Disavowal of the Pursuit

Following JB White who is following Jonah Goldberg who is following Michelle Obama, I found the following interesting little segment over at the Trinity United Church of Christ.

Disavowal of  the Pursuit of “Middleclassness.” Classic methodology on control of captives teaches that captors must be able to identify the “talented tenth” of those subjugated, especially those who show promise of providing the kind of leadership that might threaten the captor’s control.

                Those  so identified are separated from the rest of the people by:

1. Killing  them off directly, and/or fostering a social system that encourages them to  kill off one another.
2. Placing them in concentration camps, and/or structuring an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons.
3. Seducing them into a socioeconomic class system which, while training them to earn more dollars, hypnotizes them into believing they are better than others and teaches them to think in terms of “we” and “they” instead of “us.”
4. So, while it is permissible to chase “middleclassness” with all our might, we must avoid the third separation method – the psychological entrapment of Black “middleclassness.”  If we avoid this snare, we will also diminish our “voluntary” contributions to methods A and B.  And more importantly, Black people no longer will be deprived of their birthright: the leadership, resourcefulness and example of their own talented persons.

                                                  

Goldberg's point which JB echoes is that Michelle Obama spent an admirable eight minutes showing herself to be in love with the American middle class. That, for all its value, seems incongruous to conservatives put off by the excesses of Trinity and its associated splatter onto the Obamas.

I think that I have been consistent in my suggestion that Obama never took this sort of blather seriously - certainly not as his own doctrine. Rather he saw it as a necessary bodewash for poor suffering souls who needed their own worldview. Here's what I wrote when the whole shouting match was over:

I am convinced that Obama is pursuing a sort of liberal radical chic acceptance. That this half-black Harvard grad has gone all Patty Hearst on us. That he deliberately chose the most distressed blackfolks in his ambit to align himself with their desperate hopes in a paternalistic way in order to develop the kind of credibility and ‘authenticity’ he believes that he needs as a politician.

Both he and Michelle are very clueless as to what their privileges in America mean, and the fact that they keep bringing up the “He could have had a Wall Street job but instead came to work in the projects” is their story and they’re sticking to it, like missionaries in the jungle trying to convince themselves of the righteousness of their mission. They expect to be respected as long suffering souls who have made their sacrifices for the most noble of causes, and believe me they want the rest of us to sacrifice too - they’re after that tax.

Black politicians have accused Obama of cherry picking, and that is what I take to be his career. He was made by an old school first generation black pol, and took all the glory.

Yes, there is a fraction of the desperate black electorate who are in a strange psychological state and who need ‘get whitey’ to get through their day. I think Obama has taken 20 years to ‘feel their pain’ and speak their language and understand their frustration and that this is very deeply his connection to his blackness - that ultimately he is alienated from both communities he straddles and does not truly believe in either.

And as you might expect, I was quick to point out the growing line of knuckleheads that got flattened by the Obama bus as he disowned them one by one. Obama has apparently at this point, successfully triangulated himself into a comfortable spot. It's one not very far from where I've always expected that he lives, but all it really says is that he's not living the radical chic suit that he'd been wearing before.

At any rate, I give a lot more credibility to the things he's said at Saddleback and to what he will say in Denver and in the subsequent debates. It's interesting to note in passing that he very well may be done with erasing all aspects of Trinity from his jacket. Does that make him less black? Of course not. Trinity never owned black.