Monroe Anderson

Why Rev. Wright received a standing "O" at a Catholic Church

    Media clips aside, Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s standing in the African American community remains strong and steady. It’s not just simply because his sermon snippets were taken out of context; it has much to do with America’s historical treatment of blacks.
    Slavery By Another Name, a new book by the Wall Street Journal’s Douglas Blackmon documents that. The book also illustrates why sermons in black churches don’t carry the same messages as sermons in white ones. Blackmon’s book reveals that the enslavement of African Americans continued in the Deep South until the dawn of World War II.
    Here’s my ebonyjet.com commentary Rev. Wright, slavery and politics in America. It was  posted on the website this morning. (The painting of a slavery survivor is by my wife, artist Joyce Owens.)

Slavery By Another Name

Monday, March 31, 2008
By Monroe Anderson

Rev. Jeremiah Wright emerged from his self-imposed public exile to make a surprise appearance Friday at a Catholic Church where its audience of 1,000 black Chicagoans gave him a rousing standing ovation.

White America may find the unapologetically warm welcome the former spiritual adviser to Barack Obama received at St. Sabina Catholic Church surprising. Black America will not.

Rev. Wright has been vilified by the radical right, chastised by one white TV talk show host after the next and caricatured by white TV comedians. To them, those snappy sermon snippets that played in an endless loop on cable and network television were the words of a racist, hate-filled madman. To many black Americans, what Wright said was nothing less, in spirit, if not in law, than the truth.

"It's my country, right or wrong," for most of white America. For most of black America, we know what's right, we are also painfully aware that what's wrong needs to be seriously addressed. We'd know it even if our nation's prisons weren't disproportionately overcrowded with African American men, our failing schools weren't still separate and unequal and our unemployment rates grotesquely greater than in white America.

But, should we choose to ignore today's reality, there's always yesterday's: slavery.

No fruitful discussion of race can take place in this nation without discussing that peculiar institution and its legacy which lingers to this day. The knee-jerk retort from many white  Americans is that slavery was ended nearly a century and a half ago and that neither they nor their relatives had anything to do with it. African Americans, they argue, use it as an excuse for whatever ails them and that our anger is baseless.

    "This new world order of the old South called for thousands of black men to be arrested, charged with whatever, jailed and then sold to plantations, mines, railroads, mills, lumber camps and factories in the deep South."

In his "A More Perfect Union" speech, Obama pointed out that the "anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots" won't work.

An examination of our nation's real history reveals that by an evil and coordinated design, slavery went on much longer than the Emancipation Proclamation or Juneteenth Day. An historical expose by Douglas A. Blackmon reveals that it didn't end until World War II, approximately five years after Rev. Wright was born.

In his book, "Slavery by Another Name," which hit the bookstores last week, Blackmon reports on the "Age of Neoslavery" that thrived in the South until "the greatest generation" went to World War II.

In the wake of  its defeat in the Civil War, the South's plantation owners, industrialists and powerful white politicians began reinstituting slavery through laws designed "to criminalize black life," Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, writes.

This new world order of the old South called for thousands of black men to be arrested, charged with whatever, jailed and then sold to plantations, mines, railroads, mills, lumber camps and factories in the deep South. Countless thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, subjected to enormous fines and charged for the costs of their own arrests. Unable to pay the jacked up debts, they were sold as forced laborers.

In other cases, southern blacks were kidnaped by southern landowners and forced into years of involuntarily labor. Elected southern officials "leased" blacks who were convicted on trumped up charges to local farmers and entrepreneurs, and dozens of national corporations–including U.S. Steel–who preferred free and abundant labor over the other kind. Unlike in the days of legal slavery, the new masters had no financial incentive to attend to the health of their free laborers so these black men were literally worked to death.

Exploiting federal regs and legal loopholes that winked and nodded at the neoslavery system, southern states prospered off the free black labor. When WWII loomed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered that the neoslavery come to a screeching halt out of fear that the Japanese propaganda machine would put it to great use against America.

In "Slavery By Another Name," Blackmon points out that, as a result of this and other insidious practices, African Americans were put at a great economic disadvantage, which explains why white wealth dwarfs that of blacks to this day.

So, in one of these sermon snippets, when Rev. Wright God damns America, most blacks understood that he was speaking in an historical context–not a religious one. And, if they were honest, those who have benefitted most from the racial injustice should understand it as well.

