Maynard Institute archives

Wright Hits Back

by richard0542

Some Say Cultural Divide Makes His Words Poison

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright fired back at critics and the news media Monday in a speech at the National Press Club, reaping shouts of approval from fellow members of the black clergy but raising doubts from black journalists that the comments would be received favorably by white voters or translated in a positive way by culturally distant reporters and pundits.

Wright, who stepped down recently as pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, said the attacks on him were “an attack on the black church launched by people who know nothing about the African American religious tradition.” Other clergy members present seemed to agree.

The comments by Wright, former pastor to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., were broadcast live on C-Span. They followed a Friday night interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, a sermon Sunday at a Dallas church and a speech later Sunday to the Detroit branch of the NAACP, all coming after weeks of silence. Throughout, Wright made it clear that he was not part of the Obama campaign and had his own priorities.

Obama reciprocated, and “sought anew to distance himself” after Wright’s appearance at the press club, Mike Dorning reported from Wilmington, N.C., on the Chicago Tribune blog, “The Swamp.”

“Some of the comments that Rev. Wright has made offend me, and I understand why they offend the American people. He does not speak for me. He does not speak for the campaign,” Obama said.

“Many of the statements that he’s made, both that triggered this initial controversy and that he’s made over the last several days, are not statements that I have heard him make previously. They don’t represent my views,” the senator added, according to Dorning’s story.

[Obama went further at a news conference in Winston-Salem, N.C., on Tuesday.]

In his formal speech Monday, Wright sought to explain the African American religious tradition and its evolution into “black liberation theology” in the 1960s, explaining that the oppressed and the oppressors do not view Christianity in the same way.

“The prophetic tradition of the black church has its roots in Isaiah, the 61st 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 who are holding them captive,” he said.

“The prophetic theology of the Black Church in our day is preached to set African Americans and all other Americans free from the misconceived notion that different means deficient.”

It was in the question-and-answer session that Wright let loose. “Why am I speaking out now?” he said in answer to one question. “In our community, we have something called playing the dozens. If you think I’m going to let you talk about my mama and her religious tradition, and my daddy and his religious tradition, and my grandma, you’ve got another thing coming.”

He answered questions submitted in advance by audience members that seemed to exasperate not just Wright, but members of the audience. Many of those who asked seemed not to have done their homework. Even moderator Donna Leinwand of USA Today seemingly acknowledged she hadn’t watched the complete sermon containing the controversial sound bites, after Wright asked whether she had.

“No one seems to have heard of Cone or black liberation theology before last week, for instance,” veteran journalist Angela P. Dodson, who followed Wright’s appearances Sunday and Monday, told Journal-isms, “or the United Church of Christ and the fact that it is a white institution. ‘Wright is black, Obama is black, therefore church is all black’ seems to be the mentality,” said Dodson, referring to James Cone, theorist of the black liberation theology movement.

Wright took questions about the most-played sound bites from his sermons. To one on whether he really believed the U.S. government helped spread AIDS, Wright cited Dr. Leonard Horowitz’s book “Emerging Viruses” and Harriet A. Washington’s award-winning “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.” “I believe our government is capable of anything,” Wright said.

To the sound bite in which Wright said, “Not God bless America, God damn America for treating its citizens like less than human beings,” often shortened in sound bites to “Not God bless America, God damn America,” Wright replied, “If you saw the Bill Moyers show, I was talking about — although it got edited out — you know, that’s biblical. God doesn’t bless everything. God condemns something — and d-e-m-n, ‘demn,’ is where we get the word ‘damn.’ God damns some practices.

“And there is no excuse for the things that the government, not the American people, have done. That doesn’t make me not like America or unpatriotic.” In a dig at one of his critics, Vice President Cheney, Wright said he had served six years in the military. “How many years did Cheney serve?

About his suggestion that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were “chickens coming home to roost” for U.S. foreign policy, Wright insisted he was merely quoting Edward Peck, a former ambassador to Iraq who opposed the war, and added, “You can’t do terrorism on other people and not expect it to come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic principles.”

