May 04, 2008 - 04:05:23 CDT
Advice: no matter how unhappy you are with America, never say the chickens have come home to roost. Never!Every time an angry individual utters this homely and ancient barnyard proverb in response to some real or perceived crime of America, calamity follows.
First there was Malcolm X (1963). Then there was Professor Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado at Boulder (2001). The recent unearthing of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's Sept. 16, 2001, "9-11 aftermath" sermon has wounded - perhaps fatally - the presidential candidacy of Wright's most famous parishioner, Barack Obama.
Can a man whose pastor says "God damn America!" be president of the United States? Probably not.
For Obama, the chickens have indeed come home to roost. If you want to be president, carefully monitor your associations. If you want to be America's first black president, you have to pretend that several hundred years of slavery, segregation, Jim Crowism, lynching, profiling, discrimination, water cannons, attack dogs and racism (open, disguised, and, worst of all, structural) have left no scar. You must pretend that America's tragic race history has built up no fund of dismay in your heart or in the heart of your friends and supporters.
As long as Obama was, in Sen. Joe Biden's infelicitous but accurate phrase, "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," he had a chance to become president. But if his learned and sometimes fiery pastor reminds us that black people might feel a certain bitterness about their experience in American history, suddenly Obama is too black to be president. The pitch, apparently, doth defile. In other words, at this juncture in our history, you have to be a "white man's black man" to be president of the United States.
Think of a spectrum of African-American public styles with Colin Powell at one extreme and Louis Farrakhan at the other. Barack Obama rose to national prominence by positioning himself at the fully assimilated "no threat to whites" end of the spectrum. Because of their 20-year affiliation, Wright's jeremiads have now pulled Obama far down the line toward the "black rage" end of the spectrum. Anyone who wishes to find a reason to distrust Obama now has one.
In the wake of Wright's suggestions that it cannot be ruled out that the white government of the United States has deliberately infected African-Americans with the HIV virus, millions of decent people are disillusioned. From now until November, no matter how much Obama distances himself from Wright, he will seem blacker, more radical, less reliable (or perhaps merely hypocritical) in the minds of many, perhaps most, Americans. Obama had to seem to transcend race to be president. Thanks to Wright and our national insistence in living in Pollyanna-land rather than in the real world, Obama has been put in his place.
Have we been here before? Oh mercy, how many, many times in American history.
Obama's outstanding March 18 speech on race relations in America, "A More Perfect Union," made it clear that we Americans cannot go forward unless we face the legacy of slavery and racial prejudice openly, honestly, hopefully, and painfully. No we cannot let bygones be bygones. I hope you will take the time to read Obama's speech. It is available online.
I'm fascinated by Obama's historic candidacy, but the truth is that at this moment, I'm more interested in the history of the chicken proverb. "The chickens have come home to roost" does not seem to me a very good metaphor. I'm no expert on the habits of poultry, but I guess the idea is that although chickens can spend the day foraging all over the farm, at night they return to their accustomed roosts.
The proverb is supposed to sound menacing and retributive, but unless the chickens have been doing something horrible out on the far end of the barnyard, (smoking perhaps, or forming Al-Qaida cells), it's hard to see how their coming home to roost can be such a bad thing.
What Malcolm X, Ward Churchill, and Wright actually mean is that "as you sow so shall you reap" (Galatians 6:7). The biblical phrase captures the sense of karmic retribution much better than chickens do.
The black civil rights advocate Malcolm X gave a speech in New York City on Dec. 4, 1963, just 11 days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Formally titled "God's Judgment of White America," the speech is now known as the "Chickens Come Home to Roost" speech because, in the question and answer session following his formal remarks, Malcolm X said that Kennedy "never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon." In other words, because Kennedy did not take serious steps to stop racial violence in America, and because Kennedy authorized CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, he had now sowed what he reaped.
The metaphor may have been imprecise, but, needless to say, these words ignited a firestorm of national outrage. The head of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, sentenced Malcolm X to 90 days of silence. Malcolm X never fully recovered from the remark.
The now-infamous Churchill responded to the 9-11 attacks in a September 2001 essay entitled, "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens." This was the essay in which Churchill denied the innocence of the 2,752 people who died in the World Trade Center on 9-11. He called them "little Eichmanns," in other words, bland technocrats who were as responsible for America's international crimes as Adolf Eichmann was for the Holocaust.
In this instance, Churchill, a provocateur, deliberately chose to follow Malcolm X into national ignominy. His essay endorsed X's conclusions about America in 1963, and extended the retributive umbrella to a global dimension. Attempts by the University of Colorado to fire him for gross insensitivity and indecorum failed. Churchill's defense was tenure and freedom of expression.
And now a prominent and well-respected black minister in the highly credible arena of the United Church of Christ. In his sermon of Sept. 16, 2001, Wright compiled a long list of America's crimes in the world - from "taking this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, Arikara, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo" to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then he said, "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff that we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."
Had to say it. He had to say it. The barnyard proverb that ruins careers - and presidential runs.
Alas. For all of its simple farm origins, in spite of its roots in the Parson's Tale of the medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, the phrase is clearly a toxic one. No sensible person should ever employ it again.
(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State Univesity. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at jeffysage@;aol.com.)
Regina Jackson wrote on May 13, 2008 10:40 AM:
REX wrote on May 9, 2008 11:25 AM:
Captain Crunch wrote on May 9, 2008 10:56 AM:
Jeff Boatright wrote on May 7, 2008 11:19 AM:
Chickens poop. A lot.
As for concerns about the Obama candidacy, polling shows that the media are far more concerned with Rev Wright than voters (56% say that the media has overhyped the story). He ended up outperforming forcasts for both NC and IN, so I think you're wringing your hands here, and dare I say, overhyping the story? ;) "
Jen wrote on May 7, 2008 7:23 AM:
Mary K wrote on May 6, 2008 12:11 PM:
Halatbis wrote on May 5, 2008 6:22 PM:
Edward wrote on May 5, 2008 4:54 PM:
Rasmus wrote on May 5, 2008 4:20 PM:
expositor wrote on May 4, 2008 10:23 PM:
gm wrote on May 4, 2008 9:32 PM:
LL wrote on May 4, 2008 8:36 AM:
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