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 Wrightâs sermons shocking news.
In contrast, I am 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
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