What's Wrong with Rev. Wright?

Madison, WI (OpEdNews) March 17, 2008 – Senator Barack Obama's political appeal has many roots, among them his rhetorical eloquence and his apparent integrity. He has promised a new politics that transcends barriers between young and old, male and female, black and white. His success is such that he has now won more states, earned more delegates, and more of the popular vote than his rival, Hillary Clinton, the former First Lady, who, as recently as a year ago, had been widely expected to capture the Democratic nomination without serious opposition. That didn't happen.

Many students of American politics have wondered how he would be attacked next, especially since the prospect for Sen. Clinton gaining ground over the remaining contests are rather bleak, apart from the possibility that she can manipulate the DNC and her opponent into allowing delegates from Florida and Michigan she does not appear to deserve to count. That is not likely. What is highly probable, however--and indeed is now a certainty--is that attempts are going to be made to cast Obama as “just another politician” who has no abiding principles beyond self-promotion.

A firestorm has broken out over a column by Ronald Kessler in The Wall Street Journal (“Obama and the Minister”, March 14, 2008), which discusses a sermon given at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago on January 15, 2006. Whether Obama was present is not clear, but since he has been a member for more than twenty years, the question of his faith has been decisively resolved at last. According to Kessler, the sermon included the impassioned delivery of a series of claims critical of the US and its history, claims that the author suggests are extremely inflammatory, including:

"We've got more black men in prison than there are in college," he began. "Racism is alive and well. Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body."

Mr. Wright thundered on: "America is still the No. 1 killer in the world. . . . We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers . . . We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Ghadhafi . . . We put [Nelson] Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."

His voice rising, Mr. Wright said, "We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-Semitic. . . . We care nothing about human life if the end justifies the means. . . ."  Concluding, Mr. Wright said: "We started the AIDS virus . . . We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty. . . ."

Kessler presents these claims as though they were obviously false, but many qualify as “common knowledge” to even the least educated with regard to American history.  For the rest, it is rather easy to establish that most of them are either true or at least not obviously false.  But if Wright is almost completely right, then something’s wrong with this picture.  The evidence suggests that those who are opposed to his candidacy are willing to distort American history and painful truths for the sake of political expedience, a familiar tactic in a new, contemporary guise.  Consider, for example, the evidence for nine of the more inflammatory of Wright’s claims, as follow:

Wright's claim #1: "We've got more black men in prison than there are in college," he began.

Accuracy:  True.  ABC News (“Census Study Eyes Blacks in Prison”, September 27, 2007), reported that more Blacks and Hispanics live in prison cells than in college dorms. Stephen Ohlemacher explained, “More than three times as many black people live in prison cells as in college dorms, the government said in a report to be released Thursday. The ratio is only slightly better for Hispanics, at 2.7 inmates for every Latino in college housing. Among non-Hispanic whites, more than twice as many live in college housing as in prison or jail.”  Verifying that this is the case is effortless.

Wright’s claim #2: "Racism is alive and well.”

Accuracy:  True.  A recent study (“States and Black Incarceration Rates in America”, Gibbs Magazine) reported, “California, which has the sixth largest economy in the world, (including its Silicon Valley), and a population that is 52% nonwhite, and is supposedly on the cutting edge of racial and social tolerance, has a prison population that is 69% nonwhite. And, of course, with a Black population that is only 7%, it has a prison population that is 32% Black. And this large population of Black inmates has helped this enlightened state to be the sixth state in incarceration rates”.  Surely no serious American doubts that racism in the United States is “alive and well”. 


Wright’s claim #3:  “Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run.”

Accuracy: True.   As Wikipedia observes, “From the 1490s when Christopher Columbus set foot on the Americas to the massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee by the United States milita, the indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere may have declined by as many as 100 million”, which suggests that the number killed exceeded that of the Holocaust (“Genocides in History”). And no American should need to be reminded that hundreds of thousands of blacks were kidnapped from Africa and transported to America to live their lives as slaves. That is common knowledge.  Racism is pervasive in our history and continues to exert its damaging influence to this day.

Wright's claim #4: “No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson]."

Accuracy:  Mixed.  This turns out to be literally false, insofar as Barack Obama's own campaign has now falsified a generalization that most Americans have long known to be true. The intensity of the attacks on him demonstrate that he is being taken seriously as a candidate.  But the suggestion by Geraldine Ferraro that being black could be an advantage as a political candidate would not have been apparent to any of us at the time. 
 Certainly being black has not been an advantage in the past.  And if Barack were not highly intelligent, academically accomplished, politically astute, and an inspirational orator, it is difficult to imagine he would be taken seriously.

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