Monroe Anderson is an award-winning journalist who penned op-ed columns for both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. He is a regular contributor to Ebonyjet.com. Follow his blog at monroeanderson.typepad.com

Wright's words right into context

    Hillary Clinton broke her silence about Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright yesterday.
    Unlike Barack Obama, she would have, she said–and I’m paraphrasing here-- told any minister who spoke about America like Wright spoke about America to let the door knob hit ya where the good Lord split ya. The former First Lady said she would have parted ways with any minister who said the things that the former pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ said.   

    Small problem.

    Those never ending loops, as seen on TV, took Rev. Wright’s sermon way out of context. The “Amerca's chickens are coming home to roost” quote was from a white ambassador Wright heard quoting Malcolm X  on TV and then a riff off the quote. Taken out of its sound bite status and given a little more airtime, Rev. Wright’s sermon shortly after 9/11 is an every-Sunday Christian message.

    “This is a time for me to examine my own relationship with God,” Wright preached. “Is it real or is it fake? Is it forever or is it for show? Is it something that you do for the sake of the public or is it something you do for the sake of Eternity?”

    In it, he called the terrorists attacks against the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. “an unthinkable act.” In the sermon, he preached that “this is a time for self-examination” to see if you're good with God.
    Why would Christian Hillary, or should Christian Obama, part with a Christian minister who called on his flock to examine their closeness to God?
    “This is a time for me to examine my own relationship with God,” Wright preached. “Is it real or is it fake? Is it forever or is it for show? Is it something that you do for the sake of the public or is it something you do for the sake of Eternity?”
    Had Hillary sat through that sermon, then maybe she would have been saved from “misspeaking” about her misadventures in Bosnia.
    As for the maligned minister’s message, don’t take my word for it. Listen to Rev. Wright’s words. Words that last a little more than nine minutes rather than the length of a sound bite snippet.

Buchanan's got his rant down pat

    Hollywood’s prolonged writers' strike had one profoundly positive impact: It changed the TV viewing patterns of many Americans, me among them.
    Rather than wasting my time watching reruns of network sitcoms and dramas, I turned almost exclusively to the cable networks where I witnessed real-life drama and comic situations.
    Day in and day out, I’ve been glued to the tube, watching the political news shows and listening to the talking heads share their opinions. Of late, one of the most notorious talking heads, Pat Buchanan has been in overdrive. He’s been all over MSNBC and on the McLaughlin Group judging why Barack Obama’s brilliant speech on Race and Politics wasn’t good enough. Buchanan (and to a lesser degree, his right-wing sister, Babe Buchanan) has been chastising Obama for having the audacity to sit in Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ for 20 years and listen to the sermons without giving Rev. Jeremiah Wright a tongue-lashing for his “hateful” messages before never setting foot in the church again.
    Well, while we’re in the looking-back-on-20-years mode, let’s take a look at Buchanan. He’s a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He admires the Confederate General Robert E. Lee. And, over the years, he’s said a hateful thing or two about African Americans.
    Although right wing radicals like Buchanan have no use for it, I’m feeling pretty PC on this particular day so I’ll say that Pat is racially insensitive rather than just out and out call him a racist.
    Fortunately, AgentX on the African American Opinion blog said it for me–and said it better than I might have. Here’s how he kicked it off on the blog (For clarity, I'm putting AgentX's words in blue font and Buchanan's in red):
 
Notorious racist ranter Pat Buchanan asks "Where's the Gratitude?" from Blacks.

Get ready to get pissed off. Even if you are not black, this will piss you off.

First, some context. Pat Buchanan is a paleo-conservative former presidential candidate who is now an author and MSNBC political analyst. In the past he has made numerous racist statements, as documented by many sources, including Media Matters. Did you think he would stop since his last shameful incident? I didn't either.

On the 21st, he released this shameful, inaccurate, and downright racist rant (called "A Brief For Whitey") against Obama, Pastor Wright, and the entire Black community, with some splash damage on poor Whites, Native Americans, Asians and especially Latinos.

Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America.

    Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to.

    This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these:

 First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

    Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

    Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the '60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

    Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks - with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas -- to advance black applicants over white applicants.

    Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks.

    We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?

    Barack talks about new “ladders of opportunity” for blacks.

