I also get the feeling that Wright is being held to a standard that’s way out of proportion to his influence. (Compare the media obsession with Wright to their indifference to John McCain’s courting of John “let’s destroy Israel and bring on Armageddon” Hagee.) I hesitate to say this, but it seems like Wright’s sin is not saying “God damn America” but being an angry black man, which sets a lot of white people off, even today. As Ta-Nehisi Coates argues, Barack Obama can’t just be a great politician, he has to be like Jackie Robinson — completely free of flaws. So when Wright gets in the media spotlight, Obama is exceptionally vulnerable to having his campaign message weakened.

This reminds me: the most underappreciated book on the Program, IMHO, is The Souls of Black Folk. There’s so much to learn from it, especially since the underlying issues DuBois talks about have yet to disappear.

I second what Isaac says here. To me, reading DuBois at SJC felt like “Oh, we’ve read too many white people; let’s throw in a black guy or two”. Its importance was completely lost on me (granted, this might have been partially my fault; I’ve opened my eyes a lot since then), and by many others, I suspect, in my seminar, at least.

I loved DuBois (although I sided with Washington at the time) and I thought our seminar did a pretty good job with the readings. To me it didn’t feel like an afterthought at all, but new window into understanding America.

Unsurprisingly, Jon Stewart like Rev. Wright as well

@hb Well, my senior year the date for the DuBois/Washington seminar was the date we chose for Senior Prank, so I may be a bit miffed at that.

Isaac is right in pointing out the serious double standard here. This is a long-standing tradition in American politics—black politicians are asked to apologize for the fringe of black views in a way that white pols almost never have to WRT the white fringe. (This is tied to our lazy tendency to reify the “black community” as some sort of self-conscious and unitary entity.)

“I fear that the main thing Sullivan—and so many others—are reacting to is that they cannot tolerate a world without heroes and villains.”

I think the problem with Wright is just that he’s a big slap in the face of more-or-less-dumb American patriotism, which is pretty pervasive on “left” and “right” alike. If you want to find serious criticism of American foreign intervention, you have to go a ways out from mainstream political discourse on both sides.

I find it amusing (in a bleak and depressing sort of way) that the people who are most ardent about attacking Wright and his views are doing so in a way which, to me, seems to prove him right (Prove Wright Right). Calling Rev. Wright a “race pimp” or insinuating that he’s in it just to inflame racial tension is to deny the legitimate and serious greivances Wright is speaking to, and just one more reason why I find Sullivan’s site less readible than once it was.