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Title: Some Thoughts on Obama Author: Chris Hobson Date: August 18, 2008 Language: en Topics: Barack Obama, The Utopian Source: Retrieved on 4th August 2021 from http://utopianmag.com/archives/tag-The%20Utopian%20Vol.%207%20-%202008/some-thoughts-on-obama/ Notes: Published in The Utopian Vol. 7.
These thoughts will focus on what I think is unique about Barack Obama’s
campaign for the presidency, as well as on why I don’t plan to change my
long-standing practice of not voting in order to vote for him. I will
pay the most attention to Obama’s significance as an African American
candidate and to what are for me three defining moments that best put in
perspective his approach to race as a political issue and his relation
to the U.S. political system. These are his speech on race in
Philadelphia, March 18; his response to Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright’s speech
on April 28; and his Father’s Day homily, June 15, at Chicago’s
Apostolic Church of God.
First, the hype is true: the fact that an African American is poised to
be nominated for president by one of the two major U.S. parties, and
stands a good chance of being elected, is an enormous, historic shift in
U.S. politics and the consciousness of the U.S. citizenry. This is so
despite some obvious qualifications. For example, as the son of an
actual African rather than a descendant of slaves, Obama doesn’t stir up
the full combination of denied guilt and defensive hostility in some
white voters, nor bring with him the same potentially “polarizing”
agenda of racial justice, that a candidate from the latter group might.
Further, as detailed below, Obama has made real compromises in his
willingness to articulate African American concerns. These points
admitted, in endorsing Obama’s candidacy primary voters have done—and
U.S. voters as a whole may do in November—something unthinkable as
recently as the date of Obama’s own birth in August 1961.
For all the tragic the tragic costs and with all the limitations in what
has been achieved, what a difference less than half a century has made!
In 1962, a group of college friends and I made a summer trip to Mexico,
passing through most of the old Confederate states on the way. White
boys from the North, we bought take-out food and slept in our car to
avoid dealing with white-only restaurants and motels—a cheap gesture but
one we cared about. In those states and in the North and West as well,
signs in stores, hotels, and restaurants routinely warned, “We Reserve
the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone”—as if there were doubt about who
that might be. The segregation system was intact! No one could have
guessed that in 46 years a Black man would be seriously positioned to
become president. For a while, in the glorious decade of struggle, the
Sixties, we thought such a day might come sooner; later we learned how
little had changed and how distant the day still seemed. Out of the
intersection of those views, a lesson: historical change, when it comes,
comes quickly. For example, Africa, four-fifths colonial in 1956, was
four-fifths independent by 1964; the Soviet empire, palsied but mighty
in 1988, was gone by 1991. The United States I grew up in, the United
States of open racial exclusion, is gone—I hope never to return.
An even longer perspective: in 1911 A.M.E. minister Reverdy C. Ransom,
one of the turn of the century African American ministers I have been
studying and writing about recently, stated, “The sun of the 20^(th)
century is rising to banish the age-long darkness that has so long
obscured the recognition of brotherhood between man and his brother man;
it will not set until it has gilded with gold the steeples of a new
civilization.” Now, eight years after the end of that century, 20
million U.S. voters have nominated a Black man for president. Is it any
wonder that some can see a new world coming? A new world—one in which
this much is possible—is here. All this, in my view, is cause for
rejoicing.
In spite of the real, and truly historic, change that Obama’s candidacy
and possible election represent, I for one do not intend to vote for him
or alter my long practice of not voting. (As a personal aside, I last
voted in 1968, when I wrote in Dick Gregory for president and voted “no”
on a proposed new Illinois constitution, feeling that whatever it said,
it was likely to be worse than the existing one.) The rest of these
notes will discuss my reasons, which can be summed up by saying that
while Obama’s candidacy does represent a limited change in the U.S.
voting public, it doesn’t represent a change in the political system, in
the nature of the Democratic Party, or in the processes necessary to
become a viable candidate in that party and system.
