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--occasional ly
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? A place where adherence to sincerely believed and
internalized fictions allows one to rise to the highest offices in
the land, and to earn the respect of millions, while a willingness
to challenge those fictions and offer a more accurate counter-
narrative earns one nothing but contempt, derision, indeed outright
hatred? What we can say is that such a place is signing its own
death warrant. What we can say is that such a place is missing the
only and last opportunity it may ever have to make things right, to
live up to its professed ideals. What we can say is that such a
place can never move forward, because we have yet to fully address
and come to terms with that which lay behind.

What can we say about a nation where white preachers can lie every
week from their pulpits without so much as having to worry that
their lies might be noticed by the shiny white faces in their pews,
while black preachers who tell one after another essential truth are
demonized, not only for the stridency of their tone--which needless
to say scares white folks, who have long preferred a style of praise
and worship resembling nothing so much as a coma--but for merely
calling bullshit on those whose lies are swallowed whole?

And oh yes, I said it: white preachers lie. In fact, they lie with a
skill, fluidity, and precision unparalleled in the history of either
preaching or lying, both of which histories stretch back a ways and
have often overlapped. They lie every Sunday, as they talk about a
Savior they have chosen to represent dishonestly as a white man, in
every picture to be found of him in their tabernacles, every
children's story book in their Sunday Schools, every Christmas card
they'll send to relatives and friends this December. But to lie
about Jesus, about the one they consider God--to bear false witness
as to who this man was and what he looked like--is no cause for
concern.

Nor is it a problem for these preachers to teach and preach that
those who don't believe as they believe are going to hell. Despite
the fact that such a belief casts aspersions upon God that are so
profound as to defy belief--after all, they imply that God is so
fundamentally evil that he would burn non-believers in a lake of
eternal fire--many of the white folks who now condemn Jeremiah
Wright welcome that theology of hate. Indeed, back when President
Bush was the Governor of Texas, he endorsed this kind of thinking,
responding to a question about whether Jews were going to go to
hell, by saying that unless one accepted Jesus as one's personal
savior, the Bible made it pretty clear that indeed, hell was where
you'd be heading.

So you can curse God in this way--and to imply such hate on God's
part is surely to curse him--and in effect, curse those who aren't
Christians, and no one says anything. That isn't considered bigoted.
That isn't considered beyond the pale of polite society. One is not
disqualified from becoming President in the minds of millions
because they go to a church that says that shit every single week,
or because they believe it themselves. And millions do believe it,
and see nothing wrong with it whatsoever.

So white folks are mad at Jeremiah Wright because he challenges
their views about their country. Meanwhile, those same white folks,
and their ministers and priests, every week put forth a false image
of the God Jeremiah Wright serves, and yet it is whites who feel we
have the right to be offended.

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

Source: Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/wise03182008.html