By Taru Taylor
Sen. Barack Obama defied mainstream public opinion, which had demanded that he reject and denounce his former pastor, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright Jr. Incredibly, Obama did not use his speech on race to apologize for him. Nor did he excuse Rev. Wright's anti-American jeremiads.
He simply defended Rev. Wright by putting him in larger perspective. Obama stood by his friend when it was most impolitic. The Rev. Wright affair has defined the senator as man of honor.
We were expecting Obama to betray his friend. But he stood by the man of ``U.S. of (KKK) A'' and ``God damn America'' infamy. We were expecting Uncle Tom to deliver his head, to a white majority as desirous as Salome had been for the head of John the Baptist.
Instead, Obama first of all challenged blacks sympathetic to Rev. Wright to get over their resentment for the purpose of self-help. But he defended them, his friend in particular, by challenging white America to ``cast the first stone.''
He spoke of America's ``original sin of slavery.'' He described its aftermath, Jim Crow, which yet persists. He suggested that this sin is still visited upon America's white sons and daughters.
In that context, he boldly exposed the white American hypocrisy that had self-righteously thrown stones at the Fox News and YouTube images of Rev. Wright.
Obama's speech paraphrased Jesus thus: He who is not stained by American original sin and does not benefit from white privilege cast the first stone, at this pitiful old man from the Jim Crow era.
Chivalry describes his defense of his friend. Another word that comes to mind is ``finesse,'' for his stand was not a defense so much as a counterattack. His speech evokes the rhetorical dexterity of Jesus. ``What would Jesus do?'' seems to have inspired him.
Jesus had taken the self-righteousness of the Pharisees, who had charged a harlot with guilt, and reversed it. They were about to stone her to death. By asking he without sin to cast the first stone, Jesus put them on the defensive.
He turned their charges of guilt back at them. He paralyzed their judgment by counterattacking their conscience. He shamed them into dropping their stones and walking away.
Obama turned white America's charge, of guilt by association with Rev. Wright, back at them. He thus redirected their charge, of Rev. Wright's guilt and his own, back at their own guilty conscience.
He counterattacked white America. When he stood on that podium March 18, flanked by six American flags, he stood on moral high ground, which black Americans, as historic victims of American white supremacy, do as such.
Rev. Wright, for 36 years, had enjoyed the powerful position of moral authority. For ``Reverend" is black America's most prestigious honorific.
But Rev. Wright lacked the discipline and self-restraint to check the corruption we associate with power. What we saw on Fox News, reminiscent of King Lear, remind us that power tends to corrupt.
Obama skillfully re-presented Rev. Wright as a sympathetic figure we must pity, not blame. However, Rev. Wright had been a tyrant. He didn't converse with his congregation. He dictated.
``God damn America,'' hardly Christian, speaks to power's capacity to throw a man's moral compass off kilter, and thus lose him his sense of proportion. Rev. Wright, in the end, proved unworthy of the pulpit's power.
His congregation must have felt intense pride in this black man who stood at the altar and thumbed his nose at the white man; who said ``God damn America'' with impunity. The vicar of God corrupted into a ventilator of resentment.
But his flock worshiped him, for they confused courage with bravado; truth telling with bombast. They confused audacity with foolishness. Their fellow congregant showed them the difference. The knight, the would-be prince, put the fool in his place. Yet he honorably defended him who had abused his moral authority.
As presidential candidates, Rev. Jackson and Rev. Sharpton had used moral authority. As ``Reverends'' commanding the moral high ground, they launched full frontal assaults on the white guilty conscience.
Just as the guilty prisoner pays his debt to society, they demanded that the U.S. government pay reparations to black America. Guilt is synonymous with debt. Reparations symbolized their prestige as surely as medieval indulgences had betokened papal power.
But the presidential ambitions of Rev. Jackson and Rev. Sharpton were fatally limited to blacks and white liberals. They fell flat with whites that Ronald Reagan had unlearned of guilt.
Indeed, Reagan symbolizes white conservative protest against reparations and guilt, just as Martin Luther stands for protest against papal indulgence.
Sen. Obama has stood the moral high ground, but in a defensive stance. He eventually found himself in the absurd position of a black man having to apologize for (his friend's) racism.
White America demanded no less. His speech didn't put them on the defensive. It neutralized their rabid self-righteousness, which it exposed as hypocrisy. ``Judge not, lest ye be judged,'' was his theme.
He beseeched white working class America to sympathize with the old man. Black anger and white working class resentment are of a piece, he argued. His presidency hinges on whether or not they get it. The ghost of Reagan haunts his quest for the presidency. Can he exorcise it?
The writer teaches English at Semyung University in Jecheon, North Chungcheong Province. He can be reached at tarutaylor@gmail.com.