Tags : None

Here are a couple of articles that effectively look at the recent dust up between Barack Obama and his Pastor Jeremiah Wright.
Personally I have long maintained that there's no way I would've denounced or distanced myself from my pastor. It was a red flag for many when Obama tried to explain away Pastor Wright who is well known and enjoys a lot of popularity in many Black circles, in particular among church folks.


From my vantage point Obama should've put his foot down early on and drew a line in the sand and simply said those are his opinions, not mine and kept it moving. He got off to a shakey start when he disinvited Wright from his campaign launch. I felt Obama was trying to explain himself and Pastor Wright way too much and to way too many people who quite frankly don't give a damn about him or Black people in general. Obama tends to tip toe around a lot of stuff to the point that it appears he has no backbone and is pandering instead of being a decisive leader and sadly that strategy blew up in his face.


For example, instead of emphatically insisting that people look and listen to the full sermons for themselves, Obama tried to dismiss them and wish them away.
He could've pointed out how Wright's words were out of context and posted the video on his campaign website to defuse the controversy while simultaneously exposing Fox News' disengenious agenda.


Obama could've reached out and had other African American along with the white ministers from United Church of Christ which Trinity Church is a part of to defuse this. He already had people like Common speaking out. Heck Trinity has 5000 thousand members, that entire congregations could've stepped up and defended the Church and Wright. Obama did too much explaining and as a result an opportunity to bring people together and discuss difficult issues was lost by him trying to bury this.


Not only did Obama come across as pandering to a really fickle group, but he also comes across as one who was brought to his knees by Sean Hannity and Bill O'reilly of Fox News who set out to trip him up on this issue from jump street and are now crowing real loud about this defeat they handed him

Lastly I will say this... when Rev Wright spoke at the NACCP he was brilliant. He made his case.. There was nothing more to say. He clarified his position and ideally should've moved on.


Unfortunately, When Hillary Clinton's aid invited Rev Wright to the National Press Club he took the bait and walked into a firestorm. I'm glad he spoke up and out. I agree with him on many of the issues he raised for the most part.
But I didn't like him playing for the cameras by doing Omega Psi Phi hand gestures and pruning.. That's where he came off looking clownish... It's not the Rev Wright I've come to know and love.


In any case I was tired of the tip toeing..Obama having to 'be quiet' in order to win over some white folks who don't like him or us was troubling.. No matter what he did they were gonna find fault.. If you recall they were starting to jam him up about the rappers supporting him.. Next it would be the designer shoes he has on..At some point ya gotta say take it or leave it.. Politics aside the man has done everything he was supposed to do for this campaign.. He played the game and in the end the folks he was supposed to be courting the most have not come to support him over Hillary.. In short Obama is seen as just another Negroe and yesterday Rev Wright gave him what comedian Paul Mooney used to call 'that Negroe wake up call'...

Davey D



Jeremiah's Failed Crusade
By William Jelani Cobb

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, Jeremiah Wright has just
been awarded a construction contract.
And that's the best case scenario --
in light of his weekend blitz of media appearances there are many doubting
that Wright's intentions were benign.
Assuming they were, the reverend's
appearance before the National Press Club highlighted his naive belief that
he could redeem his reputation by talking to the same people who were
responsible for distorting it.


Let's be clear: Wright has been wildly mischaracterized and defamed.
It's a
natural instinct to respond to the kind malice that has been directed at him
for the past six weeks. You see a fire, you want to throw water on it.
But
this situation is more akin to a grease fire, which means that you have to
respond to it in a way that runs counter to your instincts.
Instead, Wright
opened the faucets and the flames have spread far beyond their original
boundaries.


In the wake of his appearance you heard disparate rumblings that are growing
into a chorus of condemnation.
The difference is that these jeers are now
coming from black people.
He started out with the enmity of misinformed
whites who knew him only through the manipulated soundbites that had been
looped ad nauseum (but which were, until now, dying down.
) But now he has
done nothing to diminish their scorn and has gained the contempt of a
growing number of black folk who feel that he has single-handedly ruined our
chance to have a black president.


