Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama and the Unacceptability of Truth Of National Lies ...

[3AH80]

Brothers and Guests -

I didn't write the following essay but I think it captures the essence of my feelings about the Jeremiah Wright/Barack Obama headlines that have been dominating the news recently.

This situation has put the racial divide in this country on Front Street for the whole world to see. We do such a good job of pretending to ignore it, or sucking it up in the name of daily survival but as we know, truth has a way of bubbling to the surface. In all of its complicated and uncomfortable ugliness.

Perhaps the words of the essay will spark some discussion that may lead to some reconciliation and truth -- in the face of so many lies.

- Dwayne
Iota Phi Theta Fraternity, Inc., 3AH80
Life Member since 1991
__________________________________________________

COUNTERPUNCH

March 18, 2008

Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama and the Unacceptability of Truth Of National Lies and Racial America

By TIM WISE

For most white folks, indignation just doesn't wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.

Indignation doesn't work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country--the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples--we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago--occasionally Barack Obama's pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity--for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go--these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an "angry black man" like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.

But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.

Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn't he say that America "got what it deserved" on 9/11? And didn't he say that black people should be singing "God Damn America" because of its treatment of the African American community throughout the years?

Well actually, no he didn't.

Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around--a notion with longstanding theological grounding--and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.

He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and "never batted an eye." That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even self-doubt about the act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks were justified, that they were needed to end the war and "save American lives."

But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman's own war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when we're the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once said that as President he would "never apologize for the United States of America . I don't care what the facts are."

And Wright didn't say blacks should be singing "God Damn America." He was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or shouldn't happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don't believe that any God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America . If anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.

Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black folks--and I do, for instance--it is worth pointing out that Wright isn't the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief in the very same thing back in the early '90s in an interview on CNN, when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people whom the government deemed "undesirable" including gays and racial minorities.

So that's the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America 's favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those "prosperity ministers" who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.

What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock--though make no mistake, they already knew it--is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War, according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time); millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth. No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new.

To some it was not on that day that "everything changed." To some, everything changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown . To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico , only to watch it become the Southwest United States , thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life. Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.

But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so, having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.

This is what James Baldwin was talking about in his classic 1972 work, No Name in the Street, wherein he noted:

"White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded--about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac."

And so we were shocked in 1987, when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall declined to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution, because, as he noted, most of that history had been one of overt racism and injustice, and to his way of thinking, the only history worth celebrating had been that of the past three or four decades.

We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a white cop who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and we're shocked to learn that lots of black folks still perceive the U.S. as a racist nation--we're literally stunned that people who say they experience discrimination regularly (and who have the social science research to back them up) actually think that those experiences and that data might actually say something about the nation in which they reside. Imagine.

Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and Trinity Church , because what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the "shining city on a hill," for they have never had the option of looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people do--and this is true even for millions of black veterans--for they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like "God Bless America ," for they know that whites sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when they heard the news that he had been assassinated.

Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which black folks cannot afford to forget. I've seen white people stunned to the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country--when they discover that such events were not just a couple of good old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy out to the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events, advertised in papers as "Negro Barbecues," involving hundreds or even thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken salad and drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity were being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts cut off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that postcards of the events were traded as souvenirs, and that very few whites, including members of their own families did or said anything to stop it.

Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past, whites take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history so that we need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, site of an orgy of violence against the black community in 1921, city officials literally went into the town library and removed all reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from the papers with a razor blade--an excising of truth and an assault on memory that would remain unchanged for over seventy years.

Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history, of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. In that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable of grasping at present, is that "Leave it Beaver" and "Father Knows Best," portray an America so divorced from the reality of the times in which they were produced, as to raise serious questions about the sanity of those who found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These iconographic representations of life in the U.S. are worse than selective, worse than false, they are assaults to the humanity and memory of black people, who were being savagely oppressed even as June Cleaver did housework in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks of Beaver and Larry Mondello.

These portraits of America are certifiable evidence of how disconnected white folks were--and to the extent we still love them and view them as representations of the "good old days" to which we wish we could return, still are--from those men and women of color with whom we have long shared a nation. Just two months before "Leave it to Beaver" debuted, proposed civil rights legislation was killed thanks to Strom Thurmond's 24-hour filibuster speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to block black students from entering Little Rock Central High; and nine days before America was introduced to the Cleavers, and the comforting image of national life they represented, those black students were finally allowed to enter, amid the screams of enraged, unhinged, viciously bigoted white people, who saw nothing wrong with calling children niggers in front of cameras. That was America of the 1950s: not the sanitized version into which so many escape thanks to the miracle of syndication, which merely allows white people to relive a lie, year after year after year.

No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your teenager's textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon "this great country" as Barack Obama put it in his public denunciations of him; it is the historic leadership of the nation that has cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by defiling it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological in its implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not merely a love of country but the turning of one's nation into an idol to be worshipped, it not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.

It is they--the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land--who bring shame to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are always noble in warfare, always well-intended, and although we occasionally make mistakes, we are never the ones to blame for anything. Nothing that happens to us has anything to do with us at all. It is always about them. They are evil, crazy, fanatical, hate our freedoms, and are jealous of our prosperity. When individuals prattle on in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as deluded. When nations do it--when our nation does--we celebrate it as though it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.

So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves truth?

Pardon me, but something is wrong here, and whatever it is, is not to be found at Trinity United Church of Christ.


