Cosmopolitan Love or Black Nationalist Hatred: America’s Memory of the Civil Rights Movement

• In Event: Discourses of Stability and Change in the Post-racial Rhetoric Surrounding the Election of President Barack Obama

Abstract

This paper analyzes the mediated controversy surrounding the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Senator Obama’s response on March 18, 2008. I argue that the public censure of Wright reveals the fault lines of our collective civil rights memory. In that public memory, the contributions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and John Lewis are defined as loving efforts to create an inclusive, increasingly cosmopolitan America, while the actions of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Angela Davis, and, by association, the Rev. Wright, are defined as hateful, divisive, and violent. When one approaches this controversy as a “mnemonic event” capable of sustaining or disrupting public memory, Barack Obama’s Philadelphia speech gains new meaning. I conclude that while “A More Perfect Union” seeks to legitimize the affective experience of racial conflict, it does not challenge the official memory of the civil rights movement.

Author

• Kirt Wilson, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities