Department of very unexpected things:
I received a call yesterday just before noon from E.J. Kessler, whom I knew a bit when I used to write for, and she used to be an editor of, the New York-based (Jewish) Forward, asking me if I might be able to quickly turn around an op-ed piece on the South Side political context of Barack Obama's connections with his former pastor and Obama's Philadelphia speech, then just concluded, for her current employer -- Rupert Murdoch's New York Post.
After assuring her that my views of Obama, race, and politics might not be very Murdochian, Eve underscored that the Post had endorsed Obama in the New York State Democratic Primary last month. Once it was clear that we were thinking in the same direction about what the piece should be (and after I managed to get an escorted trip to a Chicago Police Department station when I set out for a WFMT lunch meeting without carrying either my driver's license or our insurance card), I banged the column out on very short deadline only to learn, such is the newspaper business, that it would have to be bumped by a day and might not even run at all. Today I learned that it indeed will not run, other events and reports outpacing it, and so, after easily agreeing on a "kill fee" and telephonic smiles of reacquaintance all around, I figured I might as well just post it here.
Bear in mind that it was written for, I must "ahem" again, the New York Post.
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Obama and Rev. Wright: A view from the South Side of Chicago
By spending most of his adult life on the South Side of Chicago, and launching his careers as activist and politician there, Barack Obama has benefited from an unusual political and social base that is perhaps hard for the rest of the country to fully understand or relate to.
The area is both patchwork and blend of hardscrabble inner-city Black neighborhoods, well-to-do enclaves of the city’s Black elite, and the racially-mixed Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood with its strong Jewish presence where Obama and his family make their home. (The Obamas much-discussed house and lot are just across the street from my synagogue.) But it is much less a cauldron of conflict than an exceptional place of political cooperation where certain pacts and understandings were reached long ago that make for bedfellows that might seem strange to other parts of the country or the East Coast commentariat.
The South Side is home to two generations of Jesse Jacksons, the younger a Congressman with his own power base among those born after the Civil Rights Movement. Democrat Barbara Flynn Currie, majority leader of the Illinois General Assembly, is a white woman representing a nearly all-Black district. University of Chicago conservative libertarian legal guru Richard Epstein lives just a few doors from Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Education advocate Bill Ayers, an unapologetic member of the '60's violence-prone Weather Underground, sent his children to the university's private schools while some other, less grandiose, white activists support the more embattled public education system. The area's other Congressman, Bobby Rush, a former leader of the Black Panther Party, is seen now as too timid and low profile by many liberals.
Much of the unique entente in the area stems from locally legendary leaders who have moved easily across racial and religious divides and who have been direct or indirect influences on Obama. Leon M. Despres, a Jew, who for twenty years led -- and sometimes was -- the City Council opposition to the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, father of the current mayor, recently turned 100 and remains an active and respected figure.
Chicago's first Black Mayor, Harold Washington, who died in office 20 years ago after being elected decisively to a second term, made it clear to Black audiences that he was a supporter of the State of Israel and to Jewish audiences that he could reject specific statements by Minister Farrakhan without denouncing someone within his own community. South Siders are used to straight talk.
The man who introduced Obama to many South Side figures is Abner J. Mikva, also Jewish, who once represented the area in the State Legislature and then in Congress before shifting to a suburban district after redistricting, serving on and as Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and putting in time as Bill Clinton’s White House counsel.
This is the sort of area where there has been more comment over the years on the number of expensive cars in the parking lots and power couples in the pews of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ, a good four miles south of the University of Chicago Law School where Obama used to teach, than on the inflamed rhetoric seen in selected video snatches of Wright on YouTube.
These are not cases of winking and nudging, of trying to hide divisions or pockets of extreme beliefs. Rather this is an area that has understood "righteous anger" in the Black community as well as the ongoing work of conciliation and community advancement because these are issues and people encountering each other, however imperfectly, every day and not just as hypotheticals.
Obama would not be the first figure from such an area or background to confuse understandings among people who have truly spent time together in cooperation and debate with the harsh realities of suspicion and misunderstanding in the larger worlds of politics and national life. But he also can draw on these experiences as Massachusetts Governor and South Side Chicago native Deval Patrick has done or as New York’s new Governor David A. Paterson is doing. For these are all people of a generation that knows that it is a mistake either to play race as a game or to ignore race if one seeks a candid conversation with the electorate and would confront this country’s complex racial history with seriousness.
For this South Side native and Obama supporter, it is a perhaps pleasant irony that the repeated airing of video soundbites of Rev. Wright forced Obama away from his own slide into empty catchphrases and into delivering one of the most substantive speeches of his still-young career. By returning to the bases of his adopted home town and communities he can return to the unique strengths he has drawn from them -- an ability to unite varied and even disparate peoples in a common cause and a seriousness about articulating the problems this country faces and his vision for confronting them.
With the Philadelphia speech -- by way of Chicago -- he has begun to do this.
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Andrew Patner, author of I.F. Stone: A Portrait, covered the rise and election of Harold Washington as Chicago’s first Black mayor in the early 1980s for Chicago magazine.
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