Those were the comments that made news outside the hall, but not the ones that most resonated with members of the audience, who had assembled for a conference on black theology. “It was an opportunity for a very well-prepared pastor to teach America about the foundations of racism and for it to live up to its doctrines,” Anthony Evans, president of the National Black Church Initiative, told Journal-isms. “They picked on the wrong man. He represents for us the finest example of what a prepared black preacher is all about.”

Larry Murphy, a faculty member at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill., said Wright “acquitted himself well. He framed the questions in the appropriate categories, because this is, in fact, not an issue of Rev. Wright. It really is an issue of the larger African American experience” and the responsibility of the black clergy to respond to the events of the times.

But on the e-mail list of the National Association of Black Journalists, where most who commented assessed the event from live television coverage, Wright’s speech played out differently.

“All the Wright drama can do is hurt Obama among white voters, especially the undecideds,” one said. “White people (and some blacks) know basically nothing about the historical black church (as opposed to the less monolithic and changing contemporary black church) and were petrified by what they saw and heard in Wright’s pulpit. Many won’t forget it, and they associate it with Obama.”

“He should have stayed above the fray. He should have remained as this learned, theological scholar. When he starts talking about ‘playing the dozens’ and ‘talking about my mama,’ then that ain’t cute. That doesn’t come across well,” said another.

“It’s not a fair fight. Rev. Wright is much more learned and articulate than almost all of those who are covering and commenting on him,” said a third.

Others thought Wright was showing too much ego.

The resulting Web site headlines answered for some how it would be reported: Obama’s former pastor says he has been ‘crucified’ by the media” (Los Angeles Times); “Wright Says Criticism Is Attack on Black Church” (New York Times); “Rev. Wright Stays in Spotlight, Possible Problem for Obama Camp” (Wall Street Journal).

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Newsweek Package Explores Obama’s “Bubba Gap”

 

 

“Our cover this week explores what we are calling Obama’s Bubba gap,” Newsweek editor Jon Meacham tells readers this week, speaking of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.

“As Evan Thomas, Holly Bailey and Richard Wolffe write, the John McCain campaign is no longer frightened by the prospect of a general election against Obama. Only in America, it seems, could the first major African-American presidential candidate be seen by some as more elitist than Clinton, who has spent the last 30 years in a governor’s mansion, the White House or the U.S. Senate,” he continued, referencing Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.

“In a series of essays by Jonathan Alter, Ellis Cose, Raina Kelley and Karl Rove, we explore the complexities of class and race — complexities that are finding daily expression in the campaign. Jonathan Darman asks a big question: what happened to Bill Clinton? How did the darling of the African-American community become so blinded by ambition for his wife that many of his most loyal supporters believe he has done himself permanent damage? (Though with Bill Clinton there is really no such thing as truly permanent damage.) As a reminder of the debate to come, Fareed Zakaria weighs in on McCain’s bipolar foreign policy.”

Meanwhile, Sam Stein of the Huffington Post, Colbert I. King of the Washington Post and Jack White of theRoot.com wonder how it escaped the attention of the news media that Clinton’s Pennsylvania primary chair, Gov. Ed Rendell, heaped praise on the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan after then-Mayor Rendell invited Farrakhan to Philadelphia to defuse tensions in 1997.

Clinton raised the spectre of a connection between Obama and Farrakhan in the now-infamous April 16 ABC debate in Philadelphia, and her attempts to make Farrakhan the kiss of death went unchallenged.

That debate was criticized for its emphasis on tabloid-style questions, and the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times said on Monday that “All three candidates should challenge reporters who dwell on gossipy or tangential subjects to ask instead about issues voters care about — or should.” Its editorial supplied “10 questions the American people deserve to hear answered.”

In further recognition of the role race is playing in the campaign, the Washington Post led its paper on Saturday with a story by Jonathan Weisman and Matthew Mosk, “Party Fears Racial Divide; Attacks Could Do Lasting Harm, Democrats Say.”

The Sunday talk shows began to acknowledge the role not just of race, but of racism. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” reporter Andrea Mitchell said:

“Let me just say something from being on the ground in Pennsylvania and in Ohio. I think racism is a real factor here.

