I am pleased that so many readers found my previous post to be stimulating, and that it has attracted so much discussion at the site. By way of a response to some of these comments, and with apologies for the length of this post, I wish to try to clarify and defend a few of the key propositions in my original piece:

1. Comparing Obama and LBJ:

A shocking degree of historical amnesia/ignorance has been revealed in the gushing press commentary on Obama's 'race' speech. People are confusing a cult of personality with a political movement capable of making institutional reforms. I compared, unfavorably, Obama's recent speech with LBJ's commencement address at Howard University in 1965 because, unlike Obama, LBJ staked-out a political position which has had consequences. This position was that the people of the United States were obligated to undertake a massive expansion of social investment for the disadvantaged in American society, and that this obligation rested at least in part on the historical necessity that we act so as to reduce racial inequality in our country. This kind of rhetoric, coupled with a focused legislative agenda and the political acumen/muscle to get in enacted, is the stuff of historical transformation. It represents the kind of thing that can be accomplished when the apparatus of a political party is harnessed with an ideological vision that has teeth, and that is willing to take a stand on the great questions about the role of government and about the moral imperatives of our imperfect history.

What LBJ had to say in that late-spring afternoon, 43 years ago -- about race, history, policy and social obligation -- has echoed down through the decades. It was apiece with his "war on poverty," with the establishment of federal aid to education and federally financed health care for the poor and the elderly, and with those legislative capstones of the civil rights revolution that LBJ (but not JFK) was able to get enacted. Of course, nobody can expect Obama to argue for a return of the Great Society. Still, his speech -- and more broadly his views about race and American social obligation, whatever their merits -- are not in the same league with LBJ's, not even close.

2. Saying that Obama hasn't earned the right to negotiate on behalf of 'my people'.

Some readers seemed offended by the proprietary nature of my question as to whether Obama, in this campaign, has the standing to renegotiate the implicit American racial contract on behalf of MY (i.e., African American) people. I wish, emphatically, to stand by this point. What, one reader has asked, might that 'implicit racial contract' be? Well, in a word, it is the broad recognition and acceptance by governing elites in this country -- in the press, in the courts and legal establishment, in the academy and in the broader political culture -- that structural impediments exist to the equal participation of blacks in American life, and that government-sponsored initiatives (like affirmative action at public universities, but by no means limited to this) are an appropriate vehicle for redress in this situation. It is the recognition that, despite the huge social transformation occurring in this society under the pressures of immigration, globalization and rising economic insecurity -- which are, as Obama points out, changes affecting all of us, regardless of race or ethnicity -- despite this new reality, we nevertheless have unfinished business here on the 'race' front. It is the willingness to constantly interrogate our institutions as to whether their actual practice is consistent with our professed ideals concerning equality and social justice. It is an acknowledgement that, imperatives of personal and communal responsibility notwithstanding, the American nation-state nevertheless bears a collective, political responsibility for the social disasters and the human suffering that are unfolding even as we speak, and that can be so readily observed in the centers of our cities. (This responsibility, I wish to stress, extends to immigrants who have joined our society in recent decades no less so than to those with American ancestry extending back many generations. Just as present generations -- immigrants and natives alike -- are obligated to service a national debt incurred by their predecessors, so too are those who prosper within our social order obligated to contribute to the fair resolution of social problems deeply rooted in the nation's historical experience. This unfinished racial business, I would argue, is a part of what you inherit when you become an American.)

While there has never been unanimity on these matters, there nevertheless has been a consensus view -- a view, I might add, that was recently reaffirmed by a relatively conservative US Supreme Court in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases. This consensus has been under attack for a generation. And I insist that it is, in effect, being renegotiated by Barack Obama in this political campaign. I am not accusing Obama of being 'soft' on affirmative action here. To draw that conclusion would be to completely misunderstand me. Furthermore, some will object that Obama's speech revealed his appreciation of the structural bases for racial inequality. They will say that his view is nuanced, pragmatic and historically well-informed. This is all true, and I do not deny it. Still, the question that matters is not whether Barack Obama knows anything about history or sociology. The question is, what are the American people prepared to do next, if anything, about these matters? And, how will Obama's vision promote progress?

