The Roots of Obama's Rage (15 page)
Read The Roots of Obama's Rage Online
Authors: Dinesh D'Souza
Before we get to that action, it is helpful to spell out an important choice that Obama had to make about what kind of black politician he was going to be. Recall from the previous chapter Obama’s recognition that white America had been shamed by its history of slavery and racism, and this shaming had resulted in an accumulation of white guilt. This white guilt has in our day become a fund of political and financial capital for blacks to draw on. But a certain degree of black “acting out” is required to capitalize on this opportunity. In Chicago, where these thespian techniques had been virtually perfected, Obama realized that he had three options.
The first option was black nationalism. In Chicago, where Obama encountered it, this took the shape of the Nation of Islam. In
Dreams from My Father
, Obama relays his conversations with a black nationalist named Rafiq al Shabazz. In this case, as with other characters, the real Rafiq, whose name is Salim al Nuriddin, turns out to be somewhat different from the character Obama depicts. Even so, Obama’s Rafiq is over the top, a bit of a cartoon character; Obama has little difficulty resisting his militant rhetoric. Obama’s real problem with black nationalism emerges when he discusses Louis Farrakhan’s solution for the African American community: economic self-help. Obama notes that Farrakhan’s newspaper
The Final Call
had been thick with “promotions for a line of toiletries—toothpaste and the like—that the Nation had launched under the brand name POWER, part of a strategy to encourage blacks to keep their money within their own community.” Over time, however, “the ads for POWER products grew less prominent in
The Final Call
; it seems that many who enjoyed Minister Farrakhan’s speeches continued to brush their teeth with Crest.”
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Dreams from My Father
, Obama relays his conversations with a black nationalist named Rafiq al Shabazz. In this case, as with other characters, the real Rafiq, whose name is Salim al Nuriddin, turns out to be somewhat different from the character Obama depicts. Even so, Obama’s Rafiq is over the top, a bit of a cartoon character; Obama has little difficulty resisting his militant rhetoric. Obama’s real problem with black nationalism emerges when he discusses Louis Farrakhan’s solution for the African American community: economic self-help. Obama notes that Farrakhan’s newspaper
The Final Call
had been thick with “promotions for a line of toiletries—toothpaste and the like—that the Nation had launched under the brand name POWER, part of a strategy to encourage blacks to keep their money within their own community.” Over time, however, “the ads for POWER products grew less prominent in
The Final Call
; it seems that many who enjoyed Minister Farrakhan’s speeches continued to brush their teeth with Crest.”
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This is the sole moment of humor in Obama’s book, and it emerges from his contempt for a strategy that seeks black uplift through black self-financing. Obama’s objection seems to be not merely that blacks aren’t loyal to black products; it is also that, in America, by and large blacks are not where the money is. This brings us to Obama’s second option, which is the Jesse Jackson option, otherwise known as the shakedown. Unlike Farrakhan, Jackson knows exactly where the money is. Over the years Jackson has figured out how to approach corporations, from Coke to NASCAR, threaten them with public accusations of racism, and then blackmail them into paying off Jackson’s Operation PUSH, hiring blacks whom Jackson recommends, and diverting a percentage of their business to minority businesses of Jackson’s choosing. Jackson has flourished through his godfather position at the head of a kind of black mafia; what makes the operation especially impressive is that, unlike the real Mafia, Jackson can get his results without having to break heads, and moreover, he can look like he’s doing a lot of good for society while he is doing very well for himself.
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Obama is very careful in discussing the Jackson option in his book. He doesn’t want to alienate Jackson, and neither does he want to offend the Chicago political machine, run at the time by such racial scam artists as Chicago mayor Harold Washington and U.S. Senator Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois; that machine also operated on race-based patronage. Still, despite their recognition that whites are the ones who have the money, the shakedown artists have a problem which Obama was quick to discern. The problem is that people who are intimidated into paying up are likely to be very resentful of the person who shakes them down. Besides, they are forking over only a small portion of their funds. So a relatively small monetary gain comes with a big loss of white political support. Jackson may fly around in a private jet, courtesy of some CEO who provided it to beat the racism rap. But notice that Jackson tried twice to run for president and did not even come close to winning the nomination; most likely today he could not be elected to any statewide office.
Therefore Obama turned to a third option, and this is the one that has worked well for him. It is the non-racial option, the option of seeking to organize on a community basis in order to advance himself politically. Not that Obama was against the idea of a shakedown; it’s just that he wanted a bigger, more effective shakedown. What could be better than getting people to give voluntarily, even happily? Saul Alinsky helped Obama see how he could get whites to become accessories in such a large-scale project. Alinsky’s
Rules for Radicals
is dedicated to a most unusual figure, who is credited with being “the very first radical.” That figure is Lucifer, otherwise known as Satan. Not content with having Satan on his side, Alinsky also acknowledges his debts to Niccolo Machiavelli, but with one distinction. “
The Prince
was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power.