    Let him go to Altoona and Johnstown, and ask the white kids in Catholic schools how many were visited lately by Ivy League recruiters handing out scholarships for “deserving” white kids.

    Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America’s fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?

    Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?

    As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?

    Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?

    We have all heard ad nauseam from the Rev. Al about Tawana Brawley, the Duke rape case and Jena. And all turned out to be hoaxes. But about the epidemic of black assaults on whites that are real, we hear nothing.

    Sorry, Barack, some of us have heard it all before, about 40 years and 40 trillion tax dollars ago.

I don't have all night to debunk this entire sack of crap, so I'm gonna touch up on a few issues.

    Click here to see how AgentX touched on the issues.
    And, in the meantime, as you watch Buchanan pretending to speak for the angry white man, remember he’s actually speaking to him. He’s giving him talking points to perpetuate the politics of old. Buchanan's script is not written for us.

Sermon snippets this Easter Sunday that should put Rev. Wright's to shame

    On this Easter Sunday, I thought it might be appropriate to post a couple of sermon snippets from two preachers who have their own favorite candidates--the reverends Rod Parsley and James David Manning.
    John McCain has called Rev. Parsley his "spiritual guide." Rev. Parsley has called Islam a false religion and called on Christians to wage war against it. Rev. Manning believe Barack Obama to be the anti-candidate. He rants about Obama Girl's "54 double D" boobs, about Obama's mixed-race pedigree and about blacks for not appreciating all the good things President Bill Clinton did for them.

    Since we're now into vetting preachers and what they have to say about their favorite presidential candidate, I thought I should bring these two righteous ministers into the mix. Let's see if they make the cable news and talk shows. I find their sermons much more outrageous than anything Rev. Jeremiah Wright has said.

    Happy Easter!

    Here's Rev. Parsley sermonizing on pro-choice and black genocide.

    And here's Rev. Manning damning MacDaddy Obama and praising himself.

In Search of Intelligence in the Multiverse--Not DMX in the DMZ

   
 

   

    In an interview with XXL magazine, DMX succeeded in lowering the bar when it comes to expecting a certain circle of rappers to not be too ignorant. It’s one thing to proudly and loudly denigrate your  people as niggers--ahhhh, sorry, niggaz--and your women as bitches. WTF, one is supposed to be an expression of endearment and the other is apparently a shout out because you’re their baby daddy.
    But it’s something else not to know what time it is, whose time it is or that it’s about time. Apparently, the 37-year-old Earl Simmons, aka DMX, the sixth highest-selling rapper of all time, star of the easily forgettable movie, Never Die Alone, is out of this world.
    That’s the only explanation for his can’t-be-real knowledge on this year’s presidential race which has been talked about in cyberspace, in foreign countries, in the mainstream media, in the barber and beauty shops, in whore houses and in prisons.
    This is how XXL reported a portion of its interview with the rapper.

Are you following the presidential race?
Not at all.

You’re not? You know there’s a Black guy running, Barack Obama and then there’s Hillary Clinton.
His name is Barack?!

Barack Obama, yeah.
Barack?!

Barack.
What the fuck is a Barack?! Barack Obama. Where he from, Africa?

Yeah, his dad is from Kenya.
Barack Obama?

Yeah.
What the fuck?! That ain’t no fuckin’ name, yo. That ain’t that nigga’s name. You can’t be serious. Barack Obama. Get the fuck outta here.

You’re telling me you haven’t heard about him before.
I ain’t really paying much attention.

I mean, it’s pretty big if a Black…
Wow, Barack! The nigga’s name is Barack. Barack? Nigga named Barack Obama. What the fuck, man?! Is he serious? That ain’t his fuckin’ name. Ima tell this nigga when I see him, “Stop that bullshit. Stop that bullshit” [laughs] “That ain’t your fuckin’ name.” Your momma ain’t name you no damn Barack.

So you’re not following the race. You can’t vote right?
Nope.

Is that why you’re not following it?
No, because it’s just—it doesn’t matter. They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. It doesn’t really make a difference. These are the last years.

But it would be pretty big if we had a first Black president. That would be huge.
I mean, I guess…. What, they gon’ give a dog a bone? There you go. Ooh, we have a Black president now. They should’ve done that shit a long time ago, we wouldn’t be in the fuckin’ position we in now. With world war coming up right now. They done fucked this shit up then give it to the Black people, “Here you take it. Take my mess.”