That perspective isn't accurate, but it is increasingly common only a day
after that appearance.
Writing in the NY Times, Bob Herbert accused Wright
of vengefully sabotaging Obama with the press conference yesterday; Errol
Louis in the Daily News gave Wright the benefit of the doubt and said that
"He couldn't have done more damage to Obama if he tried.
" I received an
email from a friend who referred to it as "black-on-black crime" another
speculated that he was secretly on Hillary Clinton's payroll.
And then there
are the innumerable crabs-in-a-barrel references cycling around the
internet.
I'm not prepared to say that Wright was out to destroy Obama's
candidacy (though that may well be the outcome) but it was entirely
predictable that people would draw that conclusion.


It has to be unspeakably difficult to hear oneself lambasted and defamed for
weeks on end but Wright entered that conference with a flawed agenda: the
commercial media exists to exacerbate controversies, not defuse them.
The
degree of truth in his words was nearly irrelevant; what matters is the way
in which those words would inevitably be consumed, filtered, repackaged and
distributed.
If the media operated on the basis of people's good intentions
we would have far more mutual understanding and they would have far less
money.
This might have been minimized had Wright called Roland Martin, Ed
Gordon, Gwen Ifill and done a roundtable of responsible black journalists or
even stopped after the Bill Moyers interview he did days earlier.
But in
addressing the National Press Club the reverend was like a man who had lost
$10 to a card hustler but decides to play again in an attempt to break
even.


Wright was also likely buoyed by a false confidence in his own communication
skills. He is a brilliant preacher but a podium is not a pulpit.
He has
spent the last 36 years in an arena where people literally say "amen" to
your opinions, one where your credibility is virtually unquestionable.
But
yesterday he was talking to journalists, people who are, by definition,
skeptical and start with the premise that if someone in public is talking,
there's a good chance they're telling a lie.
Anything Wright said was grist
for the machine.
He was playing an away game without recognizing that he
lost home field advantage the minute he left his pulpit.
Anything he said
beyond "Jesus loves you" would be used against him.


It's been argued that Wright felt Obama threw him under the bus with his
Philadelphia race speech, but a moment's reflection would reveal that those
words constituted anything but a political stiff-arm.
In Philadelphia Obama
offered as subtle and daring a defense of Wright as he could have and far
more than any other politician would have given in the situation.
(Jocelyn
Elders and Lani Guinier were dispatched by Bill Clinton for offenses far,
far less damaging than Wright's video clips have been to Obama.
)

The irony is that less than twenty-four hours later Wright got to see what a
real denunciation looks like.
Obama has been painted into a corner, in large
measure a victim of his own attempt to place Wright into context.
It looks
all but certain that Wright will be looked at by a large segment of black
America as the man who tried to ruin a dream.
It will be a vast distortion
of Wright's distinguished legacy but its what people will believe.


And, as any one of the media in the room could have explained in the
national press club, perception is reality.


William Jelani Cobb is an associate professor of history at Spelman College.

His most recent book is The Devil & Dave Chappelle and Other Essays.
He can
be reached at Jelani9@aol.com

----------------------------------------------------------------


The world views of Rev.
Jeremiah Wright and Sen.
Barack Obama were incompatible from the start, just as the mythical American Manifest Destiny world view is directly at odds with the facts as perceived by Blacks in the United States. Wright finally forced Obama to choose sides in the conflict of racial/historical visions, and in doing so, performed a service on behalf of clarity. Obama lashed out in a startlingly personal manner, calling Wright a "caricature" of himself and linking the minister to forces that give "comfort to those who prey on hate." Rev. Wright exposed the flimsy tissues of so-called "race neutrality" in a nation founded on racial oppression.


Obama's 'Race Neutral' Strategy Unravels of its Own Contradictions

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

"Obama positioned himself at the political/historical fault line alongside the defenders of the Alamo and American Manifest Destiny.
"

http://www. blackagendareport. com/index. php?option=com_content&task=view&id=603&Itemid=1

Things fall apart; some things, like an ill-tied shoelace, sooner than others.
Barack Obama's strategy to win the White House was to run a "race-neutral" campaign in a society that is anything but neutral on race. The very premise - that race neutrality is possible in a nation built on white supremacy - demanded the systematic practice of the most profound race-factual denial, which is ultimately indistinguishable from rank dishonesty. From the moment Obama told the 2004 Democratic National Convention that "there is no white America, there is no Black America," it was inevitable that the candidate would one day declare the vast body of Black opinion illegitimate.


