Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) (WDCpix)

Just before the New Yorker cover came out depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as black power/Muslim terrorists, I was telling someone how useless the term “elitist” was. It was one of several pejorative labels tossed at Obama, and it was pure epithet disguised as a descriptor. But of what? It describes nothing. It only rankles. It’s subject to so much modification in order to make sense — pedigree, social distance/indifference, unearned/unacknowledged privilege—that it’s useless except to impugn.

Then the cover appeared. It showed up first on the Internet; then in the corners of printed tabloids; next, in my city of New York, on the real cover of the magazine itself — hanging defiantly from clips along the tops of newsstands, baiting you as you passed or waited for a train or a light. That image.

Immediately, the rub was that all the electricity the cartoon elicited would travel quickly beyond the New York minutes and would enter the nooks and crannies of the country’s other time zones, where “the folks” would wrestle with it, and across the Western world, where ex-pats might wonder or explain. There, the meaning of its manifest vulgarity— depicting Michelle Obama as a Cleopatra Jones of anarchy; Barack Obama, defamed by, of all things, Islamic dress and linked once and for all with Osama bin Laden, burning (flag pins maybe, but whoever said anything about burning?) the American flag — would be up for grabs. To some, it will confirm and bring (dis)comfort. To others, a bold and uncanny satire. To The New Yorker, welcome controversy and wider relevance.

The cover is destructive and misguided satire because viewers act on its meanings independently, with no guidance from the satirist. For me, it is not remotely funny. Within the four corners of the text (as the LitCrits used to say) is a series of visual statements, one more disgusting and unexplained than the last, that serve to ridicule the Obamas’ identities for reasons left to the viewer to sort out, with reference only to the meanings outside the frame. In their lives. With whatever inputs and analytical skills the viewer possesses.

I listened to a variety of journalists and experts on TV and in the blogosphere correct the public about The New Yorker’s true intent. I heard critic after critic of the magazine’s failed attempt at a political point talked down to, cut off. Finally, I looked again at the picture and felt the great queasiness of recognition.

I know the folks who did this. I went to school with them, work with them, dine with them, pass them in the halls of my children’s school. I know them well enough that they are almost me.

They are elitists, and you can know them by their smugness. Not only did they think this was funny and clever and smart in a pro-Obama way, but they figured that its edginess would separate the kindred readers who get it from the ignorant multitudes that would not. There was no shame in being misunderstood, just more confirmation of one’s place on a high intellectual perch. If the cover backfired — and is misused to promote more lies about Obama — that’s no stain on their judgment. They would get a pass because they can take a pass. In fact, all across the mainstream media, people like them decide who gets passes.

This is very Harvard, where I went to school; very New York City, where I live. Between then and now, I’ve watched the distance close between erudition and intellectual hipsterism. At stake is more than lattes and limos. It’s that the wit and wisdom of about a thousand white men (and women) from the Ivy League commands our political sensibilities and our sense of humor.

They do it in periodicals like The New Yorker, shows like “The Daily Show with Jon Stuart” and MSNBC’s tight rotation of 24-7 punditry on shows like the sanctimonious “Countdown with Keith Olberman.” Some of them shed all sentimentality for straight, impatient sarcasm, like Dennis Miller and Bill Maher. The older ones, like Ted Koppel and Tom Brokaw, taught through measured gravitas.

Yet like the Beltway they mock, they cannot help but interview each other again and again in order to understand the world. From within the four-corners of this downtown/Hamptons exclusivity, they never venture far — unless it’s really, really far, like exotic.

If this were the way CEO rosters worked or law firms looked (it is), we’d protest (sometimes we do). But how we get our news, opinion and humor remains staunchly two-tiered — even in the digital age: A nearly all-white mainstream cognoscenti and a vast rough blogosphere full of diamonds. That is what we should be protesting now—the smug, insular composition of our information industries, not the especially insidious cover art they are occasionally bound to produce.

It could be that no one would watch those shows, or re-tell those jokes, or echo those political insights if they weren’t written, produced and delivered by hyper-educated white people. But I have my doubts.

If I know my elitist white friends as well as I think, they will respond with a lot of nervous “c’mons” and exceptions. “Obama has to be able to take a joke like every other politician.” “We ran it by ____ who’s black, and he laughed.” “OK, this time we goofed, but how often does that happen?” Then it is back on the offensive with the unjustifiable sensitivity of black people and the importance of a robust First Amendment.

