Written 2008-03-20
Unfortunately, I missed Obama’s “race” speech the other day. I did manage to catch an interview about it though. I can only shake my head in wonder.
At the very least, the Obama/Wright association shows a severe lack of political savvy. The moment he started thinking about a presidential run, Obama’s handlers and advisors should have addressed the Wright problem. That they didn’t see it as a problem speaks volumes.
One possibility is that they believed Wright’s beliefs and attitude were sufficiently mainstream that there was no Wright problem. They’d be not far off the mark if they were thinking only in terms of the black community. The fact is, a surprising (to white people) percentage of blacks do in fact believe that AIDS was created by the CIA to kill off blacks.
The October 29, 1990 edition of The New York Times reported that 29% of black New Yorkers indicated belief that AIDS was “deliberately created in a laboratory in order to infect black people,” versus one in twenty (5%) among white New Yorkers.
In the same poll, 60% of black New Yorkers indicated belief that government “deliberately” made drugs available to poor black people, versus 12% among white New Yorkers.
I suspect that the numbers (both black and white) are up since the 1990 poll. These theories have had lots of time to percolate and it is human nature to believe that our problems are caused by someone else.
In another 1990 survey, reported in the November 2, 1995 edition of The Boston Globe:
34% of black churchgoers polled in five cities believed “the AIDS virus was produced in a germ warfare laboratory.”
A 1997 Scripps Howard News Service/Ohio University nationwide poll found:
52% of Americans believe it is likely that the CIA allowed drug dealers from Central America to sell crack cocaine to African-Americans in U.S. inner cities.
In the December 4, 1991 edition of The New York Post, comedian Bill Cosby said that AIDS was “started by human beings to get after certain people they don’t like.”
In a Benneton advertisement (see November 12, 1992 edition of Rolling Stone for an example), movie director Spike Lee said, “AIDS is a government-engineered disease.”
Though shocking to whites, the number of blacks who believe the CIA / AIDS theory espoused by Rev. Wright is substantial. My theory is that Obama’s people didn’t think it was a problem because everyone knows it to be true. Their mistake was in projecting this belief into the non-black community.