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Race, The ?Great Alibi,? And The ?Treasury Of Virtue?

Discussing The Speech this morning, Charles Krauthammer wrote that it played on ?white guilt.?

Obama?s purpose in the speech was to put Wright?s outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he means the history of white racism. Obama says, ?We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country,? and then proceeds to do precisely that. And what lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course.

This contextual analysis of Wright?s venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It?s the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That?s why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt, while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.

Those comments reminded me of a wonderful, under-appreciated slim little volume by Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War, that I have occasion to cite a number of times: here, here, here, and here, where I wrote:

[According to Warren] ?The War? bestowed two lasting legacies: it gave the North what he called ?a treasury of virtue? ? no matter what the U.S. did subsequently, the act of freeing the slaves (even if done as a by-product rather than a purpose of the war) provided such stockpiles of moral virtue that it could never be depleted.

The South, by contrast, was provided with ?the Great Alibi.? All subsequent problems could be blamed on The War and the Yankees. Nothing was ever the South?s own fault.

We are now (and have been for far too long) witnessing a similar dynamic where the history of racism and discrimination provides a ?great alibi? to blacks, excusing whatever they say or do, and a ?treasury of virtue? to liberals, whose moral superiority is guaranteed forever by their historic defense of minorities.

Full post as published by Discriminations on March 21, 2008 (boomark / email).