You know a political system is bankrupt when telling the truth becomes a scandal.
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Wright is a Black liberation theologian, encouraging his congregation to embrace a perspective that reveals and highlights the concealed role of Africa and people of African descent, so they can speak “for themselves, as subjects in history, not objects in history.” He is a widely respected community leader whose sermons focus on social justice, public health, collective responsibility and Black self-determination. Trinity welcomes people of all nationalities. He is part of the United Church of Christ, a Protestant denomination that includes 1.2 million members from all backgrounds.
Regardless, the corporate media pundits seized upon the remarks of Obama’s spiritual advisor and smeared him as an anti-white, anti-American “Black racist.” In this demonization campaign, political and social context were thrown out the window, and all pretenses of objectivity abandoned. As with the media campaign against Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic in the run-up to the imperialist invasions of their countries, the only thing that emerged out of this slanderous “journalism” was the image of the “demon.”
The campaign has been effective at pushing some white voters away from supporting Obama. In a national Democratic poll conducted between March 14 and 18, Sen. Hillary Clinton overtook Obama by seven percentage points. Just a few days earlier, Obama was ahead by several points. Obama lost his lead over Sen. John McCain in the same period. This abrupt swing can only be attributed to the racist demonization campaign conducted against Rev. Wright.
Corporate media shapes racist consciousness
When Obama won the Iowa caucuses in early January, he started off his speech with the words, “They said this day would never come.” His message was indirect, but clear: his presidency would unite the nation and heal the historical rifts, between blue states and red states, Black people and white people. If an African American man could win a state that was 92 percent white, clearly there was reason to believe or “hope” that this country could finally bury racism.
Obama himself has gone to great lengths to avoid being labeled as the “Black candidate,” leaving it to others to emphasize the potential symbolism of an African American president. He has hewed the Democratic Party line closely, avoiding any subjects that could appear as “Black issues.”
With his message of “change,” powerfully orated and carefully packaged, Obama went on to win not only the states in the southeast with large Black populations, but also overwhelmingly white states like Kansas, Vermont and Wyoming. This in itself was a remarkable development. It showed that without an active racist campaign stirred up by the government and the media, there exists the basis for multinational unity—even if in this case on patriotic and non-working-class terms—organized under Black leadership.
It was actually Bill Clinton, the self-styled ally of the Black community, who first tried to stir up racism among white voters. He suggestively compared Obama’s primary victory in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson’s victory there 20 years earlier. In doing so, he intended to elicit fears from white “middle” America that Obama was a civil rights warrior in disguise.
Later, Hillary Clinton prodded Obama in a presidential debate about why he had “denounced” but not “rejected” Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. The question was beyond ridiculous. It was merely an attempt to link Farrakhan’s name with Obama’s in the minds of backward white voters. At present, the Clinton camp is undoubtedly celebrating the vile demonization of Rev. Wright.
This is the tragic reality of racism in U.S. society. It is not automatically the overriding factor in every political context. But it can be turned on, almost with the flip of a switch, by the country’s ruling class. With the mass media, they have tested and precisely calibrated this racist machine over generations. Like all ideologies, it can be challenged, cracked, and in some instances, smashed. But this requires an active anti-racist struggle, which shows through experience the class character of the media and the common benefits of multinational organizing.
If these white voters had sat through one of Wright’s sermons, had heard a fuller clip of his remarks, or had been given the chance to hear the reverend himself, it is doubtful his comments would have had a major impact. But instead, in show after show, newsreel after newsreel, FoxNews and CNN only played sound-bites of Wright saying “Goddamn America.” Long before corporate-owned television had become the primary instrument for shaping popular consciousness, Marx famously wrote, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” Centuries later, his words hold true.
Wright is right
Rev. Wright was right when he identified the centrality of racism in U.S. history and said, “the country and culture is controlled by rich white people.” A brief survey of Wall St. board rooms—or the Senate floor—makes this an indisputable fact.
Rev. Wright was right when he said, “the government lied about the Pearl Harbor.” Rev. Wright was right when he said Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction. Rev. Wright was right when he called the government an “arrogant, racist military superpower.”
He was right when he called Black men turning on Black men “fighting the wrong enemy,” because “both are primary targets in an oppressive society that sees both of you as a dangerous threat.” Look at the disproportionate incarceration rate and lengthier sentences for young Black men.
Rev. Wright was right when he said Washington supported “state terrorism against the Palestinians and Black South Africans” and now, referencing the World Trade Center attacks, “the stuff we’ve done overseas is now brought right back home into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
Why is it so hard to believe that a destructive and imperial foreign policy creates enemies abroad? U.S. activity in the Middle East—not to mention the occupation of the Muslim holy lands in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf war—caused widespread indignation in the region.
Yet, while Democrats have scored points off of Bush’s declining popularity due to the Iraq war, it is still considered heretical to suggest that the plane hijackers had a motive beyond “extremism.” Bush’s ridiculous notion that they “hate our freedom” still holds sway.
Rev. Wright was right when he said “the government lied about the Tuskegee experiment,” in which the government left African American men infected with syphilis to die. In every stage of U.S. history, Black people have had to endure criminal and sadistic medical experimentation. Puerto Rican women were forcibly sterilized. This history is rarely mentioned in history textbooks, but is well known in the most oppressed sectors of society. A grave distrust for the established medical consensus on the origins of HIV is perfectly justifiable.
And yes, Rev. Wright is right when he says “Goddamn America” for killing innocent people without batting an eye and “for treating her citizens as less than human.” Should the country be blessed for defending apartheid South Africa and upholding Jim Crow too?
On March 18, Obama gave a lengthy speech condemning “in unequivocal terms” Wright’s comments as “not only wrong, but divisive.”
Obama referred to Wright as a sort of radical uncle, whose views he does not endorse, but who he cannot disown any “more than he can disown the Black community.” He called Wright’s views on the centrality of racism in U.S. society “profoundly distorted,” a reflection of an embittered civil rights generation for whom “the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away.” Distancing himself from Wright’s defense of the Palestinian people, Obama emphasized that conflicts in the Middle East stemmed not from “stalwart allies like Israel,” but instead from the “perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.”
The New York Times lauded Obama’s speech as one of the most important political pronouncements in 50 years, for having stimulated dialogue on such a sensitive issue. This episode— in which the media forced Obama to repudiate the politics of the Black community in order to maintain credibility—reveals what the liberal commentators will not say: Wright is right.
Although it is certainly historic that millions of white voters have entered their local polling stations and pulled the lever for a Black candidate, a more profound anti-racist struggle is needed to halt the ruling class’s racist campaign. A good place to start is to defend Rev. Wright from the corporate media lynch mob.