The issue of the political system doesn’t need much discussion. The
United States political system has obviously not changed or become
structurally more equal or democratic; rather, Obama has succeeded (so
far) within the system as it is. Anarchists, in general, don’t believe
participating in this system can change it; and our goal, after all, is
to get rid of the state altogether. On the other hand, those who support
Obama don’t necessarily disagree about the limits of change within the
system. They feel that marginal differences (for example who will name
the next Supreme Court justices) are worth pursuing; and some feel that
in a hard-to-specify way electing a Black president will open up the
system and bring it and U.S. society closer to real equality. I don’t
necessarily disagree with the point about marginal differences; I just
think other considerations are more important, notably, explaining what
I see as the system’s closed and elitist nature, which would be hard to
do if I were supporting (and putting my hopes in) one of the limited
alternatives within it. I do disagree that electing Obama could
democratize and equalize the political system and the country in any
important way, as I hope to explain.
The second and third issues mentioned above are related. While most
people probably think of the Democratic Party simply as a somewhat
liberal political bloc, “the American party of progressive change”
according to a recent article by Hendrik Hertzberg, it has at least two
other functions that in my view are more important. One is to act as a
centripetal force pulling discontented people on the edges of the
political system back into its center. This function is most important
when large numbers are active in various bottom up protests and direct
action campaign, as in 1968, when the presidential campaigns of Eugene
McCarthy and Robert Kennedy pulled thousands of quite radical young
people back into approved political channels as foot soldiers for these
candidates. There has been a similar upsurge of young and older people
getting active for Obama this year but it hasn’t had the same
deradicalizing effect simply because there is much less street level
activism going on in the first place.
The other function of the Democratic Party is to act as a filter or
vetting mechanism ensuring that whatever candidate is selected will be
thoroughly safe from the standpoint of entrenched U.S. interests and the
standard rules of political life, and will not offer a chance of
substantially democratizing political life in the way some people think
Obama may. One can get an idea of how this process works from a quite
trivial episode in the 2004 presidential primaries, the “Dean Yell.” In
2004, liberal media and political figures apparently began thinking at
some point that the then-leading Democratic primary candidate, Howard
Dean, wouldn’t be an ideal nominee. Personally, I think this wasn’t
because Dean was overly radical (he wasn’t and isn’t) but because these
figures thought his antiwar focus was too narrow to attract a wide base
and defeat Bush, which was the liberals’ main priority. As a result, the
media transformed a perfectly ordinary audience-rallying shout at a
campaign rally into the “Dean Yell,” a sign of political and perhaps
psychological instability. Dean’s campaign sank, but in Dean’s place the
Democrats got a candidate, John Kerry, who lacked the spine (and the
elementary honesty about his antiwar past) to counter the Bush team’s
smears. As this example shows, the vetting process isn’t centralized and
isn’t always successful in finding an ideal (from the elites’ viewpoint)
candidate, but it does operate, even on quite minor political matters.
This kind of filtration or vetting process, it seems to me, is what was
involved in the three incidents I referred to in the beginning of these
notes. They are not so much decisive turns in Obama’s campaign as
particularly striking parts of a process of adjustment and calibration
that Obama has been engaged in from the beginning. Obama built his
campaign from the start around the premise that he is a postracial
candidate; that his biracial background, U.S./African origins,
self-chosen African American culture, Christian faith, and nonracial
liberal politics are emblems of a new political reality, an “American”
candidate who is incidentally African American. So far as Obama’s
ability to position himself in this way does show a new direction in the
U.S. politics of race it is part of the shift I referred to earlier. But
this stance has also been the product of a continual balancing act and
repeated moments of readjustment designed to maintain this image and
avoid probing barely scabbed-over U.S. racial wounds. In particular, the
three incidents I’ve mentioned show the continual process of repudiation
required to be accepted as a viable candidate within the U.S. political
process.