That day came on Tuesday, April 29, when a battered and (truly) bitter Barack Obama made his final, irrevocable break with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose televised Black Liberation Theology tour de force the preceding Friday, Sunday and Monday had laid bare the contradictions of Obama's hopeless racial "neutrality." It was the masterful preacher and seasoned political creature Wright - not the racists who had endlessly looped chopped snippets of the reverend's past sermons together in an attempt to make him appear crazed - who forced Obama to choose in the push and pull of Black and white American worldviews. Obama was made to register his preference for the white racist version of truth over Rev. Wright's, whose rejection of Euro-American mythology reflects prevailing African American perceptions, past and present.


"Rev. Jeremiah Wright laid bare the contradictions of Obama's hopeless racial 'neutrality.
'"

Obama was less than eloquent. "All it was is a bunch of rants that aren't grounded in truth," said Sen. Obama, low-rating Rev. Wright's remarks at the National Press Club, in Washington, the morning before. Rev. Wright had become a "caricature" of himself, said the wounded candidate - another way of calling the minister a clown.


Under questioning from reporters in Winston Salem, North Carolina, Obama swore up and down that he had never before, in 16 years as a member of Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ congregation, observed his pastor behave in such a way. The declaration rang patently false, as even a red-state Republican white evangelical observer would have recognized Wright's Press Club performance as that of veteran pulpit-master with a vast repertoire of church-pleasing moves and grooves to draw upon, all of them honed over decades for the entertainment of his parishioners - including Obama. But the senator was intent on giving the impression that Rev. Wright was - unbeknownst to Obama - a Jekyll and Hyde character, whose statements "were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate.
"

An amazingly Bush-like turn of phrase! The man who married Barack and Michelle and baptized their children is now rhetorically linked to Osama bin Laden or the Ku Klux Klan.


Clearly, this is what panic looks and sounds like when Obama's flimsy tissues of "race neutrality" are stripped away. He berates Rev. Wright and other Black voices for self-centeredness in failing to strike a balance between African American grievances and whatever ails white people. "When you start focusing so much on the historically oppressed," said Obama, "we lose sight of the plight of others." Obama is desperate to convince these "others" that he rejects anything that smacks of an Afro-centric worldview, as represented by Rev. Wright. "What became clear to me was that he was presenting a world view that contradicts what I am and what I stand for.
"

Rev. Wright succeeded in drawing a line in the sand, whether that was his intention or not, daring Obama to take his stand on one side or the other. Race "neutrality" - an impossibility in the actually existing United States - went out the window as Obama in extremis positioned himself at the political/historical fault line alongside the defenders of the Alamo and American Manifest Destiny. As dictated by the logic of power, Obama furiously maneuvered toward "white space," shamelessly taking cover in a kind of populist white patriotism that has always branded Black grievances as selfish, even dangerous distractions from the larger national mission. Rev. Wright's "rantings" amounted to "a complete disregard for what the American people are going through," said Obama. "What mattered to him was him commanding center stage.
"

"Obama's flimsy tissues of 'race neutrality' are stripped away.
"

Obama had belabored the same theme in his Philadelphia speech on race, a few weeks earlier - a widely applauded piece of oratory that was at root an exercise in moral equivalence that equated white and Black grievances in the U.S., as if history and gross power discrepancies did not exist. Obama is as quick as any smug corporate commentator to dismiss as the ravings of extremists and those who "prey on hate" the very idea that U.S. imperialism is an historical and current fact. Chickens cannot possibly come home to roost in terroristic revenge as a response to American crimes against humanity, since "good" nations by definition are incapable of such crimes. It is beyond the pale to contemplate that the United States has Dr. Deaths on its covert payrolls dealing in ghastly biological warfare - the AIDS genesis theory.


In order for his race-neutral strategy to appear sane, Obama must constantly paint a picture of an America that does not exist. This cannot be accomplished without mangling the truth, assaulting the truth-tellers, and misrepresenting America's past and present.