“I don’t think it’s being polled correctly, because I don’t think it can be polled correctly. I think it is what you see in some of his failure to connect with a particular sector of the electorate, and I’m not sure how you get your arms around it, but I think it is a real issue; that there is a resistance to him on some level in the electorate, and you hear these things from voters when you talk to them — ‘Oh, I heard that he’s not really a Christian,’ ‘Oh, he didn’t put his hand over his heart.’ All this willingness to believe totally erroneous things about Barack Obama, which begins to congeal, and I think it’s a problem.”

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4 Nights in Filthy Prison for “Committing Journalism”

“Prison movies had made me fear predation,” Barry Bearak wrote Sunday in the New York Times, recalling his arrest in Zimbabwe for “committing journalism.”

 

 

“But the inmates were instead a forlorn lot, a fair selection of Harare’s downtrodden, people who’d once had decent jobs and who’d now been reduced to scrounging and worse. Two of the more personable ones were car thieves. Only because their families were starving, they said. Two others, Donald and Lancelot, were accused of poaching after cutting the hindquarter off a deer that had been hit by a bus.

“We mingled easily, swapping stories and comparing bug bites. Most were in a worse fix than we were. None said they’d been beaten; they weren’t political types. But few had lawyers — and many were jailed without their families knowing. This had dismal implications. The jail provided prisoners no food. If no one knew you were there, no one knew to bring you something to eat.”

Of his crime, Bearak wrote, “One of my captors, Detective Inspector Dani Rangwani, described the offense to me as something despicable, almost hissing the words: ‘You’ve been gathering, processing and disseminating the news.'”

Bearack was arrested April 3 after arriving in Zimbabwe to cover the March 29 elections, in which the results in the presidential race have still not been released. After four nights, his case was thrown out.

He wrote on Sunday, “I had left the cells with a case of scabies, an infestation of microscopic mites that swelled my hands and wrists to nearly twice their size. But I am better now, back in Johannesburg, with Celia, with our sons, Max, 17, and Sam, 12.”

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Paper Prefers “Indian” to “Native American”

Native American or American Indian? “We use the term American Indian for several reasons,” David Zeeck, editor of the News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., told readers on Sunday. “One, it’s what the federal government uses (the Bureau of Indian Affairs, for example) and it’s the legal term used in most treaties and contracts.

 

 

“Two, it’s what The Associated Press Stylebook (the Bible for language usage by most of the news media) uses. The stylebook also allows use of the term Native American when used by a speaker or in the name of an organization. Most all news copy comes to us using American Indian.

“There’s also common usage. The Smithsonian named its relatively new museum the National Museum of the American Indian. Russell Means, the famous Indian activist, has been quoted as saying he prefers the term Indian and abhors the term Native American.

“Means is not alone. A Census Bureau survey (1995) showed more Indians preferred the term Indian (50 percent) to Native American (37 percent). And journalist Charles C. Mann noted in the appendix to his 2005 best-seller, ‘1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,’ that virtually all the native people he met in researching the book referred to themselves as Indians.”

Tim Giago, the veteran Native columnist, wrote this in 2005: “So where did this word ‘Indian’ derive? The Spanish friars who accompanied the Italian navigator Columbus to the land he called The New World, although it was a world old to the indigenous people, were so enamored of the total trust and innocence of the inhabitants that in Spanish they called them Los ninos in Dios, The children of God. This was, of course, soon shortened to ‘Indios.’

“And even today, throughout South and Central America, the indigenous people are still called ‘Indios.’ As the European cultures bumped into each other in North America the name again changed to ‘Indian’ in America and Canada.”

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Sean Bell Verdict Saturates New York TV, Radio

“Local television stations blew out everything Friday morning for the Sean Bell verdict, then almost audibly held their breath while waiting to see if the blanket acquittals” of the detectives on trial “would trigger an explosive aftermath,” David Hinckley wrote Saturday in the New York Daily News.

 

 

 

“Their sigh of relief at the largely orderly response among Bell supporters stood in sharp contrast to the tone at black radio stations, where many hosts and callers immediately expressed frustration and fury.”

In the New York Times, Manny Fernandez wrote Sunday, “New York controversies have a way of playing out along racial lines in a city that is diverse but often seems stratified. When Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant, was killed by the police in a blast of 41 shots in the doorway of a Bronx apartment building in 1999, his death became shorthand for excessive police force against minorities.”

