In Defense of Rev. Jeremiah
Wright
Why Barack Obama’s Smooth Talk
Contributes Nothing to the Liberation of the African
American People
by Tom Barrett
As Illinois Senator Barack Obama has
marched improbably toward the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, he
has put a section of the party’s leadership into a quandary. The young handsome
Senator, whose inspirational speaking style is said to be reminiscent of John
F. Kennedy’s, has attempted to run a positive campaign, appealing to idealism
rather than to resentment, and in so doing has put up a serious challenge to
New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who at one time thought the Democratic
nomination was hers for the taking. It was only a matter of time until someone
found something with which to tarnish Obama’s silver-plated image.
For some months there has been a
semi-underground campaign to portray Obama as “disloyal” to the United
States—asserting falsely that he refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance, that
he is a Muslim (also false) with the implication that he is sympathetic to
al-Qa’ideh, and even criticizing him for not wearing an American flag lapel
pin. Obama’s opponents have also attempted to capitalize on a remark by his
wife, Michelle Obama, that she had only become proud of the United States of
America since her husband’s campaign began.
Up until now, the Internet slander
campaign has not been effective. Obama has captured the imagination of a number
of vital Democratic constituencies, not only African Americans nearly in their
entirety, but the pro-Democrat wing of the antiwar movement, a section of the
trade union leadership, and the Kennedy family and the faction which they lead.
Obama has more convention delegates pledged to him than does Hillary Clinton,
though neither can win a first ballot victory at the convention with elected
delegates alone. It is likely that the so-called “superdelegates,” those who
have a convention vote by virtue of their elected office in government or the
Democratic Party, will decide the nominee. Clinton is attempting to convince
them that Obama cannot win in a general election against John McCain.
During the first weeks of March, the
Clinton campaign seemed to find the ammunition they thought they could use
against Obama. For twenty years the Obama family has attended the Trinity
United Church of Christ in the South Side of Chicago. Its congregation is
almost entirely African American. The home page of its website (click here to access) features
African drumming and an outline map of the African continent. Its pastor, Rev.
Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, is a sixty-seven-year-old veteran of civil rights
struggles and has ministered to a congregation in a section of the city which
epitomizes Black oppression in the industrial northern cities. It should
therefore be no surprise to anyone that Dr. Wright is angry at the oppression
facing African Americans in the United States and that his anger finds
expression in his Sunday morning sermons.
It has been said that 11:00 a.m. to
12:00 noon on Sunday is the most segregated hour in American life, meaning of
course that African Americans and “white” Americans (i.e., those of European
descent; sometimes also called “Caucasians”) do not worship together.
Additionally, for the most part, African Americans in northern cities brought
their religious practices with them from the South. Whites who are accustomed
to the stuffy decorum of Presbyterianism, Anglicanism, or other mainstream
Protestant denominations, not to mention Roman Catholicism or Judaism, are not
entirely comfortable with the congregational expressiveness and uncompromising
preaching that one experiences in a Southern Baptist or Pentecostal church
service, whether the congregation is “Caucasian” or African American.
There are exceptions, of course: during
my own youth, my family belonged to one of the few truly mixed-race Episcopal
parishes in the city of Baltimore. And there are, of course, Black Roman
Catholics, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Unitarians. However, the African American
religious tradition is Southern and Protestant, usually Baptist,
Methodist, or Pentecostal, and even the Nation of Islam’s religious services
have a surprising amount in common with those of African American traditional
churches, as I found out in the 1970s when, under the Honorable Wallace D.
Muhammad’s leadership, the group briefly reached out to whites.
The churches in the Black community have
always been the organizing centers for the civil rights struggle. Their
ministers have been the most eloquent and outspoken leaders of that struggle,
from the time of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X until our own day.
African Americans are accustomed to their clergy taking a strong stand on
social and political issues, both at the pulpit on Sunday morning and in the
public life of the Black community during the rest of the week. But “white”
people, especially in the North, are not so used to it, and when they see a
two-minute clip on the
YouTube website of Rev.
