“We took this country (from Native Americans) by terror...”
“We bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We nuked far more than the numbers killed in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye...”
“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and the black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas has been brought back to our own front yards? America's chickens are coming home to roost...”
These
and similar statements by Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, the long time
pastor of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ are not even
particularly controversial in the Black community. They are, as the
University of Chicago's Michael Dawson affirms well within the
mainstream of Black opinion, and can be heard on street corners,
barber shops, churches and around dinner tables all the time. The
fact is, most African Americans agree
with Rev. Wright.
But
the common and ordinary wisdom of Black America is inadmissible in
mainstream US discourse. In the reality-defying bubble of US
corporate media, one must never speak of the genocide and
dispossession of Native Americans as “terror”. Comparing the
atomic bombings of hundreds of thousands of civilians in World War 2,
the snuffing out of two
million Vietnamese lives in the sixties and seventies or one
million plus Iraqis and counting in the current war is, in
mainstream media, strictly off-limits. And any suggestion that US
imperial policies in the Middle East, Africa or elsewhere might
provoke justified resistance or understandable retaliation is deemed
beyond-the-pale anti-American hate speech.
The
foundation of Barack Obama's electoral strategy is reliance upon a
base of voters in black America motivated by a nationalistic
desire to see one of their own in the White House, no matter what his
beliefs. Thus the black vote, ordinarily the most dependably left
wing bloc in the US can be safely and permanently taken for granted,
leaving Obama free to move rightward, doing and saying whatever it
takes to win white votes and corporate favor. Barack Obama is
therefore the establishment's dream black candidate, almost entirely
free of obligation to African Americans and our historic agenda, but
getting our votes anyway.
Accordingly,
to preserve his standing among white and Republican voters who
imagine him as the “post-racial” candidate, Obama has for the
past week sought to distance himself from his pastor of twenty years.
In speeches and interviews Obama compared Rev. Wright to “that old
uncle everybody has” who mumbles things we disagree with. He
pronounced Wright an “angry” man, hopelessly stuck in the fifties
and sixties. Obama's much ballyhooed March 18 speech went several
steps further, suggesting that white American racism is a not a
fundamental feature of American life, mischaracterizing his pastor's
views on the Middle East, and blaming war and US imperial adventures
that part of the world on “radical Islam” instead of on our
insistence upon controlling their resources.
"...the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They weren't simply a religious leader's effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam."
The
fact is that black America is more pro-Palestinian than any other
constituency except Arab-Americans. Black America is highly
suspicious of US claims to be an “honest broker” for peace in the
Middle East. Obama's labeling of "radical Islam" as the
transcendent national enemy, however, is perfectly in line with that
of corporate media, as well as with Hillary's, McCain's and Bush's
"war on terror" foreign policy framework. But it happens to
be the exact opposite of where most of Black America stands.
If
Barack believes, as he says, that "the perverse and hateful
ideologies of radical Islam" are the reasons we are at war in
the Middle East, what difference is there between Obama and Hillary,
between Obama and McCain or even between Obama and George Bush or the
neo-cons? If Barack believes this, his promised
withdrawal and “over the horizon” redeployment of "combat
troops" (not of mercenaries or contractors or counterinsurgency
troops or training troops or the rest of the occupation, just the
"combat brigades") will be followed by another intervention
somewhere else in hopes of squashing "the perverse and hateful
ideology of radical Islam". Maybe Somalia, which we already
bomb regularly. Maybe Afghanistan. Maybe nuclear-armed Pakistan, a
target Obama has already identified.
A
further proof of how liberated the black candidate Obama is from the
will of black voters is his promised to increase the military budget
over Bush levels, to add 90,000 more pairs of boots to the army and
marines, and to increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan,
where we support a coterie of arms and opium smugglers masquerading
as a government. Increasing the military budget is lower on the
priorities of African Americans than of any other constituency in the
land, and takes money away from all the cherished priorities of
African American communities like education, public transit, and job
creation.
And
of course our "stalwart ally", as Barack called Israel, in
fact a murderous
apartheid regime in which Arab "citizens" are forbidden
from owning land in much of the country, where their marriages are
not recognized by the state, where Arabs are issued different license
plates so their cars can be profiled from a distance, and many other
indignities. And those are Arabs with Israeli citizenship.
Palestinians, the owners of the land only two generation ago, are
still experiencing wholesale confiscation of their remaining land and
assets, penned up into Gaza and the West Bank, humiliated, starved
and murdered at will by Israeli armed forces and death squads.
Obama knows
these to be facts, and at earlier points in his political career
would show up at Palestinian events in Chicago. But the
political game he has chosen to play, and the allies he has chose to
play it with require a selective memory.
And
just as Ronald Reagan was seldom able to complete a paragraph on race
without a reference to fictional Cadillac-driving welfare
queens, Barack Obama was unable to make a speech on race without
a gratuitous and pandering reference to the alleged shortcomings of
black fathers. Is this what “post-racial” black candidates must
do to prove they are not “stuck” in the sixties? Is this how a
“multiracial coalition” is built?
"What
would it have cost Barack Obama to try to educate, to lead, to lift
the level of the American people by picking say, the least
controversial of Wright's assertions, say that the country was taken
from Native Americans “by terror” and actually defending it?"
Two
decades ago he took the advice of a local pastor who suggested his
work as a community organizer in Chicago's Roseland neighborhood
would go better if he had a “church home”, and Obama chose
Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th
Street. In the very early 80s, long before most Americans knew Nelson
Mandela's name, Trinity UCC had a “FREE SOUTH AFRICA” sign in
front of its building. Meetings were held and collections were
regularly taken up since at least the mid-1970s to aid liberation
movements in what were then the white-ruled countries of Mozambique,
Guinea-Bissau, Namibia, Angola and South Africa. Rev. Wright was a
theologian, an activist, a successful pastor and leader who built a
thriving ministry that was one of the black south side's social,
economic and political hubs for a generation. If you were up and
coming on the south side, Trinity was one of the places to be, for
many reasons.
Obama
got what he could out of Trinity in the 80s,. He re-joined the
church upon his return to Chicago after law school in 1992 to begin
his political career. Obama
admits that Wright married the him and his wife, baptized their
children, and blessed their new house. But at this point in the
campaign, Rev. Wright's message and ministry are as expendable as the
political will of the rest of Black America has been all along.
Campaign insiders have told reporters that if Rev. Wright was not
retiring, Obama would have to change congregations, but since he is,
that will not be necessary. In the end, Barack Obama is a grown man,
a savvy and ambitious politician who will have to live with his moral
and political choices. And so will we. We know what's in it for him.
But what's in it for us?
What
would it have cost Barack Obama to try to educate, to lead, to lift
the level of the American people by picking say, the least
controversial of Wright's assertions, say that the country was taken
from Native Americans “by terror” and actually defending it?
That would have been an historic and groundbreaking act of moral
leadership. If Obama is not ready to lead now, when will he be? And
where?
Obama's
unconditional affirmations that America is “inherently good”,
that white racism is not endemic, that “radical Islam” is the
enemy, that apartheid Israel is a “stalwart ally”, and that his
pastor and spiritual mentor, a man who accurately reflects the views
of most of Black America is an angry, divisive old uncle stuck in the
fifties and sixties --- all these may restore his credentials among
whites as the candidate of “racial reconciliation”. But what is
being reconciled here? Aside from the color of the president's face,
what is being changed? And just what does Black America, its opinions
and leading thinkers denounced, belittled and banned from the
political discourse by the black candidate, no less, get out of this
reconciliation, or this campaign?
Bruce Dixon is based in the Atlanta area, and can be reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com