There might even be something to all that. But for the remainder, there is still the distinct absence of diversity in those hallowed ranks where a whole new way of smart and funny is always waiting to happen.

You’re left to wonder: What else is going on behind our back?

David Dante Troutt is a professor of law at Rutgers University. His most recent books are “The Importance of Being Dangerous” and “After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina.”

Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. (Getty Images)

Sen. Barack Obama’s emphatic denunciation of his former pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., for a series of comments the reverend made during a sort of media tour last week involves far more than politics. Wright had reveled in a bewildering litany of racial differences and repeated his most charged political beliefs. He had characterized this tempest in the racial trope as an attack on black faith and all black churches before Obama finally cut him loose. But this spectacle is more personal than political, more universal than racial.

The nation watched this play out, riveted by the lasting mythology about human bonds — the age-old struggle between fathers and sons. The Obama-Wright breach is intriguing for its psychological familiarity — every son and every father deals with this on some level. It is as compelling as a car crash. If cultures and religions invent eternal myths as narrations of life, where does this story fit and what could it mean for Obama?

The obvious analogy is an inversion of the Oedipal struggle, where the enraged father seeks the death of his son, but accomplishes only their mutual destruction.

Try Roman mythology. Look at Wright as Saturn, the ruler of the universe, whose children were prophesied to depose him. As each child is born, he devours it. Yet, the myth goes, one gets away, Jupiter. And, as predicted, he ultimately defeats his father. This myth even reaches into astrology, where Saturn is associated with old age, melancholy and the domineering father. Jupiter –the son — represents goodness.

Then there is the Old Testament tale of Saul and David. The Lord tears the kingdom of Israel from a disobedient Saul and gives it to one better than he, David, the son of a servant. David remains loyal to Saul, fighting his battles, and becomes his son-in-law. Yet Saul’s jealousy leads him to pursue David and, in plots motivated by evil spirits, tries several times to kill him. Fleeing for his safety, David twice spares Saul’s life. Defeated in battle, Saul falls on his own sword and dies.

Finally, in Ralph Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man”— which Wright quotes regularly —there is a metaphor of crabs in a barrel pulling each other down from the sides. This famously describes the fratricidal jealousy of some blacks for the ascension of others.

None of these is perfect, of course, for something else was happening here as well. Wright is not Obama’s father or his “spiritual advisor” — nor, apparently, his political supporter. He was the former pastor to a man who had known neither God nor father well.

At best, Wright may have been a kind of godfather, and finding a godfather is a strange love. It is mostly symbolic, but no less real. For the godson, fortunate enough to find this symbolic anchor amid decades of a life at sea, his “I” may gladly relinquish itself to “we.” As many African-American men imagine, it is probably a little different with a real father.

One cannot doubt that Wright was proud of Obama, to see in such a strong and determined younger man aspects of himself. Though from different generations, they were both biracial black men, with a strong sense of justice, who discovered each other in Chicago’s rich yet impoverished, proud yet struggling South Side. There is no question that Wright wanted Obama’s political success—for what it would mean to Obama and, no doubt, the Trinity United Church of Christ and Wright’s own reputation.

It must have been difficult for the recently retired Wright to see his identification with Obama turn into a national vilification of the pastor’s own work and beliefs — as the sound bytes and video excerpts have erupted across the news cycles since late February. Suddenly, within a few days, Wrights standing as a pastor, an influential religious leader and a black man was eviscerated, and the price of his relationship with the rising political star was silence. With virtually no defense, that cost may have been too much.

Here, I suspect, is where the myth turns into something we have not quite seen before and the elements come undone— Obama’s speech about race in March. Obama had three broad but risky options with respect to Wright: reject him, defend him or explain him with aspects of both rejection and support. He did the latter, making Wright the spine of the entire address. At the time, many suspected Obama had used too much nuance to defuse the issue, and that Wright figured too centrally in an otherwise remarkable discussion of racial context in America. No one suspected it would provoke Wright to this.

Like the paranoid Saturn, Wright must have experienced gnawing envy as the star he helped launch onto the national stage first distanced himself, then explained and critiqued him before a global audience. Like Saul, his mute jealousy might have become ungovernable, as narcissistic rage overcame him. More important, the “we” that punctuates Obama’s every address seemed no longer to include Wright.

