519 Is Obama Racist?
“I used to like Obama,” Jim, told me yesterday, “but that was before I found out he was a racist.”
“A racist?” I said shocked. “I didn’t know Obama was a racist?”
“You haven’t heard his pastor’s anti-American, racist comments?”
“I’ve heard the sound bites, but that’s Obama’s former pastor, not Obama.”
“Obama attended that church for 20 years; of course he’s a racist.”
“What’s the name of Obama’s pastor and what church does he pastor?”
“I don’t know, I think his pastor’s name is Wright and it’s some black church in Chicago …I think.”
“You don’t know the man’s name or his church, but you’re certain he’s a racist and Obama is too? Don’t you think you might be jumping to conclusions?”
Jim didn’t really answer me and our conversation quickly chilled. I probably should have kept my big yap shut, but politically motivated character assignations drive me nuts. Mean-spirited politics proliferates so many of our deepest social problems …including racism.
Jim’s comments motivated me to do some research of Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. who was pastor of Chicago’s 8500 member Trinity United Church of Christ for 36 years until his retirement earlier this year. My search didn’t reveal a racist; instead I found a man who passionately, sometimes controversially, called upon fellow black Americans to rise out of the despair and setbacks of their troubled past to proudly and live out a life of service through their faith in Jesus Christ – who himself had to rise above oppression.
Wright’s tenure at Trinity started less than six years and seven miles from the very place where violent crowds opposed Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1966 Chicago marches for fair housing. Angry whites shouted racial slurs and hurled bottles, bricks and rocks at the marchers. A rock the size of a fist struck King in the face during one march, knocking him to the ground in a daze. Afterward, a clearly rattled King said, “I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen---even in Mississippi and Alabama---mobs as hostile and hate-filled as I’ve seen in Chicago. I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.”
It is ridiculous to expect a Wright, a black man preaching from that context in Chicago, to say things the same way Clothman, a white man in Montana, does. While I understand why Barack Obama distanced himself from Rev. Wright’s ill advised sermon comments, I respect Obama even more for continuing to embracing his former pastor. It seems Obama has listened to Jesus who taught us to pray, “Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others.” And, “You can’t get forgiveness from God, for instance, without also forgiving others. If you refuse to do your part, you cut yourself off from God’s part” (Matthew 6:12; 14-15).
Does that mean that I agree with everything Rev. Wright said in those inflammatory sound bites? No, but then I don’t agree with everything I’ve said in 20 years of sermons either. Do I understand where Rev. Wright is coming from? I’m certainly trying. And if the rest of America would do the same we’d find ourselves drawing ever closer to the dream of racial and social unity that Dr. Martin Luther King’s gave his life for 40 years ago.
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