Right, exactly.
It’s all a fuckin’ setup. It’s all a setup. All fuckin’ bullshit. All bullshit. I don’t give a fuck about none of that.

We could have a female president also, Hillary Clinton.
I mean, either way it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. No one person is directly affected by which president, you know, so what does it matter.

Yeah, but the country is.
I guess. The president is a puppet anyway. The president don’t make no damn decisions.

The president…they don’t have that much authority basically?
Nah, never.

But Bush pretty much…
You think Bush is making fuckin’ decisions?

He did, yeah, he fucked up the country.
He act like he making decisions. He could barely speak! He could barely fuckin’ speak!
Can’t be serious. He ain’t making no damn decisions.

Well Barack has a good chance of winning so that might be something.
Good for him, good for him.

Wright words, message missed

    

    The national discourse over Rev. Jeremiah Wright focuses on a few words spoken over many years rather than what the words addressed. This American reflex goes to the heart of the many crises we're facing right now. We focus on the flash instead of dealing with the big problems that were there before the flash went off and will remain after the flash has evaporated.
    This is a great opportunity for the talking heads to go to the root of a couple of the nation's most enduring challenges: racism and poverty.
    But since neither impacts them or theirs, my guess is they'll continue to chase one flash after the next.

Post script: I just finished watching Obama's speech on race and politics. In his news story, AP reporter Tom Raum missed the core of Obama's speech: It is a rare national challenge for all Americans to rise above the racial divide and address the most daunting problems this nation faces. Good delivery. Great speech.

    Here's my commentary on the Wright's words and the social significance of the black church. It was posted this morning on EbonyJet.com.

Understanding The Word
Offense is in the ear of the beholder.
Monroe Anderson on Jeremiah Wright.

Monday, March 17, 2008
By Monroe Anderson

Sunday mornings show America at its most segregated.

You can see this in our houses of worship. And, except for the occasional guest black panelist in this political season of Barack Obama, you can also see it on the weekly network and cable news shows. So it should come as no revelation that white America--including the political patriarchs hosting the TV talk shows, would find the snippets of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons shocking news.

In contrast, I a€™m sure most African Americans did not.

While there are still some blacks preaching pie-in-the-sky, we'€™ll-get-to-Heaven-by-and-by, ministers mixing messages of personal salvation with social justice like Rev. Wright are not the exception, they are the rule.

In Chicago, in black churches from the South to the West sides, and in the nation, in black churches from Compton to Bed Sty, you can visit many a pulpit to hear African American clergy preaching how to get to heaven while maintaining your sanity here on earth. Obama'€™s former pastor did it better and with a little more passion than most, but his style and substance are nothing but standard fare in the black church; expected and appreciated.

So much appreciated that when Rev. Wright took the helm in 1972 of Chicago'€™s Trinity United Church of Christ, whose motto was "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian," its membership was 87. Now it'€™s 8,000. Over those years, Rev. Wright'€™s fiery, socially-conscious, soul-stirring sermons drew a strong and steady influx of black MDs and Ph.Ds, cops and lawyers, judges and businessmen, along with members of the working class and mothers on welfare rolls to the church. Whites were welcomed. Some have stayed. For many of the 35 years he ministered at Trinity, he preached three separate sermons each Sunday to three different shifts of worshipers. That'€™s a lot of sermons with a lot of messages.

The handful of video clips now topping the network news and running viral on the internet are a mere blink in a lifetime of delivering the word.

Not only are the sermon sound bites out of context and devoid of their spirit, they are an old story that has been recycled, then recycled again by the radical right. This time, of course, they took. Millions of Americans got to hear, Rev. Wright preach that, "The government gives them [African Americans] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strikes law and then wants us to sing 'God bless America,' No, no, no, not 'God bless America,' God damn America. That's in the Bible, you're killing innocent people. God damn America for treating us citizens as less than human."

All the media attention has focused on the heat of Wright's words, and other than "God damn America," not the words themselves. Why are drugs so prevalent in the black community when they are smuggled in from other nations? Why are our prisons overcrowded by young black men who had committed no violent crimes?

Contrary to how he'€™s being presented in the mainstream media, Rev. Wright was no unhinged aberration and his church no sanctuary for separatists and extremists.