As everyone who follows U.S. politics knows, Obama was put in a
defensive position earlier this year by website and blog postings of
certain statements by Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, nowretired pastor of
Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, where Obama was a
parishioner. The bond between Obama and Wright in the past was close:
Wright performed Obama’s marriage, christened his two children, and was
a general inspiration; the title of Obama’s second book, The Audacity of
Hope, came from one of Wright’s sermons. Wright is a follower of “Black
Liberation” or “Black Power” theology, which is associated with such
giants in recent African American theology as James H. Cone, author of A
Black Theology of Liberation (1970), and Gayraud S. Wilmore, a historian
of African American religion. Wright himself is a solidly established
Christian writer, whose works include sermon collections and
contributions to anthologies. His sermons have been reprinted and
analyzed in such studies as The Heart of Black Preaching, by Cleophus J.
LaRue (Westminster John Knox Press, 2000). In sum, he is not some hick
who walked out of the woods, as white and some Black media opinion
portrayed him. As for the soundbite excerpts from his sermons floating
around the internet, they are patched together to present Wright in the
most “inflammatory” way possible. Even so, their ideas are common in
some African American and other discussion: the U.S. has operated as an
oppressor nation; the 2001 attacks, though wicked, were in part payback
for U.S. “state terrorism”; it is possible (at any rate not unthinkable)
that the U.S. created the AIDS virus in some kind of experiment that
went wrong. All these ideas are in common circulation, as people who
follow such discussions know. The use of these excerpts to embarrass
Obama thus (1) was a demand that he repudiate ideas that circulate every
day as part of the political debates among African Americans (and
others); and (2) exploited an almost total ignorance among the U.S.
majority of what these debates are saying.
Obama’s first response to this pressure, in a speech on race in
Philadelphia March 18, was for my money the high point of his campaign.
It was almost as if the race spoke through Obama to tell the nation
things that Obama had never said before and that the nation needs
desperately to know. While Obama did repudiate Rev. Wright’s ideas, in a
nonspecific way, he stopped short of repudiating Wright himself.
Instead, his speech developed five ideas, all of which grow out of a
long African American background but have seldom been voiced to the
nation at large. First, Obama argued that the Constitution adopted in
Philadelphia in 1787 was flawed but inherently democratic, since it “had
at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law.” Here he
embraced the long tradition most associated with Frederick Douglass that
“interpreted as it ought to be, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY
DOCUMENT” (Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”). This
view lies behind the political stance of trying to force recognition of
assumedly inherent constitutional rights, which has been the major
African American strategy for change since Douglass’s time. Secondly,
from the same history Obama drew the conclusion that the struggle to
perfect the Constitution has occurred and still continues over the long
span of historical time, the “two hundred and twenty-one years” since
Philadelphia that the candidate twice mentioned, a “long march”
occupying “successive generations.” Thirdly and centrally, Obama voiced
a centuries-long, always disputed, majority African American view that
the United States is reformable: Rev. Wright’s mistake “is not that he
spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society
was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country [...] is
still irrevocably bound to a tragic past,” whereas “what we know—what we
have seen—is that America can change.” Fourthly, the candidate laid out,
though nonspecifically, a perspective of achieving substantive
brotherhood, a “more perfect union,” to use his own play on the
Constitution’s preamble—a “more just, more equal, more free, more caring
and more prosperous America.” And finally, Obama spoke with real
eloquence about the life of his then church and the African American
church in general:
“Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous
laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping,
screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The
church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce
intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes,
the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black
experience in America.”
This speech had a simplicity, seriousness, and historical-cultural
breadth that lifted it far above most U.S. political rhetoric.
