late! We're right on time!

I might agree if any Blacks today lived as slaves, or any indigenous people living today had suffered genocide in this country. Again, Mr. Wise should look to his own presumptuous tie before suggesting I have no business being outraged by the level of outrage and misplaced venom Jeremiah Wright spills from his lips.

Mr. Wise gets it very wrong if he thinks Wright is merely "reminding" us of America's past. Wright's rhetoric condemns the Present because of the past. You, ER, are not your father. Nor your grandfather. You are not responsible for their sins.

As to responsibility, I have NONE whatsoever except to ensure it never happens again. That's not to say I don't acknowledge the past; how can I not!? But I cannot change the past, neither can you or anyone else. Drlobojo is right; it's time to rethink race, class, and ethnicity in America, NOT dredge up a past that has little relevance to where we are today.

There's a lot we can do to make things better for Blacks specifically. But if you really want to feel guilty for their plight in America, then blame yourself for what this government did, in OUR lifetime, to separate fathers from their families just so their families could have food and shelter.... in the projects. Feel guilty about this governments policy of rewarding illegitimate births. Feel guilty about the quality of entertainment these young children receive through music, television, and bling; steeped in degradation, misogyny, hedonism, drugs and booty.

Fix the culture. Demand it of D.C. Demand they stop all the social experimentation and go back to what worked. Stop castigating men like Bill Cosby for speaking the truth, and for God's sake stop rewarding race pimps like Jackson, Sharpton, Farrakhan, and Wright for perpetuating the scam of Black Victimhood.

Tim Wise's essay may have been well written, but it's filled with crap.
 

If anyone cares what I think, I'm going to respond to ELAshley over at my blog.
 

Umm, did anyone notice that this essayist only called the accusation that the US Government created or foster ed AIDS as "arguable" - and somehow thinks in a bizarre syllogism that since Bill Cosby said something similar, that is supposed to mean something? ER - do you EVER read anything closely, or are you just interested in the hummable tune?

DrL is right that it's demogogic, and I say this while being in agreement with many of the points. But breastbeating claptrap is painful to read and tends to se self-discrediting.
 

TStock, I admi to liiin' to throw a log on the fire once in awhile to see what happens.

s John Shelby Spong said here when he spoke, "At the end of the day even I don't agree with everything I say."


I think the comments on this thread is worth the log on the fire.


It is a sight to behold to see EL, Mom2 and DrLoboJo agreeing on something. Whew.


I think part of DrLoboJo's perspective on this is the same thing that causes him to slap me around for my Confederate-history stuff. I believe him when he says, above, that these are "human" issues. The problem, as I see it, is that we are mnot all "just" humans. We've ALL got hypens in our humanity, and in our American-ness -- and I think it'd be better if we all came clean about 'em rather than pretended they don't exist.

I am a Southern-American. And Oklahoman-American. A Democrat-American. A Christian-American. A waspy-American. A hetero-American. An erudite-American. A redneck-American.

I'm human. I'm an American. But I'm all those other things, too. So, it's OK by me if others want to self-identify as Mexican-American, African-American, Illinois-American, Muslim-American, ignorant-American, conservative-American, homosexual-American -- or whatever.

I think "identity politics" is a clabber-headed way to think about politics. But we do identify with groups of people like ourselves. Alexis De Tocqueville nailed us on that one. Then, our associations were young because the nation was young -- not to mention a bunch of people were in bondage, and others bunches were being chased in front of the moving chicane that was the American frontier. Now, our associations are older, and they're loaded with baggage.

My hope is that these kinds of conversations continue until we all bring our our baggage and open it, and show each other the stuff we have in them. That's kind of what we're doing here.

I simply don't understand people who want to do away with "the other" or p[retend that the other doesnt; exist, which is what I hear DrLobo saying. Correct me if I'm wrong.

It's OK that we're all someobody else's other! When we "get" that is when we start getting along with each ... other.
 

How bout we stop looking at race, or economic status, and start seeing people as individuals. People who have worth because they were created in the image of God. I love the way one of my pastors put it a while back, "We are all icons of God."

History, by definition is in the past. We can't change it we can only work to not repeat the failures of those who went before.

Finally, If Sharpton, Jackson, Wright etc. were as upset at the number of Africans who are enslaved today as they do about those who were freed 150 years ago, maybe they would be more credible. BTW whan are we going to hear calls for reparations from France or Saudi Arabia.
 

ER said: "I simply don't understand people who want to do away with "the other" or p[retend that the other doesnt; exist, which is what I hear DrLobo saying. Correct me if I'm wrong."

If you heard that in what I've said better check what your smoking, bro. The "other" is with us always. It is the fear of strangers, the territorial imperative, the red ribbon around the turkey's neck, it is that shit at the center of our lizard brain that flashes danger and over comes the higher levels of our faculties.

Do away with the other? Only in the laws, and regulations, and policies, where we find it as vestiges of our stupidity.

As for the confederate stuff is concerned, I only give you grief about that because I think you are a better man than that. I keep hoping you'll see what that facination with the stuff really means.

As for being an other. No, no your not. It takes more than a hyphen.
 