[Tim Wise is the author of: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press, 2005), and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge: 2005). He can be reached at: timjwise@msn.com This essay originally appeared in Lip.]

[Little32]

I have to say that I was cracking up (because sometimes anger leads to laughter at the absurdity of it all) while watching CNN the other night.

There was a woman--I am not sure what her name is, I think that it begins with a C--interviewing Joseph Lowery. She asked him, with such pained disbelief, why Reverend Wright and other black ministers would say that America brought the world trade center attacks on itself. I mean her pain, her disbelief, her inability to comprehend the source of such claims was comical.

I thought to myself, seriously, you are a journalist, you should know the truth of this more than most.

[ladygreek]

This essay is the truth! Thanks D. for posting it.

[DSTCHAOS]

Originally Posted by 3AH80

This situation has put the racial divide in this country on Front Street for the whole world to see.

THIS situation? After all these years and everything that has happened in this country with structural inequalities compounded by blatant -isms and discrimination, THIS did it? Seriously?

The assertion that this incident has any lasting implications for race relations and race dialogue is a reminder that we have years and years and years until we see substantive change.

ETA: I have always loved Tim Wise. If people are unfamiliar with him http://www.timwise.org/

[laylo]

Originally Posted by DSTCHAOS

I have always loved Tim Wise.

Me too.

Great article. The only things shocking about Wright's statements are the reaction to them and the ignorant assertion that it was shared by most Blacks.

[ladygreek]

Originally Posted by DSTCHAOS

THIS situation? After all these years and everything that has happened in this country with structural inequalities compounded by blatant -isms and discrimination, THIS did it? Seriously?

The assertion that this incident has any lasting implications for race relations and race dialogue is a reminder that we have years and years and years until we see substantive change.

ETA: I have always loved Tim Wise. If people are unfamiliar with him http://www.timwise.org/

true, but something about it occuring during a presidential campaign when a Black man is running gives it more punch, imo.

[DSTCHAOS]

Originally Posted by ladygreek

true, but something about it occuring during a presidential campaign when a Black man is running gives it more punch, imo.

But this isn't what put it on front street.

As an aside, any American who is claiming to just notice the racial divide in this country has seriously had their head up their asses. If that supposedly applies to the average American then this country is a hopeless cause. Unsurprisingly.

[ladygreek]

Originally Posted by DSTCHAOS

But this isn't what put it on front street.

As an aside, any American who is claiming to just notice the racial divide in this country has seriously had their head up their asses. If that supposedly applies to the average American then this country is a hopeless cause. Unsurprisingly.

I think we have different definitions for front street. For me it means having this discussion become more broad based. Of course people know the racial divide exists, I just think now folx are talking (and being confronted) about it like I have never seen before.

[DSTCHAOS]

Originally Posted by ladygreek

I think we have different definitions for front street. For me it means having this discussion become more broad based. Of course people know the racial divide exists, I just think now folx are talking (and being confronted) about it like I have never seen before.

I hear ya.

"Front street" to me means to call attention to something at any level. America has been called out over and over and over again throughout the years.

As far as I'm concerned, the attention is still very minimal. White people and news engines talking about it doesn't mean much in the longrun. This is a passing fad that hasn't had/won't have the huge impact that folks are pretending that it has/will have. Folks who are still looking for a quick fix of sorts need to keep searching or roll up their sleeves and do some real work toward change.

[ladygreek]

Originally Posted by DSTCHAOS

I hear ya.

Folks who are still looking for a quick fix of sorts need to keep searching or roll up their sleeves and do some real work toward change.

I totally agree.

[Drolefille]

I don't think it is a quick fix, but it is nice to see people talking about it (outside of the media) because my (mostly) very conservative co-workers are actually talking about the speech. It's simply a drop in the bucket, but you have to actually turn the faucet on to get anywhere. Too many people suffer from "don't talk about it, it's not there" or "don't talk about it, all we'll do is fight."

[DSTCHAOS]

Originally Posted by Drolefille

I don't think it is a quick fix, but it is nice to see people talking about it (outside of the media) because my (mostly) very conservative co-workers are actually talking about the speech.

They are talking about the speech or talking about the concepts that go above and beyond the speech? If they're just talking about the speech itself then they've missed the point.

Originally Posted by Drolefille

It's simply a drop in the bucket, but you have to actually turn the faucet on to get anywhere.

Indeed. As long as people realize that Obama's speech didn't turn on the faucet in a longterm, substantive sense. It didn't.

[Drolefille]

Originally Posted by DSTCHAOS

They are talking about the speech or talking about the concepts that go above and beyond the speech? If they're just talking about the speech itself then they've missed the point.



Indeed. As long as people realize that Obama's speech didn't turn on the faucet in a longterm, substantive sense. It didn't.

The speech and the concepts behind it.

And we don't know yet how long term the effects will be. Status quo might resume, people always revert back to the stability they knew when they're uncomfortable. But it might be the nail from the shoe that affects the kingdom. Who knows.

[DSTCHAOS]

Originally Posted by Drolefille

And we don't know yet how long term the effects will be.

I do. Here's one reason:

Originally Posted by Drolefille

Status quo might resume, people always revert back to the stability they knew when they're uncomfortable.

The status quo never stopped and it definitely won't stop anytime soon. Especially not because of a "race speech." But of course the status quo persists for reasons beyond the one you provided.