What we are witnessing in this campaign is, in effect, Obama’s very person being taken by many Americans as a site for public expiation of their collective racial sins! I fully understand why they would leap at the chance for such cheap grace. Still, I fail to see why serious advocates of the interests of black people must fall into the same swoon. Here's the bottom line of my argument: Obama's authenticity as a representative of the black experience before the American public is not self-evident -- far from it. Saying this does not make me some kind of 'race-mongering' black radical. This is not even a criticism of him. It is merely a statement of fact. Nor is it an imputation to him of any invidious motives. Sure, he is ambitious. And, yes, he is a politician, doing what politicians must do to get themselves elected. But, this issue -- concerning what consequences will ensue from the heated discourses of this campaign, for the American civic obligation to pursue greater racial equality in the decades and generations to come -- this is a vitally important matter for reflection and discussion.

Readers should resist the partisan temptation to dismiss my concerns as the whining of an older generation which is unwilling to accept that things have changed. If 'change' in our racial sensibilities means accommodating the weariness of many Americans with our long, historic, and still unfinished pursuit of racial justice, then I have no trouble standing athwart such 'progress.' Nor am I here blaming Obama for the fact that formulations and arguments which may be forced upon him, by the political logic of his quest for the presidency, can nevertheless have deleterious consequences for black people in this country. Neither do I hold that he, or any other single person, speaks for all of black America. Still, none of this obviates the fact that pronouncements by prominent persons who are received, de facto, as representatives of a group can enter into the public vernacular, become part of our unexamined political vocabulary, shape how people understand and respond to the social reality within which we are embedded, and in this manner can reverberate so as deleteriously to affect other group members. This, then, and for whatever it might be worth, is the claim I am making about the danger implicit in Obama's effective renegotiation of America's implicit racial contract.

3. Saying Obama was 'disingenuous' in his treatment of the Rev. Wright controversy.

I've been accused by some readers of being non-transparent with my arguments concerning the flaws in Obama's treatment of the controversy involving his former pastor. Partisan TV pundits have been quick to pronounce that he has dealt with this matter; that his speech has stemmed the tide; that his numbers haven't dipped too much, etc. This well may be so; I am insufficiently savvy about the ways of political campaigns to have an independent view on such matters. What I feel in my gut, however -- and I speak now as a native of Chicago's South Side -- is that Obama, with the help of a fawning press, has avoided directly confronting the fundamental issue.

Why have none of the TV talking heads asked Obama this question: "What specific differences can you point to, if any, between on the one hand, your former pastor whose pronouncements you continue to say should be seen within the context of his 30-year career and, on the other hand, the despised, also Chicago-based, black Muslim leader and reputed anti-Semite, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan -- whose support you have previously, and famously, both 'rejected' and 'denounced'?" I wish to reiterate here, in the strongest possible terms that, other than the fact that one of them is a Christian and the other a Muslim, there really is little to distinguish these two instantiations of black radicalism. Both of these men are, I reiterate, creatures of the same social, cultural and political milieu. Both have led religious movements nurtured within the ideological hothouse that was the post-1960s, black Chicago ghetto. They are both responding to, and are reflective of, the sensibilities, life-experiences, prejudices, fears, longings, frustrations, and perspectives of the more than one-half-million souls who inhabit that glorious, beautiful and troubled social world. If Obama can "no more disown (Rev. Wright) than (he) can disown the black community," then ought not he to be willing to say the same thing on behalf of Louis Farrakhan? And, if he is not willing to do so then he should be asked, why not? It's a simple question. My fundamental point, of course, is that he can't answer these questions. There can be no response that is at one in the same time both intellectually coherent and politically acceptable, because there really is not any meaningful distinction to be drawn here which is not ultimately rooted either in religious bigotry or in crude political calculation.

4. Saying that the 'moral legacy of the black freedom struggle' in this country is now partly in Obama's hands, that this is unfortunate, and that this is relevant to our national (non)discourse concerning the plight of the Palestinians.

A few readers were perplexed by my evocation of the spirits of long-dead African American figures, and my connecting them with present-day moral concerns raised by the plight of the dispossessed, stateless Palestinians. How does this even come up, they seemed to be asking, as if I pulled this subject out of thin air -- as if it's somehow a real stretch to inject the conflicts of the Middle East into a discussion about race and American politics. What I claimed was that the moral legacy of these past, heroic warriors against white supremacy -- the critical, subversive, prophetic, outsider's voice that I associate with their legacy -- stands in danger of being lost or, at least, severely attenuated. I intimated that Obama's 'bargaining' with segments of the American people over such matters -- as he strives to preserve his viability within the American political system in the midst of a presidential campaign and in the aftermath of this former pastor's offending public remarks -- could have the effect of counteracting this critical voice.

