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

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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:
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This essay originally appeared in Lip.

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