You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you
Heraclitus of Ephesus, Fragment 41; Quoted by Plato in Cratylus
Andrew Sullivan calls the passing year for Obama and reflects on the ‘Wright’ Speech, pompously christened by Obama’s aides as the ‘More Perfect Union’ speech. This was the speech in which Obama refused to denounce Jermiah Wright’s spitting hatred, likening the demagogic, racist bigot to his own grandmother – shortly before he went on to, in fact, denounce Pastor Wright when it became politically impossible for him not to do so.
Sullivan quotes himself:
And so there is a difference, pace Jonah, between a white charlatan like Robertson who chooses to demonize minorities in the name of Jesus and a pastor like Wright who vents rage against a majority that has, in the not-so-distant past, given African-Americans every reason to be angry
Andrew Sullivan, The Year Of Obama II,/p>
In writing this Sullivan commits a common error I find increasingly frustrating. His excuse of Wright, who claimed that HIV had been deliberately created by the US Government to kill black people, is only remotely sensible if the majority against which Wright now vents his anger is the same majority as the one responsible for the racist bigotry of the past. But the majority of white people now is not the same majority of white people then. The people are not the same people and were not responsible for the policies of the past, were not responsible for the past segregation and oppression.
Sullivan’s error is a simple logical one to which Heraclitus drew attention so long ago.
I’ve just returned from Germany. I had no thought that the people around me were pro-Nazi fascists responsible for Dachau, Auschwitz-Birkenau or Treblinka. That happened 60 years ago; the people are not the same people and the society is not the same society and the politics today are not the same as the politics of 1944. Andrew Sullivan would, I suppose, see the anachronistic foolishness of ranting against Germans today for the Germans of half a century ago.
I suppose the best explanation why Sullivan excuses Jeremiah Wright for his hateful ranting and excuses Obama too is that he feels personally guilty, possibly because of some residual prejudice in himself. Why else promote the racism of lower expectations?