Dr. Wright preaching, many have a negative reaction to it and are not sure they
are willing to vote for a candidate who attends a church whose pastor preaches
this way.
The major news media who “broke the story” about Rev. Dr. Wright
have done a disservice to their readers and listeners by quoting him out of
context and only showing the most inflammatory snippets of his sermons. Cable
News Network’s (CNN) reporter Roland Martin, however, has examined Dr. Wright’s
sermons in their entirety, and he reports something very different in a March
21, 2008, article on CNN’s AndersonCooper360˚ blog, an article entitled, “The
Full Story Behind Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s 9/11 Sermon.” In fact, in
the most commonly excerpted part of the sermon, Dr. Wright is in fact quoting the former U.S. ambassador to
Iraq! Here is the entire quote, as presented by Martin:
“I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview
yesterday. Did anybody else see or hear him? He was on FOX News, this is a
white man, and he was upsetting the FOX News commentators to no end, he pointed
out, a white man, an ambassador, he pointed out that what Malcolm X said when
he was silenced by Elijah Muhammad was in fact true, he said America’s chickens
are coming home to roost.”
“We took this country by terror away from the
Sioux, the Apache, Arikara, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the
Navajo. Terrorism.
“We took Africans away from their country to
build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism.
“We bombed Grenada and killed innocent
civilians, babies, non-military personnel.
“We bombed the Black civilian community of
Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant
mothers and hard-working fathers.
“We bombed Qaddafi’s home, and killed his
child. Blessed are they who bash your children’s head against the rock.
“We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians
trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack
on our embassy, killed hundreds of hard-working people, mothers and fathers who
left home to go to work that day not knowing that they’d never get back home.
“We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Nagasaki, and
we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never
batted an eye.
“Kids playing in the
playground. Mothers picking up children
after school. Civilians, not soldiers, people just trying to make it day
by day.
“We have supported state terrorism against the
Palestinians and Black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the
stuff that we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front
yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.
“Violence begets violence.
Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism.”
A white ambassador said
that, y’all, not a Black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An
ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and
move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The
ambassador said the people we have wounded don’t have the military capability
we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands
with them. And we need to come to grips with that.”
But, as Martin shows, Dr. Wright’s main
point was not to protest the wrong that the United States has done:
He went on to describe seeing the photos of the
aftermath of 9/11 because he was in Newark, N.J., when the planes struck. After
turning on the TV and seeing the second plane slam into one of the twin towers,
he spoke passionately about what if you never got a chance to say hello to your
family again.
“What is the state of your family?” he asked.
And then he told his congregation that he loved
them and asked the church to tell each other they loved themselves.
His sermon thesis:
1.
This is a time for self-examination of ourselves
and our families.
2.
This is a time for social transformation (then he went on to say they
won’t put me on PBS or national cable for what I’m about to say. Talk about
prophetic!)
“We have got to change the way we have been
doing things as a society,” he said.
Wright then said we can’t stop messing over
people and thinking they can’t touch us. He said we may need to declare war on
racism, injustice, and greed, instead of war on other countries.
“Maybe we need to declare war on AIDS. In five
minutes the Congress found $40 billion to rebuild New York and the families
that died in sudden death, do you think we can find the money to make medicine
available for people who are dying a slow death? Maybe we need to declare war
on the nation’s healthcare system that leaves the nation’s poor with no health
coverage? Maybe we need to declare war on the mishandled educational system and
provide quality education for everybody, every citizen, based on their ability
to learn, not their ability to pay. This is a time for social transformation.”
3.
This is time to tell God thank you for all that he has provided and
that he gave him and others another chance to do His will.
This sermon was actually preached over
six years ago, on September 16, 2001, the first Sunday after 9/11 itself. It is
hardly breaking news.
Nor is it any more than the simple
truth!