Trinity comes out of a long tradition. That's where the black church comes in. It is a spiritual and psychological shelter from the persistent and pernicious assaults of racism. Every Sunday it soothes the souls of black folk. For centuries, the black church has always been a refuge from the ravages of the ugly treatment of us and a catalyst in moving us to struggle for change.

From the time when slavery was America's peculiar institution, religious gatherings were a place for blacks to praise God and make plans for escaping to freedom. The classic Negro spiritual "Wade in the Water" served a dual purpose: It was an ode to being baptized and a coded message on how to throw the slave catchers' hounds off your trail.

The black church was the backbone and the moral authority of the civil rights movement. Little of this is fully-appreciated by white America while much of it is taken for granted by black America. It's no strain for African Americans to put Rev. Wright'€™s words back into a traditional and historical context.

"We are descendants of Africa, not England," Rev. Wright said in one of his sermons. "We have a culture that is African in origin, €“not European. The Bible we preach from came from a culture that was not English or European."

As if to unintentionally underscore the Rev. Wright'€™s basic truth, the Washington Post cited that as one of Rev. Wright's controversial statements. So it remains that in our black and white America, what'€™s problematic for some is a problem to others.

Monroe Anderson is an award-winning journalist who penned op-ed columns for both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. He is a regular contributor to Ebonyjet.co

George W. McCain will strike again

 

   

    Forever the maverick, John McCain is mixing President George W. Bush’s politics of fear with his own creation: the politics of facetiousness.
    The presumptive Republican party nominee fears that al-Qaida might try to influence the November general election here with increasing attacks on our troops in Iraq. He worries about it, McCain said during a town hall meeting Friday in Springfield, Pennsylvania, because “I know they pay attention, because of the intercepts we have of their communications."
    What, he worry?
    A stepped up war in Iraq or a terrorist attack on America soil could be a godsend to the Arizona Senator, a bonafide war hero. Lest we forget, he’ll be running against either Sen. Barack Obama, whose national security experience boils down to a gutsy, well-thought out anti-war speech, or Sen. Hillary Clinton, whose foreign policy credentials are visits to 80 countries as First Lady in alternating capacities as Ambassador of Good Will or USO-style appearances.
    For your everyday American voter, right now it’s the economy stupid–something no one is counting on McCain to master. But a serious flare-up abroad will put the Iraqi war back on the front burner and put millions of American voters back on red alert.
    Of course, a major Iraq attack against our troops will increase the volume on calls to end the occupation but it will stampede the red-state bloc into wagon-circling-and-bunkering-down mode.  When the going gets rough, we’ll need a tough guy as the Commander-in-Chief.
    Who ya gonna call? The Iraqi buster! McCain will argue that only he knows what to do to put those evildoers down once and forever–even if it takes 100 years. The same lot of voters who believed Bush’s war to be a necessary evil will believe McCain too.
    In fact, should there be a major attack in Iraq–say the last week in September–I’m going to call an expert Crime Scene Investigator. Karl Rove’s fingerprints are bound to be somewhere.

Feminists First: A white woman in the White House

    Gender versus race is a sad and dangerous division in the Democratic party's ranks that threatens to assure Sen. John McCain's ascendancy to the White House. Geraldine Ferraro, Cokie Roberts and Gloria Steinem have had their say. Now I've had mine. Here's my EbonyJet.com commentary, posted today, discussing the development.

Is History Deserved or Earned?
the ferraro debacle
Friday, March 14, 2008
By Monroe Anderson

Barack Obama's political success has white women of a certain age angry and frustrated.

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," Geraldine Ferraro  told the Daily Breeze newspaper in Torrance, California. "And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is."

Ferraro, who was pretty lucky herself when she was chosen 24 years ago to become a first as the Democratic party's vice-presidential candidate, was not the only feminist to express her vexation over the ever increasing possibility that a black man may become Leader-of the-Free-World before a white woman does.  Before Ferraro vented her exasperation last Sunday, there was Cokie Roberts last month on ABC This Week  voicing her frustration.

"The only group she still really has is white women. And I do think that there's some possibility that you will see a sort of reaction among white women," Roberts said after Sen. Clinton's primary loss to Obama in Wisconsin.  "I had the opportunity to interview Billie Jean King this week, and she said, you know, 'I feel like everything I've worked for all of my life is going out the window.' And there is that sense. I mean, here is this woman who's worked hard, she's done it all the way you're supposed to do it, and then this cute young man comes in and says a bunch of sweet, you know, nothings, and pushes you out of the way. And a lot of women are looking at that and saying, 'There goes my life.'"