I wonder why everyone is latching on to Rev. Wright's assertion concerning the origination of AIDS. First of all, there is no satisfactory etiology for the disease. It is suppose to have originated in Africa, yet its first appearance was among immigrants from . . . Haiti. Not only the Tuskegee experiments - in which a group of African-Americans infected with syphilis were denied treatment as a control group in a Nazi-like experiment on the progress of the disease - but all sorts of other examples of biological attacks on others are deep in American history and psyche - the Massachusetts colonists gave blankets crawling with smallpox to the Indians who helped them survive, wiping them out. Public health was delayed in urban areas during the early-20th century in the hope that unworthy immigrants would die off in various epidemics. Even something as seemingly benign as the Graham Cracker and Kellogg's cereal company were part of larger schemes by eugenecists to stop the proliferation of poorer classes of people (look it up if you think I'm making it up). To think that it is far-fetched to believe the human immuno-deficiency virus is a genetically engineered attack on an undesirable class of individuals is to ignore our history.

As far as thinking of people as individuals, that is only possible with those individuals we actually get to know. Others become "race hustlers" or "bigots", subsets of larger classes real or invented that all of us use to order all the big odd world outside the range of our experience. I read a long profile of Al Sharpton in The New Yorker magazine about five or six years ago that made me realize what an outstanding figure he is, despite all his foibles. This is a guy who takes nothing from no one, and will probably go on ten days after he is dead because he is so ornery he will refuse to stop. His life story is a remarkable testimony of the power of the individual in America.

I also wonder at the constant invocation of his name, and Jesse Jackson's. What do they have to do with Rev. Wright's sermon (one of thousands) or Sen. Obama's speech? Is it the discomfort such men instill in those who do not wish to hear the voices of others? I only offer that view as a possibility.
 

"...but all sorts of other examples of biological attacks on others are deep in American history and psyche - the Massachusetts colonists gave blankets crawling with smallpox to the Indians who helped them survive, wiping them out."

OK, I've got to ask your source on this one? You seem to be referring to the Pigrims? Are you referring to General Amherst?
 

During the mid-17th century, in the midst of a declining smallpox outbreak and an oncoming winter, the Indians asked for assistance in the form of blankets. One of the Mathers, it might have been Increase, suggested giving the blankets from those who died from smallpox to the Indians, thus ridding the colony of two "plagues" - smallpox and the less-than-human local tribe. Increase Mather had written a series of tracts in which he argued that the Indians, living outside the orbit of "Christendom", did not have souls, and therefore their welfare and well-being, both spiritual and physical, were of no concern to the colonists. This particular act would be repeated again and again with different diseases - including alcoholism - over the next two centuries.
 

I apologize in advance for such irrelevance but wikipedia reports that Increase Mather was awarded "the first honorary degree in the New World, a S.T.D., in 1692."

YIKES!
 

Whether Mather was involved was problematic, but the British General Amherst was.

Remember this is in the middle of the French Indian war and smallpox is already rampant. This is a good source, but it is a little biased:
http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/amherst/lord_jeff.html

excerpts:
Several other letters from the summer of 1763 show the smallpox idea was not an anomaly. The letters are filled with comments that indicate a genocidal intent, with phrases such as:

"...that Vermine ... have forfeited all claim to the rights of humanity" (Bouquet to Amherst, 25 June)
"I would rather chuse the liberty to kill any Savage...." (Bouquet to Amherst, 25 June)
"...Measures to be taken as would Bring about the Total Extirpation of those Indian Nations" (Amherst to Sir William Johnson, Superintendent of the Northern Indian Department, 9 July)
"...their Total Extirpation is scarce sufficient Attonement...." (Amherst to George Croghan, Deputy Agent for Indian Affairs, 7 August)
"...put a most Effectual Stop to their very Being" (Amherst to Johnson, 27 August; emphasis in original).

However there is nothing in the communications that indicates that they actually carried through with the plan. Doing so would create a danger for their side as well as the Indians and the French. Interestingly the same story crops up in other places sometimes with the same wording. This particular episode was first report by Francis Parkman and most recently in Pox Americana, a very good book.

Hardly a example of a standard American Government policy however.
 

"It is a sight to behold to see EL, Mom2 and DrLoboJo agreeing on something. Whew."

Add me into that group, too, and then check to see if the Holy Host has split the sky open!

I admire drlobojo's willingness to keep fighting the good fight. I also admire his clear articulation of the real issues.
 

ER said, then Tech said:
"It is a sight to behold to see EL, Mom2 and DrLoboJo agreeing on something. Whew."""Add me into that group, too, and then check to see if the Holy Host has split the sky open""

I will now have to spend several hours out at the 'Shrine of New Hope' consorting with Yoda in penance for being so damn "agreeable" with.

"Praise those who are disagreeable for their abrasiveness will sharpen you blade of knowledge and your tongue of wit."
Hezekiah 2:1
 

Re, "As for the confederate stuff is concerned, I only give you grief about that because I think you are a better man than that. I keep hoping you'll see what that facination with the stuff really means. ... As for being an other. No, no your not. It takes more than a hyphen."


That was painful, partly because, as with anything that has some truth to it it, it hurt. But I am who I am, and it is what it is. And I didn't know how to respond except in pain, so I didn't respond at all.

Then, I saw this elsewhere, and it speaks to why I give such a broad swath to you, DrLoboJo:

"No, I don't know 'every goddamn thing,' but you at least know enough about this subject to tell me that I don't. You are not the first to tell me that. So be it."

I try not to pretend I know enough about any subject to be able to tell another that he doesn't know everything about it.
 

Well I hope it was just enough pain to worm its way into your Confederate brain cells. Just enough, and no more.

As you know, my being an arrogant elitist and self satisfied bastard that I don't bother with people who aren't worthy. I ain't got so much time left that I can waist it.