So, along came a poisonous madness that could destroy them both. Wright’s interview on Bill Moyer’s PBS television program on Friday night made sense and demonstrated the importance of his perspectives in a campaign that — even at this length — made little room for them. The NAACP speech he gave in Detroit Sunday night might be excused for its audience — except that so much of the on-camera silliness in mocking past presidents and doing a hokey-pokey around racial differences in music undermined Wright’s own defense of himself against his critics.

Yet Wright’s performance at the National Press Club Monday seemed almost like the affliction of an evil (or lunatic) spirit. There he recklessly injected himself into the news cycle at a time when the GOP in North Carolina had threatened to do it for him — and has. There, Wright tossed off decorum and bullied a young moderator. His idea of equating U.S. foreign policy with terrorism or of re-asserting the theory of government responsibility for AIDS is so off the charts — so patently off-putting — that it can only be designed to undo the hope for the first black president in history. Whom he repeatedly disparaged as a “politician.”

Why? Because we have a little game among black folks called “the dozens,” Wright glibly explained. Of course, becoming president is not a game, nor do black men in their 60s play the dozens like their grandchildren do. Surely the former pastor of a church with a prison ministry understands how many black men lose their lives—to violence or incarceration—for not letting a perceived slight go.

The denouement is not yet clear, but this we know so far. In the story of the spiritual godfather and the political star, the two could not have known each other well. They did not grow apart; the relationship was never close enough for them to be as interchangeable as many have assumed. The separation always had potential — and now it must be final, if not violent.

The moral has more to do with choosing friends than seeking fathers.

David Dante Troutt is a professor of law at Rutgers University. His most recent books are “The Importance of Being Dangerous” and “After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina.”

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) (WDCpix)

Until his pastor’s most incendiary sound bites re-circulated on the web, Sen. Barack Obama had managed to be the “post-racial,” “post-partisan” candidate to all America — an unimposing black buddy some white men never had, an attraction to women across racial and ethnic lines. But Rev. Jeremiah A Wright Jr.’s selected sermons suddenly threatened all that, just as racial divisiveness emanated from his Democratic rival’s camp. Tuesday, Obama decided to respond by addressing race in America head on.

The question is whether this master orator and personification of racial unity could show a cynical nation how to talk to about race amid a battle of metaphors about Wright.

The tightrope cliché doesn’t begin to describe the challenge Obama faced. It is not just blue-collar white men in Pennsylvania whom Obama had to reassure, but a significant number of educated white liberals there and elsewhere concerned, for example, about Wright’s statements about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. The endless replaying of four or five Wright snippets is often characterized as racist and hateful, but their actual content suggests a deeper fear that could join many white constituencies: radical anti-Americanism.

Wright’s references to “Goddamn America,” “government lies” about 9/11, complicity in South African apartheid and “state-sponsored terrorism against Palestinians” are probably more troublesome to many than his comments about how the presidency has been “controlled by rich white people” (it has, hasn’t it?). For maximum effect, the foreign-policy linkages end with a statement once attributable to Malcolm X —“America’s chickens have come home to roost.”

That these remarks occurred in the setting of all-black churches apparently compounds the outrage, converting any loyalty to these words into an act of treason. The most virulent comments I saw repeated on websites usually invited Wright to “get the f*** out of this country.” That sentiment is probably only an extreme version of other suspicions.

Despite the social and religious segregation that must be the precondition to such revelations about how black folks talk, many white voters seemed appalled that over in black churches “they” are not thinking the same American thoughts that I am.

This is the angry metaphor of Wright that Obama took on in his speech — after assiduously avoiding race for so long. What Obama did was to stand in the gap with humble magnificence. The speech was often brilliant. Politically, however, it remains to be seen if this is how to talk to white people about race — giving a long, complex speech that few will hear in its entirety. And teaching, even from the middle, is not done in presidential campaigns.

But teach he did, because the dare that Obama accepted was to believe himself so capable a unifier that he could explain vast oceans of difference primarily to white people so that he could then do the work of unifying all.

Remember that the United States is still secretly a segregated country. Obama reminded us that older black men — whom Chris Rock called the most racist people in the world — grew up with legal segregation. So did Obama. It’s just that, since the 1970s, most segregation comes about through racially neutral laws. Also the fiscal rules demanded of towns and small cities create incentives to exclude the minority poor at all cost. This is the main reason why Sunday morning, as Obama also mentioned, is the most segregated time of the week. (Saturday is pretty segregated, too, if you think about it.)

