It's been a while since I've posted anything here from Orcinus, in spite of the fact that I think David Niewert provides some of the best perspective on hatred and prejudice around. Yesterday's post started by quoting journalists like the Washington Post's media critic, Howie Kurtz, discussing the media's role in creating the controversy:
"[I]t wasn't until last week, when Fox News and ABC News bought DVDs of Wright's sermons from the church, that the simmering controversy reached full boil. The recordings have long been sold by the church, but journalists did not seek them until now."
Niewert then points out that"
"It's telling that none of them also observed that, for the most part, Wright's remarks (aside from his conspiracist comments about AIDS, which were indeed inexcusable, but which received little or no play before Obama's speech) were factually accurate, and deeply reflective of a reality that most African Americans live with -- and which most white Americans do their best to ignore, deny, and forget."
Niewert draws from Kurtz again in describing the bias involved in being concerned about whether the "controversy" will "make too many white voters uncomfortable," but says they ignore "the deeper questions of whether white complacence about race might be something worth challenging, as well as their own roles in failing to make that challenge."
Neiwert quotes both Obama's response and Bill Clinton (from 1995) as they discuss the widespread and persistent effects of our racist history on education and economic opportunity, and closes by saying that:
"These are uncomfortable truths, of course, but they are also truths. And the media have as much a role in the failure of white Americans to honestly and forthrightly confront them.
The reason we haven't done so is that we whites have done our damnedest to ignore them. We have effectively wiped the memory of sundown towns from our memories, making us almost purposefully ignorant of them and their surrounding history of ugly violence and vicious bigotry.
Indeed, as we have seen throughout the Obama controversy, the media have been consistent in encouraging white Americans to forget them. Meanwhile, the black people who have to live with these realities cannot."
The photo above is from yesterday's New York Times in an article headlined "Photograph of Bill Clinton and Rev. Wright Surfaces," as if meeting with Wright in 1998 was somehow controversial.
