Why Jesse Jackson Fears Obama

I was originally intrigued by Barack Obama because I viewed him as progress - the new black leader, the answer to the race-baiters like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. As the primary campaign wore on, I became very disenchanted - especially after learning about his associations with terrorists like Bill Ayers and (more importantly for this discussion) the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Wright was a race baiter of the first degree, and Obama was personally close to him and was in his congregation weekly for 20 years. To me, that meant that Obama's public posture of being post-racial was just that - a posture - and his true feelings (as expressed best by his wife Michelle) was just a more mild version of the same old black racism/white guilt posturing. My hopes for Obama being a truly transformative politician and man were dashed.

But it appears, even as Obama's post-racial credibility is questionable, his public persona of being above it all might have some positive consequences, after all. In an op-ed in this morning's Wall Street Journal (Why Jesse Jackson Hates Obama), Shelby Steele highlights the problems that Jesse Jackson has with Obama, and how Obama's public persona is making Jackson somewhat, well, passe.

...Instead -- and tragically -- he [Jesse Jackson] and the entire civil rights establishment pursued equality through the manipulation of white guilt.

Their faith was in the easy moral leverage over white America that the civil rights victories of the 1960s had suddenly bestowed on them. So Mr. Jackson and his generation of black leaders made keeping whites "on the hook" the most sacred article of the post-'60s black identity.

They ushered in an extortionist era of civil rights, in which they said to American institutions: Your shame must now become our advantage. To argue differently -- that black development, for example, might be a more enduring road to black equality -- took whites "off the hook" and was therefore an unpardonable heresy. For this generation, an Uncle Tom was not a black who betrayed his race; it was a black who betrayed the group's bounty of moral leverage over whites. And now comes Mr. Obama, who became the first viable black presidential candidate precisely by giving up his moral leverage over whites.

Mr. Obama's great political ingenuity was very simple: to trade moral leverage for gratitude. Give up moral leverage over whites, refuse to shame them with America's racist past, and the gratitude they show you will constitute a new form of black power. They will love you for the faith you show in them.

So it is not hard to see why Mr. Jackson might have experienced Mr. Obama's emergence as something of a stiletto in the heart. Mr. Obama is a white "race card" -- moral leverage that whites can use against the moral leverage black leaders have wielded against them for decades. He is the nullification of Jesse Jackson -- the anti-Jackson.

Pretty fascinating column. Even if Obama isn't what he claims to be, some racial progression might still be attainable if he manages to sweep the likes of Jesse Jackson into the dust bins of history.