I’m just going to take a wild guess at this, but Christopher Hitchens probably has comparably little experience of being black in American society. Not that I can claim any more particular knowledge of what it is like to be black, perhaps a little “off-white,” but not really black. All of that being said, it doesn’t actually take being black to listen to people who are black, and a cursory glance at a US history text book shows that the United States hasn’t always had the best tract record when it comes to race. My previous comment of course is quit the understatement. So the issue of Obama being black is of significance in a nation that despite all of its historical greatness and promise has had racism built into its very ideological foundations. We all know that race is a fiction, there is zero biological justification for its existence, people from different continents have different levels of melanin and we socially construct an entire system around that. Race isn’t real, but racism is real – very real. In an ideal world Obama’s race wouldn’t matter, and it wouldn’t be of note, but we aren’t in an ideal world, and thus the fact that at least in this one respect our nation has matured enough to accept the candidacy of a man like Obama is worth note and something to be proud of, not something to “get over.” Now to the matter of Obama’s religion. Hitchens is a conservative, a right-wing nut-ball who just happens to have a beef with religion. He can flash his former Trotskyite merit badges all he wants, he can use bad words and drink and smoke and make us think “Gosh, isn’t Mr. Hitchens naughty, he doesn’t believe in God!” until Mithras returns. It doesn’t change the fact that he has been a neo-conservative cheer leader for a corrupt war for the past eight years and his playbook is the same Republican manual that has been helping them disgustingly win elections for decades. So he knows that he can’t out-and-out be racist about Obama (I’m not even saying that Hitchens IS a racist, just that he knows the strategy for smearing people) so he goes after Obama’s “Afrocentric” religion. I went to the Trinity United Church of Christ website. Is it weird? Eh, a little bit, hardly the Nation of Islam. I don’t find anything particularly offensive, my grandmother went to an Italian Catholic church her whole life, it was “unashamedly Italian and unashamedly Catholic”, and I had the presence of mind to not mistake it as being some sort of nationalist front organization. If they let in non-black members, then I see no problem. Also, was any one else weirded out by Hitchens’ whining about the “sickening canonization” of Martin Luther King? Obviously human beings have their faults, and perhaps King has been remembered at the expense of other noteworthy people, but there is a reason why he is held in such high esteem by most Americans. King embodied what was most compassionate, rational, humane and just about the Christian tradition (of which I myself am not a member) and his rhetoric alone has become a crucial part of what we think of as the best and most noble in the American experiment. Hitchens’ Stalinist attitude towards all religion, everywhere and for all time, completely blinds him to any empirical evidence that disproves his own tenuous faith about the inherent evil of religion. I heard that in “God is Not Great” (I’ll admit I haven’t read all of it, and I should for how much I bitch about it. But it’s hard with all of the other good books I want to read. Why stuff yourself on potato chips when there is caviar in the buffet?) Hitchens argues that King was only “marginally Christian”. Since that is a clearly an empty line of reasoning he now has to say that King wasn’t actually important. As a side note, I found it funny that he brought up how Europeans would react to such an event. I have just moved back from Mr. Hitchens’ home nation of Great Britain, I was living in Glasgow for a while. Britain, like America, or anyplace for that matter, has some good attributes and some bad attributes. Yet I find it odd to think that they are any less haunted about identity then we are. All it takes is to get stuck in the middle of a Protestant Orange Lodge march through the center of Glasgow to realize that the European miracle hasn’t been quite as miraculous as Europeans want us to think. If we are sometimes bigoted, small-minded and intolerant, then we learned from the best. After all, Tony Blair’s post-office conversion to Catholicism has been seen as rather shocking in Britain, so I think the day of a black Prime Minister (or Pakistani for that matter!) is quite far off. Maybe Hitchens shouldn’t find his nation of adoption all that unusual, for the record his home is batting a similar average. While I’m on that line of thought, I know that Hitchens is a citizen now and all, but don’t you think he is stealing jobs from “real Americans?” I mean, I know a lot of people who could have been pompous, arrogant, ill-informed, demagogic asshole pundits, but effete Oxbridge brandy-swillers like Hitchens will work at cheaper non-union wages.

What do you mean, "sometimes"?

LMoE

Haha, point dully noted.

I think when Hitchens refers to King's canonization he's talking about ignoring the strong SECULAR aspects of King's ideas and movement, and favoring the linking of religion with King's accomplishments (Rev though he was).

I think you make a good point, by turning King into only a religious figure they can take a bit of the political bite out of him. And doubtless there have been many progressive figure in black politics who had no connection to the church who get glossed over.

I really appreciate the way you all are thinking these issues through. Dr. King and the movement was about much more than "I Have a Dream"; people often forget that "civil" rights are in everyone's best interests.