Dr. Wright’s words may very well be
intemperate; they are not tactful. They certainly may make many “white” people
uncomfortable. But they were not spoken to white people; they were spoken to a
predominantly African American congregation, long before there was any idea
that one member of the congregation might be running for the presidency of the
United States. If his sermons cost Obama the presidency it says more about the
level of racism within the white population — and the willingness of Obama’s
political opponents and the media to exploit it — than it says either about the
Rev. Dr. Wright or about Senator Barack Obama.
Before discussing the speech on race
that Obama delivered in Philadelphia partially in response to the controversy
over Dr. Wright’s preaching, it is worthwhile to look at exactly who Barack
Obama is, and at his connection to the African American community, its historic
oppression, and its struggles for human rights, equality, justice, and economic
survival.
Barack Obama has the physical
characteristics of the African race: the skin pigment, the hair texture, and
other attributes. But he has no personal connection to the African American
people of the United States. His mother was a white woman from Kansas; his
father was an immigrant from Kenya in East Africa. Obama himself was born in
Hawaii, a state where many races coexist, but where there are not many Blacks.
No one in Obama’s family tree was ever a slave. None of his relatives ever
attended a segregated school. None ever died at the hands of a lynch mob. Dr.
Wright in one of his sermons made the point that no one ever called Hillary
Clinton a “nigger,” but one may make the same point about Barack Obama. He
never experienced directly the full force of American racism, nor did anyone in
his family. He may have an intellectual understanding of race and racism (though
judging from his speech it is quite limited), and in his public speaking he has
clearly mastered the use of Martin Luther King’s oratorical style. But as for
his being “Black” it is quite literally only skin-deep.
That does not necessarily disqualify him
from a leadership role in the African American struggle, should he make such a
choice. One of the most important early Black leaders, W.E.B. DuBois, had very
little Black ancestry and was born and raised in Great Barrington,
Massachusetts, in the Berkshire mountains, as far from
the cotton fields as one can imagine. (At the time of DuBois’s birth, not quite
three years after the abolition of slavery, a majority of African Americans
were directly involved in the production of cotton.) Nevertheless, he devoted
his life to the cause of civil rights and was one of the founding leaders of
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. However,
DuBois’s lack of direct experience with Southern racism had an effect on his
political agenda, especially in his early years.
Nor does Obama’s lack of connection with
the African American experience disqualify him necessarily from being elected
president. What we all need to understand is this: should Barack Obama become
president (and his chances are quite good), there is no reason to believe that
he would be any different than any previous opportunist politician who has held
the office. There is no reason to assume that he would not, to the best of his
ability, protect and defend the interests of the capitalist class against all
enemies, foreign and domestic. Because Obama has neither the understanding nor
the instinct that the capitalist power structure is the enemy of Black people,
the capitalist class does not consider him a threat, and a significant section
of it is willing to use his considerable talents — and his ability to co-opt a
potential radicalization of African Americans or youth — for its own benefit.
The speech which Obama gave in
Philadelphia (click
here for the text) was consistent with the image he is attempting to project
in his campaign: it was serious and dignified, appealing to lofty ideals and
expressing reverence for the “founding fathers” and the republic which they
brought into being in that same city of Philadelphia. There are no clever
one-liners or polemical “zingers.” There are no attacks on political opponents
nor any expression of the anger that one might feel is
justified coming from a person of color in these United States. The speech is
intended to convey the idea that Obama is more interested in “public service”
to the United States than in advancing his career as a politician and being
elected to the most powerful political office on earth. It’s even possible that
he really believes this. In any case, the speech, which Obama wrote himself,
was quite excellent in its tone and delivery. The only thing wrong with it was
what he actually said.
Of Rev. Dr. Wright’s sermons, Obama said:
But the remarks that have caused this
recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious
leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they
expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white
racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that
we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle
East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead
of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.