    "Facing a contest between melanin and the white Y chromosome, I saw no reason why the Y would not be the victor."

After Obama's unexpected Iowa win in January,  there was the Gloria Steinem essay in the New York Times where she complained that women have a tougher time than African American men. "Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House," wrote Steinem, a cofounder of the Women's Media Center and Clinton supporter. "Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women"

Never mind that white men gave black men the vote, then took it away and that the number of women CEOs currently running Fortune 500 companies is in the double digits and there are less than a handful of African American men doing the same. There seems to be this sense of entitlement among white feminist that when it comes to running the Oval Office, it's their turn. Period.

Six months ago, the white women would have gotten no lip back from me. I assumed they were entitled to their sense of entitlement.  Facing a contest between melanin and the white Y chromosome, I saw no reason why the Y would not be the victor. My expectations were realistically restricted. I had high hopes that Hillary would break through the good ol' white boy barrier, paving the way for an African American to follow sometime in the near future.

Back then, of course, Barack was not the front-runner and Hillary was the Inevitable One. Back then, there were debates as to whether Sen. Obama was black enough to appeal to his own ethnic group and polls predicting that Sen. Clinton would command the biggest share of that vote.

That was before it became apparent that there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the two candidates on major political issues and it became even more apparent to everyone, but older white women, that Barack was a better candidate than Hillary and running a better campaign as well.

There is also this obvious reality: Obama now leads in the dedicated delegate count, the popular vote and the number of states won. The former First Lady can only win if the party's super delegates hand her the nomination in a brokered convention this summer in Denver. Such an unacceptable  maneuver would surely turn off the party's fired-up youth and African American vote.

So unless Sen. Clinton and her supporters are willing to see the 44th white man take the presidential oath on January 20, it looks like they're going to have to accept this overwhelming probability: Their dream will be deferred.

Barack over Hillary: Nothing but net

   

The Mississippi primary is tomorrow.  The critical Pennsylvania primary is six weeks later. Between today and then, Barack Obama needs to flex a little muscle to demonstrate the battle readiness he’s going to need to go up against John McCain. Can he do it? I don’t know for sure but I say, “Yes, he can.”   
     Here’s my EbonyJet.com commentary, posted today, which encourages Obama to strike back in response to Hillary Clinton’s Kitchen Sink strategy.

Full Throttle
message to Obama's pit crew: it's time to floor it

Monday, March 10, 2008
By Monroe Anderson

Barack Obama's landslide victory in lily-white Wyoming this weekend didn't seem to count. The national media was preoccupied with Hillary Clinton's big comeback in Texas and Ohio. It was marveling at how effective Camp Clinton's kitchen sink strategy had slowed, if not stopped, Obama's steadfast march to the party nomination. And it was wondering aloud if the gentleman has a glass jaw.

It's time for Obama to slip some brass knuckles under his satin gloves. While he can't afford to be seen as the big bad black guy smacking around the little old lady, he's got to pop her a couple of times to put her back in check.

For the past two weeks, the Clinton campaign has hit the Illinois senator hard and often–throwing anything and everything it can to do damage. Within a 10-day period, a photograph of Obama in a turban and traditional Somalian garb–taken during his visit to Kenya, his father's homeland in 2006–was emailed to the Drudge Report; a misleading Canadian memo on the North American Free Trade Agreement was red-flagged; a gotcha moment about Minister Louis Farrakhan during the Ohio debate was attempted; Tony Rezko, a political wheeler dealer on trial for in Illinois for corruption, who is a former Obama fund raiser; the 3:00 a.m. negative wake-up call ad questioning Obama's readiness to lead the free world; and Hillary inability to say flat out that Barack is a Christian; Clinton's apparent reverence for John McCain, sniping that she and the Republican had a record while the Illinoisan had a speech.

Barack's push back has already begun. He has called on the Clintons to release their income tax returns. He has challenged them to also release their White House papers so that all can see what participation Hillary actually had in policymaking during Bill's eight years. And he has questioned her the 35 years of experience claim–and answered it too.

"What exactly is this foreign policy experience," he asked mockingly. "Was she negotiating treaties? Was she handling crises? The answer is no."

