[Marxism] Rev. Wright's voicing of the truth in his soul and the angry response of "Americans" -- must reading IMHO

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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?
[snip]

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@xxxxxxx
This essay originally appeared in Lip.]


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