But by the same token, the speech only half accomplished what is
necessary in the U.S. political system for a candidate to be viable and
acceptable in a presidential election. It only half embraced the
falsehoods (in this case about race) on which U.S. politics are based,
and it only half separated the candidate from the actual continuing life
of the African American community by substituting a symbolic
relationship (an Obama victory as emblematic of African American advance
and nonracial politics) in place of real ongoing dialog that would bring
this community together with the larger U.S. population. The episode
that followed, of Rev. Wright’s speech at the National Press Club (April
28) was in my view no matter of personal psychology (Wright felt spurned
by his one-time protégé; Obama needed to Oedipally repudiate his
symbolic father) but resulted from the fact that Obama’s address, even
if Obama didn’t intend it to, did in fact leave the way open for
continued dialogue with the substantial trend in African American
opinion that Rev. Wright represents. Wright’s remarks on April 28 were
theologically broad-gauged, stressing the reality of race discrimination
and a “theology of reconciliation” among both Black and white Americans;
Wright fielded the barbed questions that followed it, but kept the focus
on historic traditions of the Black church and prophetic theology. (I
include brief excerpts in a sidebar to this article.) Wright, then, did
not come across as a hatemonger. But from the standpoint of the U.S.
political system as a whole and of the Democratic Party as a filter for
candidate viability, a candidate who is in even an implicit dialogue
with Black Liberation theology is an obvious impossibility. Obama made a
second break, with Wright’s ideas, Wright as a person, and Trinity
Church.
Finally, in a homily in a South Side Chicago church on Father’s Day, a
week after clinching the nomination, Obama made his first extended
speech to an African American audience as “presumptive nominee.”
Politically, there was a need for Obama to reaffirm his ties to the
community and to do so in a way that would confirm the consistency of
his politics with those of the Democratic Party mainstream. His speech
concerned the need for African American fathers to take responsibility
for their families; to cease being, in many cases, absentee, occasional,
or uninvolved parents, and, as Obama put it, “recognize that
responsibility doesn’t just end at conception.” Without in any way
downplaying the importance of this question, it is also the safest
possible issue dealing directly with African American life that Obama
might have chosen, one that African American moderates and conservatives
like Bill Cosby and Shelby Steele have made their own. The Black
fatherhood issue, however important, keeps the focus of problems and
change for African Americans within the community itself. Focusing on
this issue asserts, by implication, that the United States as a whole
does not need to change, reform itself, or initiate any policies in
order to achieve racial progress, nor do whites need to change their
attitudes, behavior, or even awareness for this to happen. In terms of
overall political philosophy, this speech constitutes an answer to Rev.
Wright’s “theology of reconciliation,” with its insistence that both
whites and Blacks need to contribute to solving the country’s racial
division. In the narrower political sense, of electoral calculation,
Obama’s message, I think, was aimed not at African American voters nor
even at the white working class voters that Sen. Hillary Clinton had
tried with some success to make afraid of Obama, but rather at those
liberal political elites and media opinion makers who might still be
unsure of Obama’s commitment to social stability. That is, Obama’s
speech was another step in the Democratic Party vetting and filtration
process that determines that a candidate must demonstrate commitment to
maintaining the U.S. system in order to be seen as viable.
The first conclusion I would draw from these events is that it is
impossible for any presidential candidate to be nominated while telling
the truth about the ideas and outlook of the African American people.
This is what Obama did on March 18, at least in part, but he was
subsequently forced to continue “repositioning” himself and has not
repeated the emphases of that speech. This fact, if it is one, is only a
particular example of the general point that it is impossible to be
nominated while telling the truth about any aspect of U.S. life. But
this example is particularly striking given the candidate’s identity as
an African American, even taking into account that up until now it was
impossible for any African American to be nominated at all. Secondly, I
would draw the conclusion that the Democratic Party as an institution is
a key mechanism by which this filtration or purification of U.S.
politics—from the social, racial, and economic elites’ point of view—is
carried out; and this is the major reason why I don’t vote.
