Regarding the Jeremiah Wright affair.....

Groan.

Ugh!

Really, I am as bored with Wright as I am sick of him, sick of elections, and sick of politics. As "issues" go, that man is one of the most tedious and tawdry I have ever seen. The more he fails to just shut the eff up, the more tedious he is. The more people write about Wright, the worse it becomes. After you've read a certain number of blog posts and Op-Eds (whether condemning or defending him) you begin to recognize the same old numbingly familiar patterns and arguments, and if you're as old as I am, you start to get that Spiro Agnew-type feeling along the lines of "When you've seen one Jeremiah Wright piece, you've seen them all."

Even Peggy Noonan, certainly no friend or ally of Wright, is now hinting that it may be time to just move on:

I am out of step. There is something that is upsetting others whom I care about and whose thoughts are often not unlike my own. And it's not hitting me the same way.

I am referring to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I disagree with and disapprove of the things he says. The U.S. government did not spread AIDS among the black community, 9/11 was not the chickens coming home to roost, etc. He seems like a bright man, warm, humorous and compelling, but also needful and demanding of the spotlight, a showman prone to crackpottery, and I have to wonder how much respect he has for his congregation. He shows a lot of fury and does a lot of yelling for a leader of the followers of the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

When he is discussed on news shows, pundits are asked what they think Mr. Wright's political impact will be, which is another way of saying: What will people think of this?

I always wish they'd say what they themselves think. I think what Mr. Wright has been saying is extreme and radical, and people don't like extreme and radical when they're pondering who their next leader will be, and as Mr. Wright has been Barack Obama's friend and mentor for 20 years, this will hurt Mr. Obama. This is borne out in the week's polls. From the New York Times: 48% of Democrats say he can best beat McCain, down eight points since April. The proportion of Democrats who say Mr. Obama is their choice for the nomination is now 46%, down six.

I also think that if Hillary Clinton wins because of the Wright scandal, it will leave a sad taste in the mouths of many. Mr. Obama reveals many things in his books, speeches and interviews but polarity and a tropism toward the extreme are not among them. What happened with Mr. Wright should not determine the race. Mr. Obama's stands, his ability to convince us he can make good change, his ability to be "one of us," that great challenge for a national politician in a varied nation, should determine the race.

But I am finding it hard to feel truly upset about what Mr. Wright has said. This is the out-of-stepness I referred to. So here I will talk not about how people will respond to him but how I do.

Speaking for myself, I'd like to think that I should never have to listen to Wright again, and would never have to read another Op-Ed or blog post on his malevolently clownish conspiracy chatter.

With all of that in mind, please remember that for a number of reasons, I have mixed feelings about writing this post.

My problem is that in the more recent posts I wrote about Wright (including my Pajamas Media piece), I left something undone, and it will not leave me alone. Just a minor detail, and it probably has little or nothing to do with Barack Obama. Because -- and I am deadly serious here -- I don't think it applies to him. If anything, it goes to a major difference between Obama and Wright.

Yesterday, I linked Daniel Blatt's PJM piece about so-called "gay self-hatred." As the term is used, it does not refer to self-hatred in the conventional sense, but in its political dimensions. Gays who vote Republican hate themselves, while gays who vote Democrat love themselves. The same rule probably applies to blacks, and even women, who are seen as Uncle Toms, and as loving their oppressor if they do not do as they are told. OK, the logic is absurd, and I have discussed it before. In fact, I have discussed it ad nauseam. But you know what? I have learned in these five years of blogging that discussing things does not make them go away. There is no such thing as settling an argument. So, don't expect that here. All I can do is attempt in my usual way to spot issues, and leave it to others to agree or disagree with me, or come up with additional ideas of their own.

And the issue this time is race. A particularly ugly, particularly Wrightian manifestation of race, which has been largely missed (ignored may be more accurate) -- probably because it is a very uncomfortable topic.

In his discussion of Louis Farrakhan at the National Press Club, Wright said this:

Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains. He did not put me in slavery. And he didn't make me this color.

What color?

What color does he mean? Wright brought it up, and most people assume reflexively that he meant black.

Did he?

If so, then what's with the accusatory tone? Does that evince pride? Or might it evince a bit of self hatred?

But surely, Jeremiah Wright cannot hate himself for being black, can he? I mean, that would totally undercut not only his personal ethos, but his entire ideology.

So I wondered, and I wondered, and an ugly little nagging thought kept creeping into my mind, and I kept asking naughty questions I'm not supposed to ask....

How black is Wright?

And, from a purely logical standpoint, is Wright really black?

I realize that people have asked these questions about Barack Obama, because after all, he is known to be half white. But what about Wright? Unless I am wrong, he appears to have at least as much of a Caucasian-like skin tone as Obama, and I think many fair-minded observers would venture that both of these men are in truth of mixed race.

Are there rules here?

I mean, Tiger Woods is half black, but he famously stated that he does not consider himself to be black.

Obama, with the same amount of Caucasian genetic material as Woods, calls himself black, as does Wright.

Now, they can certainly call themselves whatever they want. People are free to identify themselves as they see fit, as long as they're not lying, and I don't think either man is lying. Rather, I think the rules of society are unfair. For reasons deriving from the horrid Jim Crow period, a single black great-grandmother renders a white-looking person black, and that "rule" has been embraced by activists. Especially liberationists.