Rules for Radicals
is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.” Alinsky’s context was American, yet his rules could easily be adapted to Obama’s anti-colonial outlook: Alinsky could show him how, working on behalf of the wretched of the earth, he might bring down the Haves and seize power.
Rules for Radicals
is dedicated to a most unusual figure, who is credited with being “the very first radical.” That figure is Lucifer, otherwise known as Satan. Not content with having Satan on his side, Alinsky also acknowledges his debts to Niccolo Machiavelli, but with one distinction. “
The Prince
was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power.
Rules for Radicals
is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.” Alinsky’s context was American, yet his rules could easily be adapted to Obama’s anti-colonial outlook: Alinsky could show him how, working on behalf of the wretched of the earth, he might bring down the Haves and seize power.
Despite his book’s title, the most important aspect of Alinsky was not his radicalism; it was his pragmatism. Alinsky argued that blacks cannot succeed without the support of whites; more broadly, the folks at the bottom of society cannot win without making an alliance with, or at least manipulating, the folks in the middle and even some folks at the top. Even if all the low-income blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and even poor Appalachian whites come together, the coalition would fail because it would not have enough power to make a real change. Alinsky’s point was to call for a politics that transcends race and even class. He did so not to fulfill some multicultural vision, but simply because of the political reality that no radical change—radical in the sense of going to the root of things—was possible without including the white middle class in such a coalition.
Alinsky admitted that the white middle class was provincial, selfish, and often antagonistic to immigrants and minorities. Still, with careful crafting it was possible to devise a message that would bring these folks on board. Basically you have to create alienation, to cut this group from the power bases in society, to intensify its feelings of hopelessness and frustration. “Go in and rub raw the sores of discontent,” Alinsky advised. “We’ll give them a way... to exercise their rights as citizens and strike back at the establishment that oppressed them.” This, Alinsky concluded, was the way to sell the middle class majority on a politics that would normally be alien and unpalatable.
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For Obama, here was an unforgettable lesson in political packaging and marketing.
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For Obama, here was an unforgettable lesson in political packaging and marketing.
While Alinsky was an important instructor in tactics, another figure—and this time quite a character—played a crucial role in solidifying Obama’s core identity. Approximately two decades ago, while he was working as an activist in Chicago, Obama came to the Trinity Church in order to hear its pastor Jeremiah Wright. Obama was not particularly religious; in fact, when pastors asked which church he attended, he typically hemmed and hawed. But, in
The Audacity of Hope
, Obama writes, “I was drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change.”
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Trinity, Obama had heard, was that kind of church. Obama’s interest was sharply boosted when he saw a sign spiked into the grass outside the church building: FREE SOUTH AFRICA. In the Reverend Wright, Obama encountered a man who frequently wore a dashiki or other African garb. A charismatic figure who was also an intellectual, Wright was capable of moving between the First World and the Third World, and of blending literary and political references with his biblical themes.
The Audacity of Hope
, Obama writes, “I was drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change.”
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Trinity, Obama had heard, was that kind of church. Obama’s interest was sharply boosted when he saw a sign spiked into the grass outside the church building: FREE SOUTH AFRICA. In the Reverend Wright, Obama encountered a man who frequently wore a dashiki or other African garb. A charismatic figure who was also an intellectual, Wright was capable of moving between the First World and the Third World, and of blending literary and political references with his biblical themes.
The sermon Obama heard that first day was called “The Audacity of Hope.” It was a cosmopolitan address: Wright spoke of hardship in America, but he also spoke of Sharpeville, South Africa, and Hiroshima. Wright said, “The world . . . seems on the brink of destruction. Famine ravages millions of inhabitants in one hemisphere, while feasting and gluttony are enjoyed by inhabitants of another hemisphere.” Obama reproduces the following passage as one that especially struck him. “It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere.... That’s the world !”
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The anti-colonial themes are obvious here: North versus South; rich, white Europeans versus the poor, dark-skinned people of Africa and the Caribbean. These were the themes of Obama’s life, and he was drawn in from the start.
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The anti-colonial themes are obvious here: North versus South; rich, white Europeans versus the poor, dark-skinned people of Africa and the Caribbean. These were the themes of Obama’s life, and he was drawn in from the start.
Since Wright’s name surfaced during the presidential campaign, there has been much speculation about why Obama picked Trinity as his home church. After all, there were plenty of others to choose from, including several large churches that would also have served as a strong political base for Obama, and others that were closer to the South Side of Chicago where Obama lived. Many conservative critics of Obama pointed to Wright’s controversial statements—such as his chant of “God damn America!” or his insistence that the U.S. government was deliberately spreading AIDS in the black community—and asserted that Obama must have agreed with them. Obama himself said he never heard those statements, and his liberal supporters suggested that perhaps he didn’t quite know what Wright was all about.