But he needs to stop just jabbing. After a flurry of body blows last month to the Billary attack in Palmetto State, there was a sudden and dramatic pull back with the Clinton campaign making a fast retreat to civility. Another Obama roundhouse is overdue to remind Sen. Clinton that if anyone's going to be hurt in this contest, he won't be the last.

Then again, he may be.

Behind closed doors, Bill and Hillary may have decided that it's better to bleed Barack so badly that when he wins the party's nomination, he'll be far too wounded to defeat John McCain in November. As the loser in a year with all the stars lining up for a Democratic victory, Obama will turn into the year 2000 Al Gore–and Hillary will be able to resume her mantle as the Inevitable One in 2012 against a 75-year-old President McCain.

The scorched earth tact has got to be a worst-case scenario for the Clintons, but it may manifest should it become apparent that the kitchen sink strategy is clearly not working as the April 22 Pennsylvania primary gets closer.

For now, as part of throwing everything–the sink, the tub and the toilet–at Obama, the Clintons are putting it out there that the former First Lady might be willing to make the front-runner for the Democratic party's presidential nomination her vice presidential running mate.

Is this supposed to dim the passion and participation of African American voters, who make up 70 percent of the Democratic voters in Mississippi, in Tuesday's primary? And do the Clintons actually think black folks are that simple-minded?

Wyoming was a reminder that Obama has won more U.S. states and territories–25 so far and counting. He also leads Clinton, depending on whose count, by 100-150 dedicated delegates. Out of 26 million votes cast, right now Obama has a 600,000 popular vote lead. An ABC/The Washington Post Poll released the day after Hillary's bounce back found that in the general election Obama would beat McCain 52-40 percent while Clinton would beat the Republican standard bearer 50-44 percent. The latest Newsweek Magazine poll, released Sunday, has him ahead of Clinton 46-45 percent.

In the numbers game, Obama matters.

Monroe Anderson is an award-winning journalist who penned op-ed columns for both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. He is a regular contributor to Ebonyjet.com. Follow his blog at http://www.monroeanderson.typepad.com/

Swiftboating Barack

    This email has been sent out by the Dallas South blog to members of the NABJforum and others. It addresses the Minister Louis Farrakhan interview in Trumpet, the formerly-owned magazine by the Trinity United Church of Christ, whose former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was Barack Obama’s spiritual leader.
    Trinity is THE church for 7,000 members of Chicago’s black middle class. Obama has been a parishioner there for 20 years. Trinity United Church of Christ has a pro-African American missionary statement that became controversial once Obama became a political candidate. Although Trinity no longer publishes Trumpet–the magazine is now published outside the confines of the church–the publication has also become controversial thanks to NBC’s Tim Russert and linked to both the candidate and his place of worship.

Here’s the email sent out by the Dallas South Blog:

February 29th, 2008

We all know that Tim Russert attempted to “swift boat” Senator
Barack Obama (and Clinton for that matter) in last Tuesday’s debate.
Russert decided to take the debate off the issues and turn it into a
muckraking session. Russert asked Obama about comments made by Minister Louis Farrakhan as well as comments about Min. Farrakhan that he attributed to Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.

I received an email this morning with information from the Managing
Editor of Trumpet Newsmagazine. Her message clarifies the bad information that’s been out there as well as the bad information Russert gave during the debate.
----------------

To whom it may concern:

I write to bring some journalistic clarity to what has become a
widespread inaccuracy. My name is Rhoda McKinney Jones, managing editor of the Trumpet Newsmagazine, and the author of the Minister Louis Farrakhan article in our November/December issue. Over the last few weeks, I have watched in disbelief as seasoned journalists and
not-so-well-intentioned bloggers have attributed to Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., pastor emeritus of Trinity United Church of Christ, the last three words of my first person, introductory piece on Minister Farrakhan. Those words are now familiar to you, especially after Tuesday night’s debate and Tim
Russert’s use of them — “truly epitomized greatness.” Dr. Wright, never said, wrote or uttered those words. Those words are mine and mine alone.

Whether one agrees with my assessment is not the issue or the reason I
was prompted to correct the record. As a well-trained journalist, I
know the most basic fact checking would have revealed the truth. Next
time, when attempting to sully a presidential candidate by discrediting his
church and its renowned, religious leader, let’s get the facts straight.