(Parenthetically, there's a similar "rule" at play in determining human sexuality. A single homosexual act is said to make one "gay," -- a lifetime of heterosexual acts notwithstanding. Vice versa means nothing; a gay man having sex with a woman is a gay man having sex with a woman. As a practical matter, this means that while straight men are not allowed to have sex with men and still be straight, gay men are allowed to have sex with women and still be gay. Is that clear now? Oh, and there are no bisexuals, because if there were, activists would never be able to decide which "side" was to be accused of the self hatred that dictates political, um, "preference." Is that clearer?)

Back to the interpretation of Wright's "he didn't make me this color" remark. Considering that he is biracial, is it possible that he was not referring to his black color, but his mixed race color?

Is it possible that he hates his whiteness?

The man is known to be an apostle of Malcolm X, and Malcolm X was certainly no stranger to internalized self hatred. From his Autobiography:

...when we say 'black,' we mean everything not white, brothers and sisters! Because look at your skins! We're all black to the white man, but we're a thousand and one different colors. Turn around, look at each other! What shade of black African polluted by devil white man are you? You see me -- well, in the streets they used to call me Detroit Red. Yes! Yes, that raping, red-headed devil was my grandfather! That close, yes! My mother's father! She didn't like to speak of it, can you blame her? She said she never laid eyes on him! She was glad for that! I'm glad for her! If I could drain away his blood that pollutes my body, and pollutes my complexion, I'd do it! Because I hate every drop of the rapist's blood that's in me!

"And it's not just me, it's all of us! During slavery, think of it, it was a rare one of our black grandmothers, our great-grandmothers and our great-great grandmothers who escaped the white rapist slavemaster. That rapist slavemaster who emasculated the black man . . . with threats, with fear . . . until even today the black man lives with fear of the white man in his heart! Lives even today still under the heel of the white man!

"Think of it -- think of that black slave man filled with fear and dread, hearing the screams of his wife, his mother, his daughter being taken -- in the barn, the kitchen, in the bushes! Think of it, my dear brothers and sisters! Think of hearing wives, mothers, daughters, being raped! And you were too filled with fear of the rapist to do anything about it! And his vicious, animal attacks' offspring, this white man named things like `mulatto' and `quadroon' and `octoroon' and all those other things that he has called us -- you and me -- when he is not calling us 'nigger'!

"Turn around and look at each other, brothers and sisters, and think of this! You and me, polluted all these colors -- and this devil has the arrogance and the gall to think we, his victims, should love him!"

I would become so choked up that sometimes I would walk in the streets until late into the night. Sometimes I would speak to no one for hours, thinking to myself about what the white man had done to our poor people here in America.

Whether Jeremiah Wright thinks along similar lines about his whiteness -- whether harbors that form of self hatred that drove Malcolm X -- this is pure speculation.

But the topic is not new, and the hatred is nor merely internal. Books and plays like this have been devoted to the subject of "skin color prejudice that pits members of one race against others in the same group":

...."Yellowman," which opens today at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, is both a lyrical and brutal examination of the complexities of internalized prejudice and its centuries-old roots in slavery.

"I wanted to look at the ramifications of race," said the 44-year-old playwright from her East Village home in New York. And when it comes to skin tone prejudice, "everybody does it," she said. "White people do it. The rift between blondes and brunettes has nothing to do with hair color. It has to do with racial purity. So I don't let anybody off the hook."

The title of her play, "Yellowman," refers to one of several derogatory childhood labels that have been hurled at lighter-skinned blacks by darker- skinned blacks, such as "high yella," "school bus," "zebra," "redbone," and, perhaps more benign, "light" and "bright." Then there are the hurtful insults used by lighter-skinned blacks against their darker-hued brethren: "tar baby," "ink spot," "shine" and "chocolate."

Uttered in the South Carolina Gullah/Geechie accents of the play, the epithets serve as a visceral portal into Orlandersmith's unblinking examination of prejudice, self-loathing and the ghosts of childhood. In "Yellowman," Alma, a dark-skinned woman, and her childhood friend, Eugene, a light-skinned black man, fall in love. But they face insurmountable conflicts over their skin color because their families and community have been deeply splintered by colorism -- skin color prejudice that pits members of one race against others in the same group.

Interestingly, not only was Malcolm X angry about being of mixed race, but so was his mentor Elijah Muhammad, and in turn so was his mentor, a man named Wallace Fard Muhammad:

Master W. D. Fard was half black and half white. He was made in this way to enable him to be accepted by the black people in America, and to lead them, while at the same time he was enabled to move undiscovered among the white people, so that he could understand and judge the enemy of the blacks.

With all of this in mind, I don't think it is at all clear what color (or colors) Jeremiah Wright meant when he said that Louis Farrakhan "didn't make me this color." (What color is Farrakhan, by the way?) I also think it is possible that Wright harbors more than a little self hatred.

That may be a crucial difference between Wright and Obama. Regardless of what anyone thinks of his politics, Obama strikes me as someone who really isn't losing much sleep hating his own color. I think he accepts himself as he is, half white and half black, and I don't think he suffers from self hatred because of it.

That others do hate themselves and will not or cannot move on from it -- that can hardly be said to be the fault of Barack Obama. For all I know, he might want to heal them.

Then again, what he cannot heal, he might also want to use.