Interesting take on Wright flap - Political Forum

prrriiide · 03-22-2008, 06:28 PM

Found this article linked on another board, and found it to be...interesting, to say the least. Not sure I agree with all of it, but it certainly does provoke thought. The author is white, BTW.

Also, if you aren't familiar with the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot (AKA the Greenwood Riots), here's a link to the history:

Tulsa Race Riot: Wiki

The author is correct about excising it from the history books. Growing up in Oklahoma, I had to take an Oklahoma history course as part of the high school curriculum, and the 1921 riot was not mentioned in that history book. I didn't learn about it until the Race Riot Commission was formed in 1997.

Quote:

March 18, 2008

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...

...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 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...

...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..."

...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.

Rest of article

calmObserver · 03-22-2008, 07:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by prrriiide

...The author is correct about excising it from the history books. Growing up in Oklahoma, I had to take an Oklahoma history course as part of the high school curriculum, and the 1921 riot was not mentioned in that history book. I didn't learn about it until the Race Riot Commission was formed in 1997.

high school history is non-confrontational most everywhere. go to your local public library what you need to know is there.

Caltex · 03-22-2008, 07:41 PM

That article is bullshit. It basically says that all whites are racist, and the Wright was right to say everything he did. The author blames modern whites on any wrongs committed 200 years ago, as if they were committed by the people of today. Wright blames all the ailments of Black America on Whites, and does so in a very racist way.

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," - Wright blames White America for Blacks using drugs and being arrested for it.

"Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!... We [Americans] believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God." - Wright accuses all whites of racism.

"They live below the sea level, they live below the level of "Clarence Colon" and "Con-damn-nesia." - Wright accuses black Republicans of being sell outs.

"And they will not only attack you if you try to point out what's going on in white America, the U.S. of KKK A." - Again Wright calls all whites KKK members.

Wright's comments were egregious, case closed. He deserves all the scorn to be thrown at him. He scapegoats whites for all the problems in the black community, and promotes hatred of whites and America. So, seriously Fuck him. America has been trying to make up for the poor government policies of the past for 50 years now. Affirmative action, welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs all have been directed towards helping out blacks in America at the cost of all other Americans, yet he accuses America of being the U.S. of KKK. A. If that isn't scapegoating and shouldering responsibility of the communities own actions, I don't know what is.

calmObserver · 03-22-2008, 08:02 PM

Quote:

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...

this is what i hear brother wright saying also. have some doubts? read the following;

Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

The Shock Doctrine

HartParr · 03-22-2008, 11:18 PM

Quote:

Wright's comments were egregious, case closed. He deserves all the scorn to be thrown at him. He scapegoats whites for all the problems in the black community, and promotes hatred of whites and America. So, seriously Fuck him. America has been trying to make up for the poor government policies of the past for 50 years now. Affirmative action, welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs all have been directed towards helping out blacks in America at the cost of all other Americans, yet he accuses America of being the U.S. of KKK. A. If that isn't scapegoating and shouldering responsibility of the communities own actions, I don't know what is.

The above is wrong on so many levels it's impossible to know where to start discussing it with you.

But I would like to try.

Would you mind starting with the scapegoating comment, and we'll go from there.

prrriiide · 03-23-2008, 12:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Caltex

He scapegoats whites for all the problems in the black community, and promotes hatred of whites and America.

So you believe that had blacks immigrated to the US by means other than the slave trade (like Italians, Germans, Irish, Poles, and all the other races/ethnicities that didn't come here chained in the bilge of a stinking slave ship) that they would be facing the same set of circumstances they now face? You honestly believe that 400 years of slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, KKK/StormFront/Skinhead activity has nothing to do with the problems facing the African-American community? Whites have nothing to do with that?

I don't like some of the things Wright said. But he damned well earned the right to say them when he was catching all kinds of hell as a civil rights activist.

Caltex · 03-23-2008, 12:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by prrriiide

So you believe that had blacks immigrated to the US by means other than the slave trade (like Italians, Germans, Irish, Poles, and all the other races/ethnicities that didn't come here chained in the bilge of a stinking slave ship) that they would be facing the same set of circumstances they now face? You honestly believe that 400 years of slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, KKK/StormFront/Skinhead activity has nothing to do with the problems facing the African-American community? Whites have nothing to do with that?

I don't like some of the things Wright said. But he damned well earned the right to say them when he was catching all kinds of hell as a civil rights activist.