Furthermore, I had the temerity to suggest that one of the issues, among others to be sure, where this development could have practical consequences has to do with how the experience and political voice of blacks would be inflected, within the ongoing, broader American national dialogue over the conflict in the Middle East. I stand by these claims. Does anyone even remember how Louis Farrakhan became a nationally recognized figure? Let me remind you. It occurred in the aftermath of Andrew Young's dismissal in 1979 from his position as Jimmy Carter's UN ambassador, because Young had unauthorized contact with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization -- contrary to official US policy. Jackson had been forthright in defending Young, and had traveled to Palestine to show solidarity with Young, and with Yasser Arafat. Five years later, during Jesse Jackson's historic first run for the White House in 1984, a firestorm erupted after Jackson, in an unguarded moment of banter with reporters, referred to New York City as "Hymietown" -- a remark by which many Jews, and others, were (rightly) offended. As Jackson fell under attack, Farrakhan spoke out before black audiences in Jackson's defense, making a number of anti-Semitic remarks which were seen (again, rightly) as deeply offensive by many Americans.

Now, there is nothing new to the American experience about the notion that an ethnic group's historically conditioned sensibilities might inform how members of that group, acting as citizens of this republic, come to construe, react to and advocate about events taking place abroad -- whether in South Africa, or Ireland, or Cuba, or Taiwan or Palestine. I can say with some degree of certainty that Rev. Wright's views -- about the plight of the Palestinians, and about their victimization at the hands of what Wright has called US-sponsored 'state terrorism' -- are not the least bit unusual, within the context of the black experience as lived, for instance, on Chicago's South Side. That a person steeped in Wright's social world could find himself reminded by events in today's Middle East of the anti-colonial struggles and anti-racist struggles of an earlier time can come as no surprise to anyone who has bothered to walk the streets of that community, to sit in its barber shops and beauty salons, or to spend more than a passing moment in the vicinity of a black church (or mosque) in the community which Barack Obama represented in the Illinois state legislature for a decade. You can be sure that, no matter what he may say about the matter, these views were no revelation to Obama himself.

Now, take a look at what Obama actually had to say about this matter in his Philadelphia 'race' speech:

"But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm … expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country--a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam."

I'm sorry, but I have to again insist: the fact that a black Muslim or, for that matter, a black Christian religious leader, ministering to a huge flock in Chicago's black ghetto, would fail to see the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as being due to a purportedly 'perverse and hateful' Muslim ideology hardly certifies that said religious leader has a "profoundly distorted view of this country." Such a claim is just propaganda, pure and simple, and it can serve only one purpose -- to de-legitimate criticism of American foreign policy by what amounts to some not-so-sophisticated name calling. One may agree or disagree with Wright's (and, for that matter, Farrakhan's) reading of the situation in the Middle East, but one cannot fairly characterize those views as deluded, unfounded, irrational, or un-American. In the sentence quoted above, acting on behalf of his own ambitions (and perhaps articulating sincerely held views), Barack Obama nevertheless spoke in such a way as to deny space within the legitimate American conversation for an important dimension of the historically grounded, authentic African American political voice. To repeat, in my considered opinion, he has not earned the right to do so.

Perhaps people will be better able to understand what I'm getting at here if they read the following excerpt from an article I published some 22 years ago (!), in the American Jewish Committee's magazine, Commentary, under the title "Behind the Black-Jewish Split." (Please forgive this extended self-quotation, but I think it is pertinent to the questions at hand.)

"...The idea of public visions in conflict, which in essence is the theme of my argument, points to what I see as the other principal source or our current difficulties-what might be called conflicting nationalisms. It is curious that this should be so among two groups as thoroughly American as Jews and blacks. Yet two parallel developments have brought this long dormant source of tension between the groups into full flower. Among Jews, the political ideology of Zionism has given birth in the Middle East to a new, specifically Jewish nation-state, continuing to live in conflict with its neighbors but representing a beacon of hope and source of identity for all world Jewry. Among blacks the renewed nationalistic assertions of the Black Power movement of the 60's have now crystallized into a broadly embraced if somewhat nebulously defined Pan-African political identity, inducing blacks to see themselves as a "Third World People," analogous in their relations with Americans of European descent to the position of the nonwhite peoples of the developing countries vis-à-vis their former European colonizers.

"There are interesting parallels in these two developments. In both cases the question arises as to which loyalty - that to the American nation or that to the "tribal homeland" - takes precedence. The question is seldom put so crudely; and often it can be said that the interests of the U.S., properly construed, are wholly compatible with the security interests of Israel, or with the interests of South African blacks in gaining their freedom. But the fact is that, when attempting to influence the policies of our government on matters directly involving Israel or Africa, Jews and blacks act out of motives which go beyond the desire to foster American national interests as they see them. Moreover, how they come to see American interests is, in the long run, surely affected by their ethnic loyalties.