Since Obama's candidacy is predicated on minimizing the pervasiveness of racism in American life, it is necessary that he cast doubt on the legitimacy of those with race-based grievances. Otherwise, he would be morally compelled to abandon his neutrality and side with the oppressed minority. Thus, he announces in Selma, Alabama that Blacks "have already come 90 percent of the way" to equality - a non-truth by virtually any measurement. He says the "incompetence was color-blind" in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, thereby deracializing all that occurred in New Orleans from the moment the winds died down to this very second. He claims that 1980s Ronald Reagan voters had understandable grievances due to "the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s," in the process cleansing the Reagan victory of any racist content.


Race neutrality requires that Barack Obama become a cleanup boy for racists, historically and in the present day. At the same time, Obama is driven to loath most those people and facts that might lead to divisiveness.
America's worst enemies are not the racists, but those who point out the facts of racism, as Obama explained in mid-March in Philadelphia:

"Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.
"

Rev. Wright and his ilk, by this reasoning, are Public Enemy Number One, standing in the way of the racial harmony that is the natural order of things in Obama's mythical America.


"Obama must constantly paint a picture of an America that does not exist.
"

Ironically, in practice, race-neutrality also requires that Obama disarm himself in the face of racist attacks. "If I lose," he told reporters with a straight face, "it would not be because of race. It would be because of mistakes I made along the campaign trail.
"

Perhaps it is fitting that, having absolved American racists of all manner of crimes against others, Obama also holds them blameless for their assaults on himself. That's his prerogative, as long as he's the only one being assaulted. But Obama was also dogged over the long weekend by the ghost of Sean Bell, whose death in a 50-shot New York City police fusillade was held blameless by a white judge. Many African Americans anxiously awaited Obama's reaction to the three police officers' acquittals on all charges. "We're a nation of laws, so we respect the verdict that came down," said Obama, when asked about the case by reporters in Indiana. "Resorting to violence to express displeasure over a verdict is something that is completely unacceptable and is counterproductive." That was it.


Hillary Clinton, aware that the Sean Bell verdict was an outrage to Black America, issued a prepared statement:

"This tragedy has deeply saddened New Yorkers - and all Americans. My thoughts are with Nicole and her children and the rest of Sean's family during this difficult time. The court has given its verdict, and now we await the conclusion of a Department of Justice civil rights investigation. We must also embrace this opportunity to take steps - in our communities, in our law enforcement agencies, and in our government - to make sure this does not happen again.
"

It is difficult not to conclude that Obama distanced himself from the facts of the acquittal - except to counsel against violence and urge folks to "respect" the verdict, whatever that means - while Clinton had the sense to prepare a statement that sounded sensitive to Black anger and on top of developments in the story. The Sean Bell police and judicial atrocity revealed with horrific clarity that Black life continues to be systematically devalued by police in the United States, even when the officers involved are of African descent, as were two of the three shooters in the Bell case. The New York verdict shows that Black lives are devalued by all actors in American society, including Black actors: the essence of institutional racism.


"Black life continues to be systematically devalued by police in the United States, even when the officers involved are of African descent.
"

Institutional racism is alien to Barack Obama's version of the nation, a fantasy place where racial oppression has never been so endemic to the political culture as to overshadow the "promise" of America. In Obama's public vision, his Democratic caucus victory in 98 percent white Iowa, which began the cascade of Obama wins, proves that the U.S. is ready for profound racial "change." Left unnoted is the fact that Iowa incarcerates African Americans at 13 times the frequency that it locks up whites, the worst record in the nation.


For people like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, mass Black incarceration and slavery are seamlessly linked, part of the continuity of racial oppression in the U.S. Most African Americans see the world the way Rev. Wright does - that's why he's among the top five rated preacher-speakers in Black America. This Black American world view, excruciatingly aware of the nation's origins in genocide and slavery, is wholly incompatible with the American mythology championed by Barack Obama. When the two meet, they are mutually repellant.


The relationship between Rev. Wright and Sen. Obama has undergone "great damage," says Obama, understatedly. But the break was inevitable and is no tragedy, because it reveals the incompatibility of Obama's adapted world view with the body of knowledge amassed by African Americans since before the landing of the Mayflower. The truth is always a revelation.


BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen. Ford@BlackAgendaReport. com .

Return to Davey D's Hip Hop Corner

Last Edited By: mrdaveyd 04/30/08 06:04:36. Edited 1 time.