At some essential level of cultural abstraction, what it means to be black in this country is to manage the anger of a persistent past, to understand the power of humiliation as a daily depressant and to overcome it anyway with love, laughter and growth.

Then stop and consider what we really mean by racial identity, at least between “black” and “white.” At some essential level of cultural abstraction, what it means to be black in this country is to manage the anger of a persistent past, to understand the power of humiliation as a daily depressant and to overcome it anyway with love, laughter and growth. That identification has lots of material expressions, but for many it is spiritually known. And for a lot of American blacks, underlying that spiritual connection is a notion of Christianity rooted in service, redemption and liberation. The boundaries of racial and religious identity aren’t so clear when they rely on similar constructions.

However, the nature of white identity in this context is fundamentally different. It does not follow racialized traditions as readily. Sure, 25 percent of white men polled in Ohio may have said that race mattered to their votes, and at least as many in Pennsylvania may agree. But racial identity is rarely an article of faith—-an aspect of one’s religious identity–when you see yourself as merely normal. One’s “whiteness” often matters only when another’s “blackness” enters the room. It is not a salient feature of identity until provoked, so to speak, and then it can often be very defensive about the relationship. A colorblind or “post-racial” society implies an end to these discomforts. Obama’s candidacy appeared to oblige.

Along came Wright’s greatest hits and, for those who looked, his motto: Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian. This is another reason Sundays are so segregated. Audaciously, Obama was trying to show why they should not be, while he walked yet another tightrope. In the same speech in which he set forth the idea of a progressively evolving society (“perfecting a union” that once legalized slavery), he attempted to use rather than reject the metaphor of the Wright he knows. With that metaphor of the man, people are not “disowned” because they are angry. Reconciliation does not often occur through repudiation. For that matter, disposability may be a consumer trait, but not a Christian one, Obama seemed to argue. It was a gesture not lost on many blacks.

How often does heavy stuff work anywhere, let alone a presidential campaign?

But why would he do all this in one speech? This is heavy stuff. How often does heavy stuff work anywhere, let alone a presidential campaign? When’s the last time you succeeded by explaining the source and substance of someone’s anger?

First of all, in the other metaphor, Wright, it turns out, is no foolish old man. He holds a doctorate and is considered one of the finest black ministers in the nation. A thorough review of his sermons reveals a deeply thoughtful man, committed to assisting the weak, the poor and the vulnerable. Though his prophetic tradition is by no means the only one in the black church today, it has variations as old as slavery and as familiar as Martin Luther King Jr. It espouses a model of Jesus as a liberator of the poor against the powerful, which fits not only the lives of many blacks but of whites, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans in this country. In Wright’s prophetic stream of oratory, anger is neither hatred nor racism — just a reasonable reaction to oppression.

In the sermon that inspired Obama to call his second book “The Audacity of Hope,” Wright describes in a warm and almost professorial tone how the biblical Hannah’s audacity was to sit in her rags atop a war-torn world, holding a harp with but one string left, and play for hope.

Obama could not, and would not, jettison such thinking, unusual though it might be. It is also why his speech includes a careful recital of the structure of racism—the lasting wealth effects of housing discrimination, generations of marginalized black workers, the anguish and anger of drugs, crime and incarceration—the things a significant number of black people struggle with but can overcome with shared resources.

It would have been nice if Obama had reached further beyond the black-white binary to remind a nation of immigrants unfamiliar with our early racial history how crippling racial myths can be. This is perhaps the third Wright metaphor—his perspective on the difficulties many people of color face while seeking inclusion in the benefits of a productive society.

This is the point — assuming it can be heard. Most people can appreciate this message of personal struggle in their lives, especially as recession sets in. The prospect for unification is obvious except for the face and intonations of the speaker.

What may be most radical about Obama’s approach is that he believes he can somehow reveal to a divided electorate the falsity of their standard fault lines and lead them to a unity of interests. (Jesse Jackson dared the same thing in 1984.) It is audacious to think that what is good for the poorest among us can benefit the middle, too, but it may be true.

Until last week, this was presumably the Obama “movement”—Obamamania. With this speech, the real costs of unification are clearer. What was seductive rhetoric is now racial and economic realism. The results may be the same, but the country’s path to it looks rockier and more challenging, informed by—but not littered with—old black men. Yet they too, Obama admonished, must acknowledge that change is possible.

Now comes the fear and what we do about it.

David Dante Troutt is a professor of law at Rutgers University. His most recent books are “The Importance of Being Dangerous” and “After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina.”