"There is nothing necessarily wrong or pernicious in such inevitable conflicts of loyalty - they were observed, for example, among Americans of German and Japanese descent in the years leading to World War II. Sadly, our country has not always exhibited an equal tolerance for such conflict. Self-consciously German Americans were not, after all, rounded up and imprisoned as security threats after war broke out in 1941, while Japanese Americans, the majority of whom were born and raised in this country, were. And many blacks would today claim that their efforts to shape American policy on matters affecting the Third World have met with more questions and a less open reception in the halls of power than have Jewish efforts to lobby on matters affecting Israel.

"In any event, the fact is that both blacks and Jews, as American citizens with profound concerns about our foreign involvements, have entered the political arena with the objective of influencing our policy. And this has become a major source of conflict between the groups.

"Here, too, the problem has a surface dimension and a deeper, symbolic dimension. On the surface, resentments arise because of disparities in resources, power, and influence between the groups. We sometimes find ourselves on different sides of a policy struggle that only one group can win. A case in point is the Andrew Young affair, in which President Carter's UN Ambassador - the most influential and highest-ranking black ever to have held appointive office in our history, and one whose portfolio explicitly involved foreign-policy concerns - was fired for talking with the PLO in violation of official American policy, and (at least as is widely believed by blacks) at the insistence of American and Israeli Jews.

"Without doubt this incident can be seen as a proximate cause of the recent deterioration of relations between the groups. Within weeks of the event two separate delegations of prominent black civil-rights leaders made pilgrimages to the Middle East and permitted themselves to be photographed in friendly embrace with Israel's mortal enemies, thus seeming to place the moral authority of the civil-rights struggle - a struggle in which Jewish Americans had figured prominently - at the disposal of Yasir Arafat's PLO. This was obviously, deeply troubling to many Jews; it disturbed other Americans as well.

"Yet this activity, however much one may disagree with its substance, is probably best understood as an effort by some black Americans to assert their right to participate in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy, an attempt to show that "two can play this game." Such events do not, in my view, go to the heart of the matter. Rather, this occurrence, and the more recent ones of a similar kind, reflect a deeper conflict of vision between the elites of the two groups. With the development of a Third World, pan-national perspective among black elites, such conflict is inevitable, and I fear we will see much more of it. For at base, this emerging political identity among blacks, unlike its counterpart in Zionism among Jews, is profoundly anti-Western. It has been forged from the bitter harvest of frustrated black political aspirations in America. It rejects European intellectual and economic dominance, regards with serious doubt the most cherished of Western political values, and reflexively embraces anti-Western movements even when they clearly threatened black interests (as evidenced, for example, by the extent of black American support for and identification with the rise of the OPEC oil cartel).

"Now Israel, notwithstanding its diverse population, is clearly a creature of the West - historically, culturally, politically, economically, militarily. This is surely one reason why virulent opposition to Israel is almost universal among the nonaligned and Third World nations in the United Nations, and why many black African nations, themselves once dominated and exploited, indeed enslaved, by Arabs, nonetheless reject associations with Israel from which (in the area of agricultural development, for example) they might gain a great deal. There is, therefore, something inexorable about black-Jewish conflict over the Middle East. For much of black elite opinion in this area is shaped by a sense of supranational political identity which, at its core, rejects the very civilization of which the Jewish state is the sole representative in that part of the world.

"That black American intellectuals, when reflecting on the question of national identity, would arrive at ambivalent, divided conclusions - at once African and American, partaking of both the East and the West - should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with American history. Indeed, descendants of European Jews might well recognize such an ambivalence from their own past. A central fact of the black experience has been the need to accommodate oneself to the pervasive rejection which, for a century after slavery, was the experience of most blacks in American public life. Perhaps nothing better symbolized this than the poignant struggles of black soldiers - in engagements from the Civil War to the Korean conflict - to have an equal opportunity to serve and die for the only country they had ever known. W.E.B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folks, wrote lyrically of "this poor dark body, torn asunder" by the conflicting and irresolvable tensions of being nothing else but an American, and yet of never quite being accepted by one's countrymen as an American. Marcus Garvey's back-to-Africa movement struck such a chord among blacks because it seemed to offer a dignified, if utopian, way out of Du Bois's dilemma. And on up to the current day - the appeal of and sympathy for Islam among a devoutly Christian people, the embrace (in some instances the manufacture) of an African cultural heritage which would be unrecognizable to our slave ancestors, the rewriting of world history to discover African antecedents of European accomplishment - all of these are attempts to find an identity for black Americans which is not contingent upon acceptance by whites.