One can make several objections to what I’ve said. First, I’ve discussed
only one issue, though a crucial one. True. But a look at Obama’s stands
on other issues wouldn’t lead to different conclusions. While Obama
opposes the Iraq war—today; what he would do in office is impossible to
say—so does a large segment of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
Obama doesn’t differ from this establishment in any noticeable way, and
no more than others does he criticize or even discuss its assumption
that the U.S. has the right to dominate the whole world, which he fully
shares. He made this especially clear in a New York Times Op Ed piece
July 14—in other words a statement to the opinion elite I have been
discussing—that proposed sending 2 new combat brigades, about 10,000
troops, to Afghanistan.
On domestic policy Obama differs strikingly little from Sen. Clinton and
other Democrats. The one area in which he did seem tangibly different
was in “transcending” the race issue. The developments I’ve traced mean
he is now in a position of having (so far) transcended this issue in
terms of electoral appeal, while not taking on the obligation to
actually do anything about the issue. That is what makes the filtration
process so important, for this process reveals both that any candidate’s
ability to publicly discuss U.S. racial assumptions is extremely
limited, and also that the shift in voters’ attitudes that allowed Obama
to win the nomination is, while real, also quite limited.
(How limited can be seen in the relatively minor flap over Michelle
Obama’s comment in February, “For the first time in my adult lifetime,
I’m really proud of my country.” Mrs. Obama succeeded in defusing this
one by saying she meant the U.S. government. But how absurd, really, for
anyone to blink at such a comment by an African American; what abysmal
ignorance people’s surprise—if not feigned—shows about the cultural life
and thought processes of other Americans; and what narrow limits the
incident reveals for political acceptability in the United States.)
One might also object that Obama’s Father’s Day speech is not a result
of compromise or backing away from controversy but is the real Obama;
all along, he was moderate and politically nonconfrontational. Again
true. But his trajectory has required some reinventing of himself:
quietly dropping earlier proPalestinian positions when stepping up from
Illinois Senate to U.S. Senate (New York Times May 11); keeping Muslim
supporters out of view in this campaign (New York Times June 24). In my
view Obama’s sincerity or lack of sincerity in these shifts and his
overall politics doesn’t affect my overall argument that the incidents
I’ve discussed show the limits to discussion of a major U.S. issue
within a political campaign, and also show the process by which the
Democratic Party trims the candidate to fit the political system.
Finally, there will be those who argue that Obama will truly carry out
transforming policies, at least on domestic issues, when and if he is
elected. There’s been a strong surge of what can only be called faith
and trust in Obama, especially among African Americans and younger, more
liberal white Americans who are sick of both the racial divides that
Obama crosses and the dead-conservative, repressive, and vilely
dishonest politics of the Bush years. Thus a new release, “Black
President,” by the New York rapper Nas announces, “I’m thinking I can
trust this brother.” Hopes of this kind are essentially faith-based;
there is no way to prove them right or wrong except by waiting.
I think there are plenty of reasons in past history not to hold such
hopes. When Obama was recalibrating his views on Palestine, in 2004, he
told one Arab-American supporter, according to the supporter’s
recollection, “I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now,
but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping that when things calm
down I can be more upfront” (Times May 11). It didn’t happen, of course.
(The Obama campaign calls the report inaccurate.) I myself can recall
discussing essentially the same point with friends the day after Bill
Clinton’s nomination in 1992. When I mentioned the tepidness of
Clinton’s positions, my friends assured me that Clinton had to make
compromises in order to get elected but would implement a social change
agenda once in office. I argued that his compromises would limit his
future options and were therefore his real positions, but my friends
didn’t accept the point and I ended by saying we should come back to the
discussion in 2 years. (That didn’t happen. Other than the failed health
care plan—compromised to death by Hillary Clinton—the only major
domestic “reform” of Clinton’s administration was the abolition of
welfare, a conservative initiative that Clinton embraced for his own
reasons.) Basically, I have this same conversation every presidential
election year: there seems no situation in which hopeful people can’t
believe what the Democratic nominee says, and even much more than what
s/he says. In my eyes, at least, it is unlikely that a candidate who has
fit his campaign within certain limits because of the political
pressures of an election (has chopped off his feet, as in the legend of
the Procrustean bed) will be freer once the campaign is over (will be
able to reattach his feet). I cannot prove this, but in my view, the
Democratic Party’s ability to persuade people of essentially the same
hopes of true reform every four years, regardless of who its nominee
might be, is one sign of the party’s illusion-generating role in U.S.
politics.
