Tim Wise on racial double-standards, Barack Obama, Reverend Wright and Louis Farrakhan

The article below is a year old, but completely relevant today in terms of double-standards dumped on Obama (of whom I am obviously a critic, but who still deserves freedom from racial discrimination).

Tim Wise is a smart cat who's been writing and speaking on the topic of racial supremacy for years. And in case the remarks below send up flags for your about Wise being an angry Black militant with an axe to grind about "Whitey," Wise is Jewish.

"...a white guy can praise Hitler, can cast aspersions on the veracity of Jews who were slotted to be killed, and can make blatantly racist, sexist and homophobic remarks and ultimately nothing happens to him, and no white politician is ever asked their opinion of him, or made to distance him or herself from the white man's rantings.

"But black folks will have to do the dance, will have to make sure to reject Farrakhan, because otherwise, apparently, we should intuit that they are closet members of the Nation, just waiting to take office so they can pop on a bow tie and put Elijah Muhammad's face on the nation's currency.

"Perhaps when white folks begin to show as much concern for the bigoted statements and, more to the point, murderous actions of white political leaders as we show over the statements of Louis Farrakhan, then we'll deserve to be taken seriously in this thing we call a 'national dialogue on race.'

"Until then, however, folks of color will continue--and rightly, understandably so--to view us as trying to dodge our personal responsibility for our share of the problem. They will view us, and with good reason, as merely using Farrakhan so that we can divert attention from institutional discrimination, institutionalized white privilege and power, and the way in which white denial maintains a lid on social change, by creating the impression that everything is fine, and whatever isn't fine is the fault of crazy, militant black people, who follow crazy and hateful religious leaders.

"In this way, white Americans can continue to pretend that the nation's racial problem isn't about us; that we are but passive observers of a drama concocted by others, over which only they have any control.

"And in this way, we guarantee the perpetuation of the very enmity we claim not to understand, the very tension we cannot comprehend, and the chasm-like divide that was created in our name and for our historic benefit, no matter how much we try and shift the blame now, heads rooted firmly in the proverbial sand."