Sunday March 30, 2008
Angry men may still speak truth
I mentioned Rev. Jeremiah Wright to a friend earlier this week. He replied, “Who?”
Jeremiah Wright was minister of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago for over 30 years. He has four earned degrees, and eight honorary doctorates. More significantly, he was presidential candidate Barrack Obama\’s minister until retiring.
As Obama looks more likely to win the Democratic nomination, his critics dig deeper to find ways of attacking him.
Past attacks implied that Obama is a secret Muslim – and therefore a terrorist sympathizer — because his middle name is Hussein. This time, critics dug into his associates. And they found Jeremiah Wright.
Generally speaking, United Church of Christ congregations lean to the left. They are more likely to emphasis justice than doctrine, more likely to condemn what President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” than gay groups.
But being a black congregation, they do all this with a fire and passion that can feel fanatical to white, middle-class America.
Inflammatory stuff
Television footage of Wright in full song makes him as dramatic as a Louis Armstrong trumpet riff.
The networks did not, of course, choose to show Wright\’s more reasoned critiques of American culture, or his thoughtful explanations of Christian doctrine. They chose his most inflammatory phrases to broadcast.
In one clip, Wright called America “racist to the core.”
In another, he denounced prejudices against African-Americans: “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strikes law, and then wants us to sing \’God Bless America.\’ No, no, no! Not \’God bless America,\’ but God damn America… for killing innocent people; God damn America for treating its citizens as less than human…”
That\’s strong stuff. Not surprisingly, Fox News\’s Bill O\’Reilly and others condemned Wright for saying “vile, racist, and un-American things.”
Barrack Obama himself felt compelled to devote a speech to his relationship with Jeremiah Wright. He called Wright\’s language “offensive” but refused to reject him, any more than he could reject his own grandmother, who voiced lifelong stereotypes of black men.
Wright, said Obama, was “family.”
Forgetting the point
The media immediately shifted their focus from Wright\’s words to Obama\’s.
Professor George Lakoff of the University of California, Berkeley, called Obama\’s speech “the most important statement about race in recent history.”
“The speech should be required reading in classrooms across the country,” gushed Bob Herbert of the New York Times.
Conversely, Los Angeles writer Juan Santos called it “white middle-class bullshit.” Santos argued that Obama tried to brush systemic prejudice under the carpet, “in order not to offend the white godlets he relies on for his imagined future as president of the White Empire… [If elected] Obama would be a silenced Black ruler, a muzzled Black emperor…”
In Santos\’ words, “Obama plays the role of a Black Cinderella. He does for Black folks what Cinderella does for girls. He shows that oppression and silence can be good for you – if you are the one the prince chooses…”
All this furor diverts attention from Jeremiah Wright\’s charges.
Black experience
Personally, although I have no direct experience of what it means to be black in America, I think he\’s right.
The oft-touted vision of the American melting pot is, in reality, a white vision. The refiner\’s fire will burn off the slag of alien custom and culture; the pure metal that emerges will look remarkably like Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, and Mayberry.
That has not been the black experience.
Charges that America, as a whole, dealt with the end of segregation and the rise of black power by flooding black neighbourhoods with crack cocaine and drugs did not originate with Jeremiah Wright.
Nor did official statistics about incarceration. The U.S., with about six per cent of the world\’s population, has 20 per cent of the world\’s prisoners. The largest group of those prisoners is black men. Nationally, blacks are 8.2 times more likely to be imprisoned than whites; in Washington DC, 34 times more likely.
Their incarceration rate is exceeded only by American Indians.
As people other than Jeremiah Wright have pointed out, racism is built into the American legal system. For taxation purposes, the Constitution itself decreed that slaves counted as only three-fifths of a human (Article 1, Section 2).
An 1857 Supreme Court judgment – as far as I know, never repudiated – defined African-Americans as “beings of an inferior order, altogether unfit to associate with the white race… so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
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It\’s also worth pursuing Charlene Fairchild\’s United Online site. Another site worth visiting is David Keating\’s \”SeemslikeGod\” page.
More currently, American bombs and missiles have destroyed villages in Pakistan and Somalia, on suspicion that they harboured terrorists. No death tolls are reported.
If it turns out that the terrorists weren\’t there, no apologies are issued, no reparations made.
Reverse the situation. Imagine hostile warships patrolling off the coast of California, hostile warplanes circling over Malibu. Periodically, missiles flatten a village in the Napa Valley. Dozens of innocent civilians die, including children.
Would that be considered fair? Just? Acceptable?
But in Somalia or Pakistan, it\’s considered legitimate in the so-called war on terror. Because the “enemy” are poor, non-Christian, and black or brown, they don\’t rate much concern.
Over 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq. Protests mount. Why is there so little protest about at least 90,000 Iraqis dead? The real figure may be much higher. The British medical journal The Lancet recently estimated Iraqi deaths at over 600,000.
Asked about civilian casualties, General Tommy Franks replied: “We don\’t take body counts.”
And you think racism is no more?
The original Jeremiah was a biblical prophet who told the truth to his nation, even at the risk of his own life. Jeremiah Wright takes that calling seriously. He says what he believes America needs to hear.
We should listen, and not simply recoil in revulsion.
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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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