Last Friday, author and historian Garry Wills, who blogs occasionally at the New York Review of Books site, praised Michelle Obama for challenging, in her recent Tuskegee University commencement address, conservatives’ complacency about race in America. Specifically, Wills approved of the first lady’s “breaking all of the four rules of racial discourse the right wing now wants to enforce.”
“The celebrators of rugged individualism will not allow successful blacks to reach back and help others up the ladder of achievement. That is just rewarding the ‘takers over the makers,’” wrote Wills. “But when we see or read the speech of Michelle Obama, stingy individualists melt down into their pooled little meannesses, and this tall black woman of achievement calls on us all to mount into the sky, following the Tuskegee Airmen. This is not playing the race card. It is playing the American card.”
From Wills’s post (bolding added):
Michelle Obama [said in her Tuskegee speech:]
My husband and I [have] both felt the sting of those daily slights throughout our entire lives — the folks who crossed the street in fear of their safety; the clerks who kept a close eye on us in all those department stores; the people at formal events who assumed we were the “help”—and those who have questioned our intelligence, our honesty, even our love of this country.
How dare she? The right wing does not allow such a reference. “We” let “you people” win the White House, which meant that racism is over with and gone…Any mention of it now is “playing the race card”—and was denounced as such by all the many mouths of the Right—by Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, and Rush Limbaugh...In her own quiet way Ms. Obama was breaking all of the four rules of racial discourse the right wing now wants to enforce.
RULE ONE: Thou shalt not doubt that racism is gone. “You people never had it so good.” This reflects the Chief Justice Roberts school of social history, declaring provisions of the Voting Rights Act obsolete…
RULE TWO: If racism occurs, thou shalt declare that it was brought back by the Obamas. This reflects the Glenn Beck school of social history, which says that, before Mr. Obama was elected, the country had escaped the 1960s (the font of all modern evil in the right wing’s sparsely furnished minds)…
RULE THREE: If you truly love your country, thou shalt not say that there were evils in the American past (slavery, secession, Indian “removal”). This reflects the Lynn[e] Cheney school of social history, which purges unpleasant parts of our heritage from school books. Ms. Obama broke this rule when she said in her speech that black soldiers in World War II were kept apart and often given menial tasks...
RULE FOUR: If you truly love your country, thou shalt find evils everywhere in the American present. They swarm all over real patriots—evils like gays, death taxes, the EPA, the IRS, a Negro president, an Elizabeth Warren...
Reactions to Ms. Obama’s speech show how conservatives use black success against blacks. Look at all “we” have given them! Why do they keep whining?...
The celebrators of rugged individualism will not allow successful blacks to reach back and help others up the ladder of achievement. That is just rewarding the “takers over the makers”…But when we see or read the speech of Michelle Obama, stingy individualists melt down into their pooled little meannesses, and this tall black woman of achievement calls on us all to mount into the sky, following the Tuskegee Airmen. This is not playing the race card. It is playing the American card.