No, Dr. Wright’s view of this country is
not distorted at all. Racism is endemic to American capitalism. How
could it be otherwise? African slavery had been a foundation of the colonial
economy in the Western Hemisphere (under the Spanish and Portuguese) for a full
century before the English colony at Jamestown was even settled. Just as slaves
were necessary for the profitable production of sugar cane in the Spanish and
Portuguese colonies, they were necessary for the profitable production of
tobacco in Virginia. Africans were not enslaved because of prejudice against
people with black skin. It was completely a matter of economics and
practicality: the native peoples did not make good slaves — they knew the
country and for that reason had a much better chance of escaping; if they did
not escape they simply died under the strain of servitude and the whites’
diseases. People with black skin were easy to identify and far from home;
consequently it was not so easy for them to escape. The first advertisements
for slaves in the Jamestown colony emphasized that they had been exposed to
smallpox and were no longer susceptible to it.
In the Americas slavery was an essential
component of the early accumulation of capital by the merchant class. Without
the “triangular trade” of slaves, sugar cane, and rum –– later to include
textiles and other manufactured goods — the bankers would never have had the
cash on hand to invest in the industries that formed the foundation of the
capitalist economy and society. So, for the first two-and-a-half centuries
following the first English settlement in what is now the United States, Blacks
lived and worked here as slaves. The capitalist economy developed with slavery
as an integral factor in that economy.
The abolition of slavery in 1865 did not
eliminate the need for cheap labor in Southern agriculture. The textile mills
still needed inexpensive cotton after slavery was abolished, just as they
needed it before slavery was abolished. In the 1880s and 1890s Southern
legislatures imposed the “Black Codes,” the system of segregation which became
known as “Jim Crow.” The purpose was to keep African Americans bound to the
cotton fields almost as medieval serfs and to deprive them of any political
power which might enable them to break free. This system of enforced white
supremacy remained in force until the 1950s and 1960s. Though the civil
rights movement struggled valiantly from the early years of the twentieth
century, it was not until after World War II –– when Southern agriculture was
extensively mechanized and the need for cheap Black labor was no longer so
acute — that the federal government intervened for its own reasons on the side
of the civil rights struggle. This happened within Barack Obama’s own
lifetime. This is not the dim and distant past.
This aspect of racism — its central and historic role in the foundation of American
capitalism — was completely absent from Obama’s “discussion” of race. Instead,
he focused on skin-color prejudice, a serious problem to be sure, but something
which grew out of economically-based racism. Economically-based racism does not
necessary involve hatred of whites for African Americans — so long as the Black
folks know their place! All one needs to do is to read Margaret Mitchell’s
self-justifying Gone with the Wind to
get an idea of how the slave masters “loved the darkies.” To this day Southern
apologists for racism will argue that “Northerners,” from the Abolitionists to
the civil rights activists of our own day, never understood Southern ways, and
will contrast the virulent hatred that Blacks have faced in Northern cities
with the genteel (read: patronizing) affection with which Southern aristocrats
treated their Black maids and gardeners. There is some truth in what they say:
it is hard to imagine more vicious race hatred than that which exploded, for
example, in South Boston in 1974 but has hardly been unique to that city.
Racism is rooted in the need for cheap
labor for certain jobs necessary to the local capitalist economy. Skin-color
prejudice is fundamentally based in competition between Blacks and immigrants
(or their descendants) for jobs. By the 1840s there were significant
communities of free Blacks in many cities, especially along the coasts in the
Southern states, from Baltimore, Maryland, all the way to New Orleans,
Louisiana. Many trades were reserved for them: for example, in the Baltimore
shipyards, the caulking trade was reserved for free Blacks. (Frederick Douglass
even worked briefly as a caulker in the Baltimore shipyards.) When Irish
immigrants, fleeing the Potato Famine, arrived in many of these cities and saw
signs in front of workplaces reading, “No Irish need apply,” there were often
free Blacks working there.
