Why Jack White is wrong about Jesse Jackson

Writing for TheRoot.com in an essay also touted by MSN and MSNBC, columnist Jack White opines that Jesse Jackson's crudely voiced frustration with Barack Obama is on some level emblematic of the vertigo induced among black people by Obama's surprising rise to the top of the political heap. "We are all, including Obama, in a place we never really thought we would be, and it has knocked us off our feet. We don't know how to act. We don't have a plan. We're searching for our equilibrium. And until we regain our footing, we can expect all sorts of bizarre behavior from people who ought to know better," White writes.

I don't buy that, and the reason I don't is because White makes the curious error of treating both himself and other Americans as infants ("We don't know how to act"?). He also tries to have it both ways by dismissing Jesse Jackson, Sr. as an "old fool" while holding him up as representative of Black American thought. That such pretzel thinking comes from a columnist who so recently and rightly pointed out Barack Obama's debt to Clarence Thomas surprises me.

On re-reading his essay, I'm also struck by White's claim that Barack Obama's speeches "represent the first stirrings of a new consensus that places more emphasis on a public discussion of personal responsibility than on protest, on publicly delving into our own shortcomings and dysfunctional behavior."

Obama himself might like to think that, but the "first stirrings" tag tells me that while he'll go out on a limb among friends to acknowledge the positive influence of Clarence Thomas, White has never engaged the thought of such great black Americans as Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Herman Cain, or even post-comedic Bill Cosby. And if White saw Chris Rock's 1996 HBO special, "Bring the Pain," it didn't occur to him to parse what Rock had to say about fatherhood, responsibility, or the "civil war" within the black community.

Generalizing shamelessly, White claims that "we're not really ready for the day when The Man becomes a black man."

On the one hand, because so many politicians have made a mockery of "public service," it's refreshing to hear a pundit defend people on the grounds that they prefer the dinner table and the barbershop to the rough-and-tumble of varsity-level representation in this republic of ours.

But on the other hand, what White has given us is a tacit acknowledgement that Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy of activisim and hope has well and truly been besmirched by the likes of grievance-mongers like Jesse Jackson, Sr and all the others who hijacked the Civil Rights movement as a sop to their own anger and oddly resilient sense of victimhood.

In other words, the "new paradigm" to which White alludes is only new to people who haven't been paying attention, or people who haven't answered to competent black authority figures like the Ranger captain whose patrol rescued stranded Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell in the wild mountains of Afghanistan.

It's as though White read the quixotic presidential candidacies of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Alan Keyes as fairy tales told in places where people like Oprah Winfrey, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell don't exist. Racism is real, but it's a human thing, not a "white" thing, and thanks to its ongoing attempts to live up to the promise of its founding documents, America has arguably made greater strides than any other country in mitigating the pernicious influence of racism. If Ann Coulter is to be believed, even the late Senator Jesse Helms wasn't the racist ogre some people make him out to be.

In spite of all that, "We are simply not accustomed to one of our own playing real, power politics," White says.

Were he talking solely about the street theater with which Jackson and Sharpton have made a living, he'd have a point, because (althoguh you wouldn't know it from following Al Gore's environmental crusades) power politics tends to make its shakedowns less obvious than Jackson and Sharpton have.

But White's essay doesn't reprise "Send in the Clowns"; its guiding premise seems to be that Barack Obama is the first non-clown "of color" to come down the pike, and that seems both sad and mistaken.

Hey, a less-than-charismatic mediocrity like John Kerry won a major party nomination not long ago, so why not Barack Obama? Is the trend line there really so surprising? Mainstream media loves the Senator from Illinois with almost no experience at anything other than speechifying. And is the irony of having Jesse "Hymietown" Jackson call another black man "condescending" really that hard to see?

What White does not grasp is that to think of Obama as some kind of great black hope is to debase the currency of greatness. Obama talks about transcending race, and no wonder: class transcendance isn't an option for a guy who lives in Hyde Park and whines about the price of arugula. But we still don't know whether he can take a punch (as the Anchoress and other people have noted), because he likes to pre-empt criticism by hinting that it's probably racist. Moreover, his gifts have more to do with comfort around Teleprompters and facility at raising money over the Internet than with any ability to rise above "politics as usual."

Indeed, White's column refutes that "transcendence" conceit by marveling at how Obama is actually pretty good at playing politics as usual.

Were White to sit down for a beer with Mark Morford, the San Francisco columnist who speculated in his own inimitable New Age fashion about how Obama may be a "light worker," the resulting "bargument" would almost certainly be entertaining, and probably along the lines of "lightworker, my ass-- Obama's beating the [white] establishment at its own cynical game."

Meanwhile, "Change you can believe in" is probably what his accountants call Obama's hefty share of PayPal donations and thousand-dollar-a-plate fundraising dinners.

That any of this would induce vertigo in a columnist like Jack White suggests at least three things about him: First, he's only superficially aware of how much black Americans have achieved without Obama's help. Second, he needs to re-read Edwin O'Connor's great political novel, The Last Hurrah. And third, if we may speak briefly in terms of classic TV sitcoms, White, like Jesse Jackson, lives in the world of Sanford and Son, not the world of The Jeffersons: Movin' on up to the Eastside is what other people do.