Rhoda McKinney Jones
Managing Editor
Trumpet Newsmagazine
Graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and
Spelman College

    I made my own comments on Trinity and an earlier mindless attack on it about a year ago.
    Erik Rush, a right-wing religion blogger, who happens to be black, criticized Trinity’s mission statement and made a feeble attempt to turn the church into a cult. The equally light-weight commentators on Fox Cable News took up Rush’s confusion. This is the op-ed page column in the Chicago Sun-Times I wrote about it on March 25, 2007. Excepts from the column are quoted in Snopes.com to combat the urban legend that Obama is a Muslim as well as on the candidate’s website, Barackobama.com.
    Speaking of urban legends, the United States denomination, The United Church of Christ, is being investigated by the IRS--not Trinity, Obama's Chicago church.

Ethnic identity isn’t black and white

March 25, 2007

BY MONROE ANDERSON

   

For the past two decades, Barack Obama has been a faithful member of the congregation at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Trinity is no run-of-the-mill black church. It’s social activism and political awareness on pure, natural holy water. Trinity’s progressive pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, preaches the black theology of liberation. And he practices what he preaches. Back when apartheid was the law of the land in South Africa, when Nelson Mandela was a political prisoner and when American corporations, institutions and the U.S. government all gave their blessings to those evil doings, the dashiki-wearing minister planted a “Free South Africa” sign on the church’s lawn. Obama’s spiritual mentor has routinely been on the right side of morality, championing liberal causes from gay rights to opposition of the war in Iraq.

Shortly after Sen. Obama launched his run for the presidency last month, Erik Rush, a right-wing Christian blogger who happens to be African American, discovered what had been hiding in plain sight: The motto for Trinity United is “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian.”

Trinity’s motto, as well as its mission to eradicate what W.E.B. DuBois called “the problem of the color line” and “the strange meaning of being black here,” so incensed Rush that he wrote a blistering blog about it. It was unnerving for him to learn that the South Side church had adopted a “Black Value System” and that its 8,000 black members are committed to the “Black Community,” the “Black Family” and “the Black Work Ethic.” In his blog, Rush ignores -- or is just ignorant about -- the nearly 200-year-long tradition of the black church’s struggle to free and elevate its people while slyly substituting the words white for black and then disingenuously concluding that “like the Nation of Islam, a white separatist church or the Branch Davidians, Trinity United more resembles a cult than a church.”

No doubt that concept came as news to the thousands of well-heeled, professional and middle-class black Chicagoans who are members of the church. And no doubt media mogul Oprah Winfrey and rap star Common, who have both attended Trinity, were surprised to discover they were cultists. But quicker than you could say “holy fit,” the cable conservatives were clucking and complaining to the high heavens. Tucker Carlson, MSNBC’s very own Fox News-type right-wing host, opined that, “This stuff sounds separatist to me.”

Sean Hannity, the conservative half of Fox News’ lightweight talk show, “Hannity and Colmes,” sounded as if this country was going to hypocritical hell. If a white presidential candidate’s church had a similar statement and “you substitute the word white for black, there would be an outrage in this country,” Hannity preached. “There would be cries of racism in this country.”

True and Catch-22. If a white church plainly and proudly pronounced its whiteness, Hannity, Carlson and company would be right. But if it was the Holy Trinity Polish Church on Chicago’s North Side, proclaiming its Polishness, who’d care? This is how African Americans find ourselves in a trick bag. We’re defined racially even when we’re acting like any other of this nation’s ethnic groups. Issues knee-jerkily become black and white when in reality they may be African American and Irish American. Or Serbian American and African American. Remove black and substitute another American ethnic group so that Trinity’s Concept No. 6 reads: “Adherence to the Mexican Work Ethic.” Does that still sound separatist? Or racist? Of course not. But, if you’re insincerely espousing color blindness, while holding the race card up your sleeve, you know you can easily trump African-American ethnic pride every time.

Obama’s political advisers know this as well. That’s why, at the last minute, Obama disinvited Wright to speak last month when he officially announced his presidential candidacy. Wright says that Obama now realizes that his political handlers gave him bad advice and that all is well between him and the senator.

I say this is just one more sad example of how ethnic identity gets color-coded for African Americans. And I believe it’s just one more sign that there are those who would place Obama in political purgatory -- painting him not good enough to be black and not right enough to be white.