The employing class has made use of
racial competition for jobs and economic position ever since, often bringing in
Black workers as replacement for white strikers and using poor Southern whites
to carry out violence against Blacks who challenged the Jim Crow system.
However, the early Communist Party successfully combated white workers’ race
hatreds in the trade unions, and in the 1930s and 1940s the employing class was
unable to use racial competition to defeat the greatest labor upsurge ever
witnessed. After the McCarthy era had destroyed radical leadership in the trade
union movement, however, white racism returned to challenge the civil rights
movement’s struggles against job and housing discrimination in Northern states.
The facts clearly show: militant working-class
solidarity is the only true antidote to the poison of racial prejudice.
However, one hears nothing of this from Barack Obama. While acknowledging the
misplaced resentment by white workers who are struggling in an increasingly
unfavorable economy, the only answer Obama can give is a paternalistic liberal
answer: a few more crumbs from the master’s table. That will hardly suffice
when any fool can predict that competition for those crumbs will increase
racial tension, not reduce it.
So, Obama has a completely insufficient
answer to the problem of white-skin prejudice and not even an acknowledgment of
the racism which forms a key part of the foundation of American capitalism
itself. And this speech is being praised as a serious discussion of the race problem
in the United States?
Rev. Dr. Wright spoke out eloquently
against the imperialist foreign policy of the United States, citing the
military action in Grenada, Panamá, and Iraq, and even the atomic bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. He criticized Washington’s support for
“state-sponsored terrorism” against Black South Africans and Palestinian Arabs.
Dr. Wright was correct on all counts.
Justice demands that we speak out against these crimes, and there can be no
lasting peace short of the final defeat of imperialism throughout the world.
But Barack Obama takes issue with Dr. Wright on this as well, describing the
apartheid state of Israel as a “stalwart ally” and blaming the conflict in the
Middle East on the “perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.”
The only way Obama could make such a
statement is by being either completely ignorant of the entire Middle East
conflict as well as the history of U.S. involvement in that region or by simply
lying and hoping that the American people have as short a memory and as little
understanding of the world as the cynical politicians seem to believe.
Since the Iranian revolution of 1979 and
the “hostage crisis” of that year, and especially since the events of September
11, 2001, “radical Islam” has replaced “Communism” as the “enemy,” with all the
hysteria, dishonesty, and militaristic “patriotism” that one can expect. But
what role has it played in the conflict between Zionism and the Arab people of
Palestine? In fact, its role has been small until quite recently.
The Palestinian people are Muslim in
their majority, but it is not an overwhelming majority. A substantial number
are Christians, and some of the central leaders of the Palestinian resistance
movement, have come from the Christian community, including the revered George
Habash, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In
1968 the Palestine Liberation Organization, led by al-Fateh’s Yassir Arafat,
adopted the Palestine National Charter, which set as its goal the establishment
of a “Democratic Secular State” in Palestine, a state in which Jews,
Christians, and Muslims would have equal rights and responsibilities.
The organization associated with
“radical Islam” in the Zionist-Palestinian conflict is Hamas, which began to take
shape in the Gaza strip during the first Intifadeh of the late 1980s, that is,
twenty years after the Palestine National Charter. Outside of Gaza very few
people knew what was going on; however, I heard a report from a young
Palestinian Arab who worked in the Alternative Information Center, an
anti-Zionist alliance of Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews, that Israel was
financing the “Muslim Brothers” in Gaza. He explained that Israel was trying to
create a conservative religious — and therefore anti-Communist — formation as
an alternative to the Palestine Liberation Organization. This was consistent as
well with U.S. policy. The CIA and other U.S. agencies were providing money and
weapons to the most reactionary Islamic forces in Afghanistan to help them
fight against the left-leaning Afghan government and the Soviet troops who were
supporting it. One of the leaders of the Islamic anti-Communist forces was one
Usama bin Ladin, who used his family’s considerable wealth to build up a
network of fighters loyal to the Sa’udi Arabia–based Wahhabi sect of Islam. He
called his network “The Foundation,” the Arabic word for which is “al-Qa’ideh.”