---
Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright’s Remarks, April 28, 2008
I include these excerpts from Rev. Wright’s appearance at the National
Press Club in Washington because his views are not as well known as
Obama’s and because, in my opinion, it is worth knowing something about
the wing in African American theology that he represents. After Rev.
Wright’s remarks I include a few of the questions that were submitted in
writing and read out by the chair, Donna Leinwand of USA Today.
REV. WRIGHT: Over the next few days, prominent scholars of the
African-American religious tradition from several different
disciplines—theologians, church historians, ethicists, professors of
Hebrew bible, homiletics, hermeneutics and historians of religions—those
scholars will join in with sociologists, political analysts, local
church pastors and denominational officials to examine the
African-American religious experience and its historical, theological
and political context. The workshops, the panel discussions and the
symposia will go into much more intricate detail about this unknown
phenomenon of the black church—(laughter)—than I have time to go into in
the few moments that we have to share together.
And I would invite you to spend the next two days getting to know just a
little bit about a religious tradition that is as old as and, in some
instances, older than this country. And this is a country which houses
its religious tradition that we all love and a country that some of us
have served. It is a tradition that is in some ways like Ralph Ellison’s
“The Invisible Man.” It has been right here in our midst and on our
shores since the 1600s, but it was, has been and, in far too many
instances, still is invisible to the dominant culture in terms of its
rich history, its incredible legacy and its multiple meanings. [...] And
maybe now we can begin to take steps to move the black religious
tradition from the status of invisible to the status of invaluable, not
just for some black people in this country, but for all the people in
this country.
Maybe this dialogue on race—an honest dialogue that does not engage in
denial or superficial platitudes—maybe this dialogue on race can move
the people of faith in this country from various stages of alienation
and marginalization to the exciting possibility of reconciliation. That
is my hope as I open up this two-day symposium, and I open it as a
pastor and a professor who comes from a long tradition of what I call
“the prophetic theology of the black church.”
Now, in the 1960s, the term “liberation theology” began to gain currency
with the writings and the teachings of preachers, pastors, priests and
professors from Latin America. Their theology was done from the
underside. Their viewpoint was not from the top down or from a set of
teachings which undergirded imperialism. Their viewpoints, rather, were
from the bottom up, the thoughts and understandings of God, the faith,
religion and the bible from those whose lives were ground under, mangled
and destroyed by the ruling classes or the oppressors. Liberation
theology started in and started from a different place. It started from
the vantage point of the oppressed.
In the late 1960s, when Dr. James Cone’s powerful books burst onto the
scene, the term “black liberation theology” began to be used. I do not
in any way disagree with Dr. Cone, nor do I in any way diminish the
inimitable and incomparable contribution that he has made and that he
continues to make to the field of theology. Jim, incidentally, is a
personal friend of mine.
I call our faith tradition, however, “the prophetic tradition of the
black church,” because I take its origins back past Jim Cone, past the
sermons and songs of Africans in bondage in the transatlantic slave
trade. I take it back past the problem of western ideology and notions
of white supremacy. I take and trace the theology of the black church
back to the prophets in the Hebrew bible and to its last prophet, in my
tradition, the one we call Jesus of Nazareth.
The prophetic tradition of the black church has its roots in Isaiah, the
61^(st) chapter, where God says the prophet is to preach the gospel to
the poor and to set at liberty those who are held captive. Liberating
the captives also liberates those who are holding them captive. It frees
the captive and it frees the captors. It frees the oppressed and it
frees the oppressors. The prophetic theology of the black church during
the days of chattel slavery was a theology of liberation. It was
preached to set free those who were held in bondage, spiritually,
psychologically and sometimes physically, and it was practiced to set
the slaveholders free from the notion that they could define other human
beings or confine a soul set free by the power of the gospel. [...]
