Over the past 2 weeks the continuous loops of Jeremiah Wright have made me sad, but mostly angry. I knew then what has now been proven is that his words were taken WAY OUT OF CONTEXT. I also knew that when the truth came out, the mainstream media would not cover it at all. Unfortunately, I was right. I am an African American and an Obama supporter and had he rejected and denounced his pastor I would have voted for Clinton if given the opportunity. That's how passionate I was and am. Al Gore writes of the inconvenient truth, but the American inconvenient truth is that America has yet to come to terms with its horrific beginnings. I was going to write more about it but, a gentleman, Tim Wise did the job for me. (please forgive my posting the entire article next time I'll READ the rules and not just skim them :)
Of National Lies and Racial Amnesia:
Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Audacity of Truth
By Tim Wise
March 18, 2008
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.
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..., 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...
Mr. Wise goes on to talk about the history of lynching and picnics (or what black people refer to has Pic-a-Ni*&@*)- the social construct, history books and media that perpetuate the idea that the ills of or society didn't and don't really exist. For instance, he writes:
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.
No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your teenager's textbooks do that.
If you have the time please read the entire article which is here:
http://www.lipmagazine.org/...
The Greenwood, OK town that he refers to we call Black Wallstreet. I have written a screenplay about this tragic, yet obscure event. Why aren't tragedies like this in our history books? The answer is obvious and is the reason that in 2008 we're still having these conversations.