If I never heard the phrase "race card" again, it would be eleventy billion years too soon.  But since I know I'm not likely to make it even through the rest of the evening, I decided to take a little solace in MLK's "Letter From Birmingham Jail."  I would like to print a lot of copies, fold each one into a lovely origami swan, and cram one down the throat of each and every person who works for Fox "News."

Instead, I'll just mention here that my parents' interracial marriage was still illegal in many states when they tied the knot, and my childhood home was pelted with rocks after this couple moved in with their toddler son and their newborn daughter.  I was the newborn; it was 1973.  The aforementioned home was in a residential neighborhood in what I'm pretty sure is the most liberal of the multitudes of small New England college towns.

Descriptions of Jeremiah Wright's sermons as filled with "hate"or as "anti-white" seem to me to imagine a greater distance than I believe there is between the present day and past times when that kind of anger was appropriate.  Many seem to take it for granted that he's clearly expressing a generalized resentment of white people and not targeted anger at a specific class of powerholders who do, now, in actual fact, perpetuate injustice, racial and otherwise.  I'm also not sure that the ways we retell history help us to remember that anger was a primary engine behind all of the social liberation movements of the second half of the 20th century, not a pathology.

Here's an excerpt from the "Letter":

"I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, 'Wait.' But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: 'Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?'; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading 'white' and 'colored'; when your first name becomes 'nigger,' your middle name becomes 'boy' (however old you are) and your last name becomes 'John,' and your wife and mother are never given the respected title 'Mrs.'; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness'; then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait."

This is Wright's rhetorical tradition.  Angry, yes; hateful, no.  You can certainly argue that the time for such sentiments is past, but it's worth remembering the role they have played in our not-so-distant past.