Not only is “radical Islam” not the cause of conflict between Israel
and the Arab people of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, “radical
Islam” has developed with the aid and support of both Israel and the United
States as an instrument of imperialist foreign policy. This cannot possibly be
news to Barack Obama. One might expect such ignorance from George W. Bush, but
not from Obama. No, I believe that Obama is cynically lying to the African
Americans and young people who are supporting his campaign and sending a signal
to the business community that he will loyally defend their interests.
Washington’s “stalwart ally” Israel, by
contrast, has indeed been the cause of violent conflict in the Middle East
since the period immediately following the First World War — yes, First World War, not Second. Zionist
settlers, originally welcomed by the Arabs of Palestine, began the process of
ethnic cleansing as soon as they were able to acquire land for their early
settlements. They would buy the land from absentee landlords and then expel the
peasants who had been working the land as tenant farmers. The displaced fallaheen fought back, and in the 1930s
thousands of British troops were sent into Palestine to try to keep order.
During the 1930s and 1940s, the Zionists carried out acts of terrorism,
including the bombing of the King David Hotel and the massacre of civilians at
Deir Yassin, as part of their campaign to clear the future territory of Israel
of unwanted native Arabs.
Once the state of Israel was
established, the Arabs within its borders were subjected to second-class citizenship, similar to that suffered by African Americans
in the pre–Civil Rights South or the native Black Africans in South Africa.
Indeed, Israel and South Africa maintained a close relationship starting during
Israel’s early years. South Africa allowed its Jewish citizens to fight in the
Israeli armed forces without losing their South African citizenship, and
Israel, whose primary export in its first decades was cut diamonds, was a major
buyer of rough diamonds from South Africa. The Israeli foreign minister at the
time of the Six-Day War, Abba Eban, was himself South African. The apartheid system ended in South Africa
in 1994, but it continues in the state of Israel today, as Arabs are subjected
to checkpoints, water restrictions, and even demolition of their homes. As a
member of Trinity United Church of Christ, there is no way that Barack Obama
was not aware of this situation. If he can make the unqualified statement that
Israel is a “stalwart ally,” knowing what he knows, then one can only conclude
that he approves of Israel’s actions.
If Barack Obama is elected President, he
may very well bring about “change” as he has promised, but it won’t be change
that benefits working people, either here or abroad. It certainly won’t be
change that benefits African Americans, Latinos, or Native Americans. The kind
of change he is talking about is change that will make government more
efficient in protecting big business’s ability to make profit. The change he
seeks to make is to bring about class and racial peace so that workers will
accept a lower standard of living and people of color will forego equal rights
and opportunity in the “national interest,” which really means massive profits
for multinational corporations. The real debate in the 2008 election is not
that kind of change, which John McCain and Hillary Clinton support as much as
Obama does. The real question is, Which candidate is
best able to bring it about the kind of change that will benefit the
capitalists? And in his Philadelphia speech on race, Barack Obama has made a
good case that he is indeed that candidate.
Jeremiah Wright has spent the past
several decades ministering to one of the most oppressed communities in the
United States, to people suffering the effects of poverty, crime, police
brutality, drug addiction, and terrible diseases including HIV/AIDS. He has
consistently preached the truth as he has seen it, and he has devoted his life
to public service on the level of individuals and families. When all is said
and done and the ledger is tallied, it will very likely show that it was Dr.
Wright who did more in service to others than did Barack Obama, even though
Obama has already risen to great power and may rise to the most powerful
political office on earth. In the words attributed to Jesus Christ, in Mark
8:35–36, “For whosoever will save his life will lose it; but whosoever shall
lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it. For what
shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own
soul?” Rev. Dr. Wright has been true to his moral principles and has done his
best to tell the truth as he as seen it. He will be remembered as a good man.