They are now using his staggeringly honest autobiography against him, using out-of-context quotes to make him seem like a racist. Yes, the repellent Coulter – still treated as a legitimate voice on the far right – has called Obama’s book a dime-store "Mein Kampf." Sometimes I wonder if some white Republicans actually believe that black people in this country have no reason to feel any anger or alienation at times. I’m not talking about letting it consume you – just feeling it, dealing with it, managing it.
I guess I might feel the same way as these sheltered folk if I weren’t gay. But anger is a totally legitimate thing to feel when you grow up and realize you will never be allowed to celebrate a marriage or build a family like your parents or siblings. It is totally legitimate when your emotional core is constantly ridiculed, demeaned and even treated as a sickness or a sin. It became a necessity when hundreds of thousands died while others looked on, or persecuted the sick with segregation or disdain, or blamed them for their disease. It is totally understandable when even now, after living in this country for 24 years, with a family and a home, I have to seek a waiver from the government every year to allow me to stay in this country because I have HIV, and only people married to a member of the opposite sex are treated like human beings if immigrants. The government denies you family, dignity and even a secure home – and you are never supposed to feel anger?
My "conservative" position in gay politics has never been that anger is wrong. It is that it cannot provide the full answer. It’s a trap that can destroy you if you allow it to. We have to get beyond anger to explain, engage, persuade, reason, integrate … in order to make anger less relevant to the next generation. With gays, each generation springs afresh from new heterosexual homes and families, and so healing can be relatively fast, even if it is never easy. But with African-Americans, these disadvantages and resentments and feelings are more easily passed from generation to generation, and skin color can act as a constant, unpassable feature of your life that can drive you crazy if you do not master it. Economics entrenches this. You have to be blind not to see the pathos of so many trapped in this. Conservatives should be able to see this pain, and help alleviate it in ways that make sense (not socialism or big government dependency), not dismiss it as a form of hatred.
The great spiritual gift of Obama is that he has mastered this – not by suppressing it or denying it. But by confronting it, looking at it, expressing it, and channeling it to better ends. That some on the far right would now use this process of honesty as a way to describe Obama as a racist is a sign of their cramped hearts, frightened souls and utter inability to empathize. One day, they will feel ashamed. Right now, they simply have to be overcome.
(Photo: Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty.)
The Dish 