Chi Trib’s John Kass hit a home run with the bases loaded on a 3–2 count in the bottom of the 9th to erase his team’s 3–0 deficit to win the — what? pennant? world series? name it — with his so-timely column about the call for sacred conversation about race.
He quotes the head man of the Christian denomination to which Obama’s erstwhile pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, belongs:
“The intersection of politics, religion and race has heightened our awareness of how easy it is for our conversations about race to become anything but sacred,” Rev. John Thomas, president of the United Church of Christ, said last week. “That’s why we are calling for sacred conversations, and for the respect of sacred places to begin right here and now.
He might also have cited a 4/3 Trib story:
Gathered at Trinity United Church of Christ, the focus of intense media interest in recent weeks, officials also said they would clamp down on reporters’ access to the South Side church.
Kass responds to this fervent plea: “In other words, listen up you reporters: Back off.”
Darn tootin’.
Seriously, folks, a real, honest-to-God sacred conversation goes this way: One guy says, “Dominus Vobiscum,” and the other says “Et cum spiritu tuo.”
Now that’s dialogue.
Maybe reporters could chant:
Reverend Wright, how does saying “G.D. America” fit into the Sermon on the Mount?
dropping their voices at “on.” Same with something about the Big House on the golf course and other issues surrounding Wright.
As for talking about race, if we really did it, says Kass,
we’d really talk about unfair racial preferences in college and graduate school admissions [and] in hiring and on tax-subsidized public contracts. We’d talk about the horrendous drop-out rate in big city high school systems run by political bosses who, year after year after year, use minority school children as cash cows to cement their power.
It’s been so corrosive for so long, [this] black resentment over white bigotry and white resentment over racial preferences (which is, in effect, institutionalized racism); and the abandonment of minority schools, generation after generation dropping out, left behind. [Italics added]
That conversation can’t happen: “It gets too loud and too angry too fast.”
Institutionalized racism, yes. Civil rights legislation de-institutionalized it, so-called affirmative action re-institutionalized it.
“You’re not talking ‘color-blind,’ are you?” shot back an Oak Park & River Forest High School board candidate in a forum some years back. She stopped the other guy in his tracks. Once it was the essence of liberalism to be color-blind. Now it’s an epithet.
As for dialogue, Kass advises going to Gettysburg and having one with yourself. It’s “a quiet place, where you can think about race and sacrifice. It’s not an angry place now. It’s sacred.”
It’s where “some 23,000 Union troops died in trying to break the South [and even] more Confederates died.”
[T]he next group of politicians demanding a sacred dialogue on race should just drive to Gettysburg. They can think of all those souls, fighting to hold the Union and stop slavery, and all those who died defending the South and its slaveholding ways.
It didn’t end there. The hatefulness continued for years, and still does, and shamefully.
But at least you can have a dialogue, a quiet one, a sacred one, alone, a dialogue with yourself, without politics, looking out where thousands upon thousands of Americans died, bringing freedom to others.
Yes.
Later, from Reader Phil:
I think a dialogue on race would be swell…for a change…rather than the 45–year monologue we’ve had to endure.
Blithe Spirit 