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For months there’s been a lot of flap about Barack Obama and the preaching of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, now Obama’s former church. I wonder, though, if the break will put an end to the controversy.
As Gregory Rodriguez pointed out in the Los Angeles Times late in March, Obama could have walked away from the pastor any time over the past 20 years. “Now,” wrote Rodriguez, who characterized Wright as a sower of racial discord, “it’s too late.”
Roughly two months later, Obama nevertheless captured the Democratic nomination, putting an ironic spin on Hillary Clinton’s “Help make history” cry on the campaign trail. It will be interesting to see if Obama’s long association with Wright dogs him in the months ahead.
We’ve come to accept the notion that a politician may be, say, Roman Catholic yet reject the church’s religious teachings on some issues such as abortion. Why, then, is it so hard to believe Obama does not share all of Wright’s political views?
I’m not as bothered by what I believed was a tenured relationship between Wright and Obama as I am now by its severance.
A comment on the NPR News and Views blog entered by a reader identified as “Bill M” put it like this: “Politician dumps longtime associates in the name of political expediency, what else is new. Is this the ‘Hope and Change’ we’ve been waiting for?”
Obama’s been promising “A change we can believe in,” but this kind of apparently expedient change doesn’t make a believer out of me. I expected this political preacher of liberty and justice for all — whether poor blacks in our inner cities or poor working-class whites in West Virginia — to stand solid on honest if complex ground.
In what came to be called his “race speech,” Obama told the nation on March 18 that he could no more disown Wright than he could disown the black community. That he could no more disown the pastor than he could disown his white grandmother.
He described Wright as a man who “contains within him the contradictions — the good and the bad — of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.” Then, as though turning over the coin of experience in his hand, Obama spoke of his grandmother.
She is, he said, “a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
In a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times, Edna M. Tobias of Hermosa Beach wrote the next day, “His eloquence and sincerity literally shone through his profound words. Those of us who have actually experienced or expressed racism could not help but be deeply affected.” Reading the letter, I thought, “Yeah.”
Not in a sarcastic way. I was born in the Deep South at a time when the words “white” and “colored” would remain stenciled above public drinking fountains for years to come.
One of my grandmother’s sisters employed a black family, whose young daughter I was allowed to play with, to work on her land. But when I invited the girl to join me in the front-porch swing, my aunt chased her from the porch with a broom.
Just as Obama’s white grandmother loves him, my aunt loved me as much as anything in this world. I could have asked her for anything within her means, and she’d have given it to me — short of letting a black child swing on her porch with me.
Many of my southern kin still use the n-word. Yet, like Obama with his grandmother, I’d never in a lifetime dream of disowning one of them.
Two of them are my godparents. Every one of them has taught me decent and marvelous things.
This is our nation. In it are the remnants of a racial divide as old as its foundation.
As Obama suggested in his famous speech, we may not be bound to this tragic past. But I have no doubt Wright spoke for many who feel as though they are.
Wright’s remarks, for the most part repeated as sound bites outside of any rhetorical or historical context, have been construed by more than a few as hatemongering. Los Angeles Times reader Kevin Michael in a letter to the editor asked us to imagine Hillary Clinton’s pastor spewing what he called “aggressively anti-American and racist rants.”
The media and the Democratic Party, he wrote, would have demanded she drop out of the race. I suspect he’s right.
And with good reason. Neither blacks nor other minorities in this country have a history of systematically oppressing and abusing whites.
Jeffrey Weiss, in a story for the Dallas Morning News quotes the Rev. Raphael Warnock, senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, as saying, “Hatred and anger are not the same thing [and] whenever injustice is present, moral outrage and anger are appropriate.”
Maybe Obama hasn’t disowned his former pastor or deserted him. Perhaps he’s simply left Trinity church for what he sees as the good of all concerned.
All the same, I wish the senator would have found the courage to tell his critics to stick it because I believe what Phill Wilson, the executive director of the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles who has worked with Wright on AIDS education, told Weiss.
“There are grains of truth, and maybe even more than grains, to what Rev. Wright has said,” he said. “Some in black America interpret the grains of truth … to be larger than they actually are. And some in white America are not willing to acknowledge that they are as large as they really are.”
If Obama could acknowledge that and work to change it, that would be a change I truly could believe in.
MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].
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