Ready for Obama ...

There are black pastors nationwide giving anti-American sermons like Reverend Jeremiah Wright's. It's not as if Barack Obama sought out some peculiar institution to worship in. Call it Black Liberation Theology, "telling it like it is," or what have you — Reverend Wright's broadsides at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago were ordinary examples of one of many stripes of black sermonizing.

Of course, "God Damn America" is most certainly not "telling it like it is" usefully. However, anyone under the impression that Reverend Wright has been making sermons about whites' evil every Sunday has a strange sense of what would maintain a congregation. Wouldn't a "racism forever" sermon every week get old?

As Mr. Obama eloquently explained in his Philadelphia speech yesterday, he has valued Reverend Wright for the bulk of his sermons, about spiritual issues. He, like the rest of the church members, values the active social work that he has involved his ministry in. There are likely some Trinity people who dismiss AmeriKKA as a racist nation. However, political sentiments this hot are atypical of most human beings. Most of Reverend Wright's flock would never themselves utter the kinds of things he was spouting now and then, and if hearing someone do so in a private setting, would chuckle at it as "crazy stuff."

Now, to be sure, on the occasions when Reverend Wright would launch into that "crazy" routine, those people were laughing and clapping along. But this doesn't mean they were cheering when the Twin Towers fell.

I have written that it is part of the essence of the modern black American identity to be a victor in private but a victim in public. There is a sense that while initiative is important, blacks still have to display more of it than whites, and that this isn't fair.

Someone who feels this way can have done well and even be comfortable around white people. However, that sense that black America still labors under a general injustice can express itself in taking a certain pleasure in listening to someone like Jeremiah Wright.

They hear a stirring articulation of rebellion, listenable according to a sense that fealty to one's race entails at least a gestural nod to sticking a finger in whitey's eye now and then. The tone, the music of the statements is more vivid than the content. Sermons like this are Sunday morning's version of gangsta rap.

This, then, is why, as Mr. Obama said in his speech yesterday, he could no more disown Reverend Wright than disown black people in general. So, why did the Obamas not find another church after finding out that Reverend Wright had some tart things to say about "the Man"? Because they weren't listening to them as logic, but as atmosphere.

To the Obamas, attending to such rhetoric may even have felt like a gesture of solidarity with less fortunate blacks. Commentators reading this as evidence that the Obamas are conniving to get at the reigns of a nation they loathe are missing that in black America, to an extent that is easy to miss if one has not lived it, race trumps class.

This confusion of gesture with conviction also has thrown people on Michelle Obama's comment about not having been proud of her country until her husband's embrace by the public. Not too long ago everybody went wild over David Brooks's "Bobos in Paradise," about affluent couples managing their mutual funds and fighting to get their kids into top schools while indulging in anti-Establishment statements in decor, dress style, and political opinions.

Spot-on anthropology, all agreed. Then why the sputtering over an affluent, educated woman indicting America as a land of injustice? She is wary of cheerleading for the U.S. of A. — but with no illusions that life in Yemen or even Denmark would be better than the one she has here. Her hesitant patriotism is a gesture, in this case of higher awareness about imperialism and racism. The commentariat appears thrown seeing a black person indulge in a gesture which would not even make news if offered by a Princeton graduate who was white.

In any case, who really thinks someone who taught law at the University of Chicago seriously believes that whites infected black people with AIDS, and that the sustained vision of interracial harmony in Mr. Obama's two books was a ruse? Or, who will say with a straight face that Mr. Obama got up and lied yesterday?

If this is just political hardball, I get it. But I sense more to it. America prides itself on being ready for a black president lately. Well, in hearing Reverend Wright's agitprop as performance rather than hate speech, Barack Obama is black indeed — in a way other than the uninteresting one of melanin. Yet I see this as irrelevant to how he would run the country.

That is, I, for one, am still ready for a black president. I wonder if the rest of America is.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.