None of the whites living in America these days. Those responsible for slavery are long dead. We're even at the point now where those responsible for keeping segregation around are mostly all dead, minus a few 100 year old geezers. The whites living in America these days are not the source of the black communities issues, in fact because of all the social assistance provided, are probably a net help more than anything else.

Caltex · 03-23-2008, 12:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by HartParr

The above is wrong on so many levels it's impossible to know where to start discussing it with you.

But I would like to try.

Would you mind starting with the scapegoating comment, and we'll go from there.

It's not white Americans fault that black Americans are born out of wedlock over 70% of the time, which results in poverty. It is not white Americans fault that blacks commit crimes and get locked up at horrifically high rates. It is not white Americans fault that blacks drop out of school at higher rates than any other group. These are the main issues which create a cycle of poverty, and destitute living conditions.

Wright is essentially blaming whites for many of these ailments, and thus is scapegoating in order to get a applause. He is promoting racism, and a victim mentality. The only way they're going to be able to fix their problems is by pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, not by inciting hatred, and blaming whites, and America.

TeaSea · 03-23-2008, 12:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Caltex

That article is bullshit. It basically says that all whites are racist, and the Wright was right to say everything he did. The author blames modern whites on any wrongs committed 200 years ago, as if they were committed by the people of today. Wright blames all the ailments of Black America on Whites, and does so in a very racist way.

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," - Wright blames White America for Blacks using drugs and being arrested for it.

"Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!... We [Americans] believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God." - Wright accuses all whites of racism.

"They live below the sea level, they live below the level of "Clarence Colon" and "Con-damn-nesia." - Wright accuses black Republicans of being sell outs.

"And they will not only attack you if you try to point out what's going on in white America, the U.S. of KKK A." - Again Wright calls all whites KKK members.

Wright's comments were egregious, case closed. He deserves all the scorn to be thrown at him. He scapegoats whites for all the problems in the black community, and promotes hatred of whites and America. So, seriously Fuck him. America has been trying to make up for the poor government policies of the past for 50 years now. Affirmative action, welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs all have been directed towards helping out blacks in America at the cost of all other Americans, yet he accuses America of being the U.S. of KKK. A. If that isn't scapegoating and shouldering responsibility of the communities own actions, I don't know what is.

Where did that article blame today's whites for wrongs committed 200 years ago? I like the way artists cut to the truth. That quote from James Baldwin really sums it all up in a way:
"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..."
Now, Baldwin isn't BLAMING white children. He is merely pointing out the truth.
BTW, a lot of the history referred to in that article was alot more recent than 200 years. I have family members who grew up in a town where blacks were expected to step off the sidewalks whenever a white approached.

Caltex · 03-23-2008, 01:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TeaSea

Where did that article blame today's whites for wrongs committed 200 years ago? I like the way artists cut to the truth. That quote from James Baldwin really sums it all up in a way:
"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..."
Now, Baldwin isn't BLAMING white children. He is merely pointing out the truth.
BTW, a lot of the history referred to in that article was alot more recent than 200 years. I have family members who grew up in a town where blacks were expected to step off the sidewalks whenever a white approached.

No he's saying that all whites are deluded and that America is really a shitty country. America has done many wrong things in the past, there is no doubt, but everyone knows that. We chose to celebrate the good, and try to rectify the bad. What does he want everyone to walk around damning their country? Is it not far more productive to fix what we find to be wrong, and go on with it?

The author very much did blame modern whites for past injustices in his saying that "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." He is saying that it's our fault, and Wright has every reason to hate us. Forget that the men responsible for those injustices are all long dead.

Bladwin's quote asserts that all whites are woefully ignorant of the past, or chose to ignore it. Which is false. Everyone knows that injustice occurred, but there is no reason to damn the America that we the people are now, for we have not committed those injustices. A sovereign nation is an evolving entity, it is not static. We do not have to celebrate, or embrace the things that we no longer hold sacred to our nation. We have outlawed slavery, and forced segregation long ago. There is no need to feel bad about the fact that Americans generations before us had such institutions, because we are not them.

Modern Americans are Patriotic to modern America, and the ideals which it theoretically stands for. We do not stand for the America of 50 years ago, as we have changed what America is much since then. What is so woeful about today's Americas treatment toward blacks that Wright is justified in damning it? Last I checked, there is a disproportionate amount of government social aid to blacks, and no (or very little) government institutionalized racism against them.