None of this makes any sense. Certainly it is preposterous to suggest that Obama shared Wright’s crackpot conspiracies about AIDS and the government. Nor can I envision Obama himself joining with Wright in chanting “God damn America.” On the other hand, it is equally absurd to claim that Obama was clueless about Wright’s real views. He attended the church for two decades. Throughout this time, the Obamas supported the church financially, and in 2007 they donated $22,500 to Trinity, their single largest charitable contribution.
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Wright presided over Obama’s wedding and baptized his two children. Even more telling, just as Obama took his father’s name Barack as a tangible sign of his identification with him, so too Obama took the title of Wright’s sermon “The Audacity of Hope” and made it the title of his second book. Some have suggested that Wright became a kind of surrogate father for Obama, and that with his several thousand church members, Wright was perceived by Obama as having succeeded where his own father had failed. If this is the case, then Wright would be Obama’s third paternal surrogate, following in the train of Lolo Soetoro and Frank Davis. In any event, over time Obama and Wright developed a close relationship. And clearly an intelligent man like Obama knew who Wright was and what he stood for; in fact, those were his main reasons for choosing Trinity and staying there.
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Wright presided over Obama’s wedding and baptized his two children. Even more telling, just as Obama took his father’s name Barack as a tangible sign of his identification with him, so too Obama took the title of Wright’s sermon “The Audacity of Hope” and made it the title of his second book. Some have suggested that Wright became a kind of surrogate father for Obama, and that with his several thousand church members, Wright was perceived by Obama as having succeeded where his own father had failed. If this is the case, then Wright would be Obama’s third paternal surrogate, following in the train of Lolo Soetoro and Frank Davis. In any event, over time Obama and Wright developed a close relationship. And clearly an intelligent man like Obama knew who Wright was and what he stood for; in fact, those were his main reasons for choosing Trinity and staying there.
What was it about Wright that appealed so much to Obama? Here we must distinguish between the many faces of Jeremiah Wright. Wright is a character who could easily have appeared in one of Mark Twain’s novels, right alongside the Duke and Dauphin. The man is one part civil rights activist, one part Afrocentrist, one part anti-colonialist, and all parts opportunist. He rails against the rich while he himself lives in an affluent, gated community. He met his wife Ramah in a rather unusual way: she had been married to someone else, but when she came to him for counseling he coaxed her into his bed, ultimately convincing her that she would be better off with him than with her husband.
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Who knows whether Obama was aware of any of this? He certainly did know some of Wright’s Afrocentric preoccupations: the “white value system” and the “black value system,” Cleopatra was black, Jesus was black, everyone who invented anything was black, and so on. Most leading anti-colonial thinkers dismiss Afrocentrism as a foolish diversion. “No,” admits Aimé Césaire with a hint of impatience, “we’ve never been Amazons or the Kings of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana with 800 camels.” The Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka has written sarcastically that Negroes no more need to prove their Negritude than tigers need to prove their tigritude.
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My guess is that, in line with this thinking, Obama dismissed all of Wright’s Afrocentric nonsense. He didn’t care about it because, in his view, on the really crucial issue, Wright was 100 percent right.
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My guess is that, in line with this thinking, Obama dismissed all of Wright’s Afrocentric nonsense. He didn’t care about it because, in his view, on the really crucial issue, Wright was 100 percent right.
The crucial issue was anti-colonialism, and this is a central theme in Wright’s sermons, but it’s been ignored because hardly anyone has taken what the man says seriously. Yet Wright has been stressing this theme all along. Asked about his affiliation with black liberation theology on Sean Hannity’s show, Wright said there was nothing specifically black about it; indeed, he claimed to have been influenced by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and by “Asian theologians and Hispanic theologians.” Speaking at the National Press Club, Wright showed how his reading of the Bible gave rise to anti-colonialist themes. “In biblical history, there’s not one word written in the Bible between Genesis and Revelation that was not written under one of six different kinds of oppression, Egyptian oppression, Assyrian oppression, Persian oppression, Greek oppression, Roman oppression, Babylonian oppression. The Roman oppression is the period in which Jesus is born.... It sounds like some other governments I know.”
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Here is an extended quotation from “The Day of Jerusalem’s Fall,” a sermon that Wright gave on September 16, 2001, a few days after 9/11:
We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Iroquois, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism. We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism. We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel; we bombed the black civilian community of Panama, with stealth bombers, and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard-working fathers. We bombed Qadaffi’s home and killed his child. Blessed are they who bash your children’s heads against the rocks. We bombed Iraq; we killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back an attack on our embassy. Killed hundreds of hard-working people, mothers and fathers who left home to go that day, not knowing they would never get back home. We’ve bombed Hiroshima, we’ve bombed Nagasaki, we’ve nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye. Kids playing in the playground, mothers picking up children after school, civilians, not soldiers, people just trying to make it day by day. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant. Because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yard.
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