Academic

Bittergate Response from Professor Guy Charles: No High-Tech Lynching

By Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Dear Angela:

I understand your frustration with bittergate.  However, I don?t think the criticism of Senator Obama is an attempted high-tech lynching for being uppity.  The ultimate in being uppity is a black man thinking that he can be President of these United States.  Senator Obama, a first-term Senator barely into that term, has deigned to aspire to that most exclusive club in the land?a club that has only admitted 43 white men in over 200 years. When he announced for the presidency no one but his most ardent supporters would have predicted that he would end up as the Democratic Party?s frontrunner.  He has won big states and small states, causes and elections, predominantly white states and plurality black states.  Contrary to popular wisdom, his campaign in one contest or another has attracted every demographic including white working class voters. He has been a media darling and the candidate of the elites.  For a while, he even made conservative pundits swoon.  Until l?affaire Wright, he was considered by many to be the inevitable Democratic nominee and he may still be depending upon what happens tomorrow.  Yes, Senator Obama has been subject to some withering criticism and yes some of that criticism has been unfair.  But is this a high-tech lynching?  Not even close my friend.

More specifically on bittergate: I have to say that having re-read the transcript and listened to the audio, I am of multiple minds.  As a point of departure, it is not plausible to believe that Senator Obama is any less empathetic than any other candidate running for the presidency.  So, in some sense, the criticism that he received was unfair.  Voters should be looking at his policies and asking how those policies are going to impact their well-being. Nevertheless, the comments are hard to explain. 

It is true that among those of us who are religious, some of us may rely more on religion in times of difficulty.  But that is not what the Senator said.  What he said is that after years of economic depression some voters (irrationally?) turned to religion, guns, anti-immigrant sentiments as a way to explain their frustrations.  That statement was singularly callous and out of character for Senator Obama. It is not surprising that bittergate has received a lot of attention?some fair and some beyond the pale.

But what most troubled me about the comments is not what has received the most attention.  You are right that his comments were not placed into context.  But I?m not sure if viewing the context puts the comments in a more sympathetic light.  Senator Obama offered up religion, guns, etc., as a way of explaining why working class white voters were having time connecting with his message. Some pundits were attributing this inability to connect to racism.  Senator Obama disagreed.  Race, from the Senator?s perspective, was not the primary reason that some voters were having a hard time connecting to his message; they were having a hard time connecting because they?re bitter.  Now you tell me, shouldn?t that explanation make you bitter?

Guy

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Full post as published by BlackProf on May 05, 2008 (boomark / email).