Yet in the aftermath of the not-guilty verdict in the case of Bell, killed in a hail of 50 police bullets in 2006, “many black New Yorkers reacted not with outrage but with a muted reserve, saying that the city felt like a less polarized place in 2008, nearly a decade after the Diallo shooting and with a different mayor and police commissioner.

“Some also said that after a seven-week trial, the picture of what happened the night Mr. Bell, a black man, was killed was still murky, and so they left the public outcry to a relatively small group of black activists who had been closely monitoring the case.”

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Short Takes

  • “The Orange County Register and its affiliated publications are laying off between 80 and 90 employees, or 5 percent of its workforce, because of declining advertising revenue, President and Publisher Terry Horne said Monday,” Jan Norman reported in the California newspaper. “Horne said declines in real estate and classified job advertising have created a short-term financial problem that forced the cutbacks, which are scheduled to be completed on Wednesday.”
  • “In an effort to streamline its operations, The News & Observer Publishing Co. will offer voluntary buyout packages to some employees today,” Sue Stock reported Monday in the Raleigh, N.C., newspaper. “The package will be offered to 204 of the newspaper’s roughly 900 employees, though only a small percentage of those people are expected to accept and leave the company.”

 

 
  • The Atlanta Falcons needed a defensive tackle, but they needed a quarterback, too, and they passed on LSU defensive tackle Glenn Dorsey, who is black, to take Boston College quarterback Matt Ryan, who is white, in the first surprise of Saturday’s NFL Draft, Clark Judge wrote for CBSSports.com. Then the zinger: “Ryan reportedly was the choice of Atlanta owner Arthur Blank, and he makes sense as the new face of the franchise. Ryan is bright. He’s articulate. And he doesn’t own pit bulls.”
  • A CNN Web page on the world food crisis features reports and stories from around the globe, many of which aired last week. The Washington Post is running a four-part series on the crisis by Anthony Faiola.
  • Marcus Dixon, who spent 15 months in prison for aggravated child molestation for having sex with a 15-year-old classmate in 2003 before the Georgia Supreme Court voted 4-3 to overturn his conviction, is now 6-foot-4, 294 pounds, 23 years old, and a gifted pass-rusher at Hampton University who signed as a free agent with the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday. But in a story for ESPN.com, “Draft prospect determined to address doubts about his character,” Dixon carried even more of a burden. A correction reads, “In an April 24 story on ESPN.com about NFL draft prospect Marcus Dixon, a scouting breakdown provided by ESPN’s Scouts Inc., erroneously reported that Dixon had been charged with criminal damage and disorderly conduct in August of 2007. Dixon was not involved in any such an incident and was never charged with those crimes.”
  • “Struggling media giant Radio One has agreed to give founder and chairman Cathy Hughes and her son, chief executive Alfred C. Liggins III, substantial raises and bonuses as part of new three-year pay packages,” Anita Huslin reported Saturday in the Washington Post. Hughes’ salary would increase at least 75 percent and Liggins would receive a 70 percent increase over the $575,370 he made in 2007, the story said.
  • “ImpreMedia’s New York City Spanish-language daily El Diario La Prensa surged 7.6% in weekday circulation, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) FAS-FAX released Monday,” Editor & Publisher reported. “El Diario reported weekday sales of 53,856 copies, up from 50,047 a year ago. El Diario is one of only three Spanish-language dailies audited by ABC that remain paid-circulation papers. The two others — La Opinion in Los Angeles and El Nuevo Herald in Miami — reported decreases in weekday and Sunday circulation for the six-month period ended March 31.”
  • In Gabon, West Africa, Reporters Without Borders condemned the police beating of cameraman Claude Aba Mboula of privately owned TV station Télé Africa as Mboula filmed police violence during a street protest. “Cases of journalists on the job being physically attacked by police are increasing dangerously in Gabon and must one day be punished or else the climate of impunity will just encourage them to continue,” the press freedom organization said on Monday.
  • “A story on claims of torture at alleged secret government-run detention centers led authorities in Uganda to arrest three top journalists and seize materials and documents on Saturday, according to local journalists and news reports,” the Committee to Protect Journalists said on Monday.

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Feedback: Wright Is Gift to Closet Racists

Well, the bigots on the far right have finally found a “smoking gun” with which to torpedo Barack Obama’s presidential ambitions.

