I went to church on Easter Sunday. This is the same church my family has attended and financially supported for nearly twenty years. Our church is part of the United Church of Christ, the same denomination that presidential candidate Barack Obama has belonged to in Chicago for twenty years. We live in the politically left-leaning San Francisco Bay area where most people consider US Senator Diane Feinstein as having sold out years ago and the Boxer/Pelosi tag-team as having betrayed them for not bringing the Iraq War to a close, now. Our church is extremely liberal too. Each of our church activities, from candle light vigils to invitations to attend protests, conferences and campaigns, all center around “peace, non violence and social injustice”, as if those terms had a neutral meaning instead of also being code for a very liberal political activist agenda. However, unlike the Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Trinity UCC, our pastor, whom I respect greatly as a loving and warm person, avoids any explicit political comments in her sermons. While she seems aware of the thin line between church and state that she walks, the members of the congregation are very outspoken in their political views.

On Sunday, during the time in our service where church members ask for prayers for loved ones, one church member used her time to ask for prayers for Barrack Obama, because (and I quote roughly) “he had the courage to initiate the long overdue discussion of race in this country”.  As she spoke my jaw dropped and my eyes widened. I don’t think she realized that she was repeating the same “talking points” I’d heard the Obama spin-artists use the night before on television. I also don’t think that she realized that Obama’s speech was a carefully crafted, politically motivated one designed to simultaneously deflect attention from his proximity to Wright’s virulent hate-mongering sermons, shore up his support from those who are actually aligned with Wright’s twisted view of the world and to widen the field of vision around his church so that it appears as only a small locus in a larger race relations landscape. I also don’t think she realized how deprecatory and belittling her comments might seem to those blacks and whites who have for many, many years tried to openly discuss problems of race, only to find themselves labeled as “Uncle Toms” and “racists” by the black and white liberal establishment.

As I listened to her, I couldn’t help but think of Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, two brilliant scholars who have worked tirelessly to bring well-reasoned, historically informed and honest discussions of race relations into the public arena.  Sowell’s efforts to unearth the culturally European origins of some of the more destructive aspects in black culture today and to analyze the geographical factors that have influenced the evolution of white – black relations have been rewarded with abuse and insults by the reigning leadership of the black political community. Steele has been attacked for his discussions of how “white guilt” and a loss of moral imperative among whites may have provided the necessary tinder for the anti-American and white-hating fires whose flames engulfed the hearts and minds of militant blacks of 1960’s and whose flames are still fanned in some circles (especially in Chicago) of today’s black political and religious leadership.

And I couldn’t help but see Bill Cosby’s smiling face in my mind, someone who has dared identify, in a very loving way, some of the obviously negative aspects of black culture and who has passionately “called out” those who have seen to lift themselves up from that mire of self-deprecatory behavior. Cosby has been largely vilified by the black establishment and consigned to the same cabin as Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell.

None of these thinkers deny that inequalities have existed and still exist today. None of them deny that anger and resentment exists and in some cases for very good reason. But all of them see that progress has been made and that a bright future of real, tangible hope awaits each person, black or white, who looks beyond the tragic vision that the Reverend Wright’s of this world offer and that Obama will not expose for what it is. Many of us, black and white, have for years been reflecting upon race, evolving our words and behavior to conform to the wisdom we have compiled, and continually asking for blessings to better understand the complexities of race in our country today.

Maybe those guilt-ridden whites and hate-infested blacks who have just realized that it is time to talk about race in an honest and meaningful way ought to take a look in the mirror before they open their mouths.