May 16, 2008

Racial Paranoia and Jeremiah Wright

By JOHN L. JACKSON JR.

In the 1950s and 1960s, "consensus historians" such as Richard Hofstadter argued that large swaths of the American public displayed a "paranoid style" of political analysis that made them incapable of fully participating in rational debate. That "sick" style was concerned with "the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content." Half a century later, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.'s claim that the AIDS epidemic is a scourge inflicted on

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