"So in this still developing Pan-African conception of black identity, many black Americans see themselves as being in, but not wholly of, the West. It is to be expected therefore that their sympathies will lie with what most non-Westerners recognize as the "legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people" in the Middle East. It does not matter in this that such Pan-Africanism, looked at with detached rationality, may be a deeply flawed ideology, one rejected by many Africans themselves and which, though embraced by some black intellectual elites, is foreign to the everyday experience and commonplace aspirations of most rank-and-file black people. For it is a perspective which is gaining adherents among the black intelligentsia, and that is what seems to count. And its development is abetted by apartheid abroad, and by black poverty at home.

"These are things which Jewish Americans may recognize and understand. Indeed, there are a few similarities here with the early phases of the development of Zionism. But understanding something is not the same as either accepting or changing it. I fear that the conflict among blacks and Jews is not likely soon to abate, notwithstanding the earnest efforts of so many people of good will. For it is the case today that our reflective and influential elites have come to order their experience, as Americans and as citizens of the world, in profoundly different ways."

By way of adding a coda to the foregoing remarks, I wish to tell a story about a friend of mine, now deceased, named Tony Campbell -- the Reverend Anthony C. Campbell, that is -- who served as minister in the Boston University chapel during the summers for over a decade, until his death a few years ago. An African-American who had for many years been pastor of a large church in Detroit, and who was a close personal friend of then BU president, John Silber, Tony preached in the university's chapel nearly every Sunday during the summers, while serving as 'preacher-in-residence' and professor of preaching in the university's school of theology. His sermons were broadcast throughout the New England region on the university-sponsored public radio stations. Tony's father had also been a well-known Baptist minister. The family came out of South Carolina. Tony had a somewhat academic bent. Though a Baptist, he was also very familiar with the Anglican and Episcopalian traditions. He had preached at Westminster Abbey, and at Canterbury. Indeed, before his death he preached sermons from pulpits in a dozen countries throughout the world. He was an elegant, beautifully poetic preacher. No ranting and stomping in the pulpit from him. He was always understated. His voice tended to get lower, and slower, as his sermons approached their climax. (My son and I once traveled to New York from Boston for the sole purpose of hearing Tony preach at the Riverside Church, because it was such an honorific thing for him. And, on that occasion he once again 'hit it out of the park' with an achingly beautiful and profound reflections on some aspect of the Christian teaching.)

Well – and here is the crux of my story, less than two weeks after the events of 9/11/01, Tony preached his final sermon of the summer at Boston University. I was there. The title he gave for that sermon was, "A Reversal of Fortune." His text was based on a teaching in the New Testament about the figure of Lazarus, not the one who was raised from the dead, but the wealthy man who ignored the beggars sitting in front of his door throughout his blessed life. When he died, said Lazarus was sent to roast in the fires of hell and, upon asking for relief from the angel of the Lord was denied it, being told that he had had his chance on earth. And, when he asked that word be sent back to his brothers, lest they fall into the same condition, he was told, in effect: "they didn't listen to Moses and the prophets, why would they listen now? Let them roast along with you."

My good friend, the late Rev. Anthony C. Campbell, summer preacher at the Boston University chapel and heir to a great tradition of black preaching -- an urbane, mild-mannered sophisticate -- started his sermon with that scripture. This is, I tell you, a man who did not have a radical bone in his body -- a Baptist with high-church pretensions who had preached at Canterbury. He was as thoroughly American and as committed a Christian as one could imagine. And he argued, in the wake of our country having been attacked by terrorists, that the U.S. was now in the position of the Lazarus figure of that biblical tale. We were, in effect and to some degree -- he argued -- reaping what we had sown. Those were not his words, of course. He was far too eloquent and subtle a preacher for that. But, that was his message, and there really could be no mistake about it. In other words, he argued that we live now with the consequences of our neglect of complaints against injustice, our contempt for decent world opinion, our arrogance, our haughtiness, and our self-absorption. This is a sermon that was preached in Boston University's chapel less than two weeks after 9/11.

My point with this extended closing anecdote is to explain and defend my assertion that the African-American spiritual witness -- for Christians, the teachings of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as refracted through the long generations of pain and suffering and disappointment and hopelessness endured by millions of the descendents of slaves in this country -- has a prophetic message for the American people. Barack Obama has not earned the right to interpret that message so as to suit his political needs of the moment, and he certainly ought not to be allowed to denigrate or marginalize it. And, with respect to its application to the moral problems raised by the plight of the Palestinians, that is precisely what he did in Philadelphia two weeks ago.