Did I say smoking gun? Loose cannon is actually more fitting. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, currently grasping his 15 minutes of fame, can’t seem to find enough targets at which to aim his verbal potshots or enough venues in which to launch them. It’s good theater and rich fodder for the current breed of newscasters and pundits who would rather focus on the trivial nonsense and guilt-by-whatever-association gotcha game that has characterized this campaign.

Meanwhile, they virtually ignore the substantive issues that will markedly shape our lives in the coming decades.

Rev. Wright will enjoy his brief taste of notoriety and perhaps sell more copies of his book than he ever thought possible. Then he’ll fade into obscurity. But the real victim of his verbal diarrhea could well be Mr. Obama, who will see his poll numbers and chance to become the nation’s first president of color dwindle with each Wright diatribe and the mandatory media dissection that will follow.

The closet racists will be able to stay in the closet as long as they have Wright’s remarks and Obama’s relatively tenuous connection with the man to point to as their excuse for rejecting his candidacy. Wright’s is the gift that keeps on giving.

The pity is that this highly educated and articulate minister has no grasp of the bigger picture at stake.

Joseph N. Boyce
Indianapolis, Ind.
April 28, 2008

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Feedback: Wright Story Shows Need for Diversity

A diverse slate of presidential candidates, historic in itself, begs the question of why the mainstream press still struggles with diversifying the corps of reporters covering those candidates. But for the few columnists who write from the periphery and a handful of pundits, diversity is rare.

Even when the television networks have employed the voices of black pundits, the diversity often stops at appearance. What typically comes out of the pundit is largely what everyone else is saying. On ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Friday, Juan Williams, who never looked more like a minstrel, joined the head-bobbing Cokie Roberts in agreeing with the brow-furled Diane Sawyer in declaring that Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s interview with Bill Moyers, which aired on PBS Friday night, would do more harm than good to presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.

It is clear that the mainstream media have not done their homework. They have not read any of Sen. Obama’s autobiographical work. Had they done so, they would know that Sen. Obama could no more sit under a hate-spewing pastor than he could give up hope —the very cornerstone of his political career. Had they read either of the books, they would ask questions calculated to illuminate what it was about Wright’s ministry that could be attractive to a person of Obama’s convictions. They would not propagate the notion that Rev. Wright is a “paranoid” (Newsweek’s word) anti-American cult leader, and Obama his faithful follower.

More to the point, if the msm had a few more African Americans on the trail, there might be one who grew up in a traditional black church who could have brought the truth to bear: African American preachers preach with didactic passion, making a few hard-hitting points, building a crescendo that ushers in an opportunity to give the listeners a reason to cling to their hope in Jesus Christ. At the end of the sermon, the entire message is neatly tied into an invitation to Christian fellowship. It’s not liberal theology or whatever convenient label the msm are giving it. It is simply the black church speaking truth to black people. But America cannot know this because there are not enough free-thinking black journalists on the trail who could tell them.

What I saw of the PBS interview was honest and authentically Rev. Wright. After the show, I called my mother. She was crying. She was so moved at the reverend’s eloquence and learned demeanor in making clear what African Americans already knew: Chiefly, that certain words were excised from the “Chickens Coming Home to Roost” sermon for the express purpose of obliterating Obama’s lead by linking him to what appeared to be a madman. Finally, the nation would hear the entire context from which the infamous words were taken. She had been vindicated.

A more racially balanced campaign corps might pose the question of what lies behind America’s indignation. We might ask ourselves whether Rev. Wright’s comments give voters a convenient excuse for not putting a man of African descent in the White House.

Perhaps one reporter would have explored the reason why John McCain went to New Orleans’ Ninth ward last week and noted that Texas televangelist John Hagee, a McCain supporter, declared that Hurricane Katrina was God’s wrath for the sin of the people who live in New Orleans.

A diverse press corps might publicly opine that it would be difficult to win over voters in the Ninth Ward with that kind incendiary and offensive rhetoric. Furthermore, we would be reading about how Rev. Hagee’s comments have not had to bear the same scrutiny as Rev. Wright sermons.

Karen P. Moody
Baltimore
April 27, 2008

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