The prophetic theology of the black church is a theology of liberation.
It is a theology of transformation.
And it is ultimately a theology of reconciliation. The Apostle Paul
said, “Be ye reconciled one to another, even as God was in Christ
reconciling the world to God’s self.”
God does not desire for us, as children of God, to be at war with each
other, to see each other as superior or inferior, to hate each other,
abuse each other, misuse each other, define each other or put each other
down.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes.
REV. WRIGHT: God wants us reconciled one to another, and that third
principle in the prophetic theology of the black church is also and has
always been at the heart of the black church experience in North
America. [...] Reconciliation, the years have taught me, is where the
hardest work is found for those of us in the Christian faith, however,
because it means some critical thinking and some reexamination of faulty
assumptions. [...] If I see God as male; if I see God as white male; if
I see God as superior, as God over us and not Immanuel, which means God
with us; if I see God as mean, vengeful, authoritarian, sexist or
misogynist, then I see humans through that lens. [...] [When someone
sees God this way, then] How we are seeing God, our theology, is not the
same. And what we both mean when we say, I am a Christian, is not the
same thing. The prophetic theology of the black church has always seen
and still sees all of God’s children as sisters and brothers, equals who
need reconciliation, who need to be reconciled as equals, in order for
us to walk together into the future which God has prepared for us.
Reconciliation does not mean that blacks become whites or whites become
blacks or Hispanics become Asian or that Asians become Europeans.
Reconciliation means we embrace our individual rich histories, all of
them. We retain who we are, as persons of different cultures, while
acknowledging that those of other cultures are not superior or inferior
to us; they are just different from us. [...]
QUESTIONS: MS. LEINWAND: You have said that the media have taken you out
of context. Can you explain what you mean in a sermon shortly after 9/11
when you said the United States had brought the terrorist attacks on
itself, quote, “America’s chickens are coming home to roost”?
REV. WRIGHT: Have you heard the whole sermon? (Laughter, applause.) Have
you heard the whole sermon?
MS. LEINWAND: I—most—(chuckles)—
REV. WRIGHT: No, no, the whole sermon. That’s—yes or no. No, you haven’t
heard the whole sermon? That nullifies that question.
Well, let me try to respond in a non-bombastic way. (Applause.) If you
heard the whole sermon, first of all, you heard that I was quoting the
ambassador from Iraq. That’s number one. But number two, to quote the
Bible, “Be not deceived; God is not mocked, for whatsoever you sow that
you also shall”—
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: “Reap.”
REV. WRIGHT: Jesus said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto
you.” You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to
come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright
bombastic divisive principles. (Applause.)
[...] MS. LEINWAND: In light of your—in light of your widely quoted
comment damning America, do you think you owe the American people an
apology?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: No!
MS. LEINWAND: If not, do you think that America is still damned in the
eyes of God?
REV. WRIGHT: The government of leaders, those—as I said to Barack Obama,
my member—I’m a pastor; he’s a member. I’m not a “spiritual
mentor”—hoodoo. I’m his pastor. And I said to Barack Obama last year,
“If you get elected, November the 5^(th) I’m coming after you, because
you’ll be representing a government whose policies grind under people.”
All right?
It’s about policy, not the American people. [...]
MS. LEINWAND: Can you elaborate on your comparison of the Roman soldiers
who killed Jesus to the U.S. Marine Corps? Do you still believe that is
an appropriate comparison? And why?
REV. WRIGHT: One of the things that will be covered at symposiums over
the next two days is biblical history, which many of the working press
are unfamiliar with.
(Laughter.)
Source: Chicago Tribune Web Edition, April 28, 2008.