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Post-Racial America? The Murder of Sean Bell and the Theology of Jeremiah Wright
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by Kristina Gronquist, W A M M
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Three New York police officers are acquitted on April 25 after pumping over 50 bullets into an innocent black man and father of two, Sean Bell. At the same time, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., retired pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, is being crucified in the media for his refusal to recant a people’s history of the United States. Time magazine’s opinion point man, Joe Klein (in its May 12 issue, which praises George Bush as “a leader of ideals, courage and sincerity,”) blasts Rev. Wright for what he believes is Wright’s continued promotion of “40 years of liberal self-laceration” which, to white males like Klein, means focusing on “historical beefs” as well as Wright’s refusal to blame his own black community for the problems it faces.
The majority of white Americans who responded so angrily to Wright’s sermons still embrace the rags to riches stories of Horatio Alger. Individual initiative and the courage to overcome great odds is something to be celebrated and honored, but the fact is that for every one story of a man or woman of color (or a poor person of any color) overcoming the impediments of an economic system controlled by elites for the benefit of the military-industrial complex, there are millions of stories of courageous people still struggling.
U.S. citizens who want to pretend that racism is largely a thing of the past are people who have had the privilege of never being affected by racism. Wright seeks to explain the racial barriers of both past and present. Unlike Time magazine’s Joe Klein, I don’t believe for one second that Wright does this as a method of “self-laceration,” to keep blacks from feeling like they cannot advance. Instead, he seeks to expose structural racism and convey the message that there is nothing inherently wrong with the black community, which is a liberating and powerful message.
Explaining that reality in his sermons, to the hundreds of people who flock to his church, is not preaching “hate,” as his detractors accuse, it is a presentation of how systems of hate have operated in this nation. He is describing, not despairing. White historian Howard Zinn has done this for years in his books and articles, and he has not been skewered publicly as Wright has.
For the media, pundits, and politicians that took Wright to task, the preacher’s biggest sin has been upsetting the status quo by naming the foreign policies of the U.S. as state-sponsored terrorism. His examples include but are not limited to: slaughtering the Indian people on their own soil to steal their land, the enslavement of Blacks, dropping nuclear bombs on civilians in Japan, supporting the Contras, and supporting apartheid in South Africa. He dared suggest, after the attacks of 9/11, what is obvious to people all over the world, that “you cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you.” But a key qualifier is always ignored: understanding why 9/11 happened does not translate into approval of it, nor does it mean one does not want to work proactively to keep it from happening again.
9/11 was the result of specific foreign policy mistakes related to the Middle East, mistakes that former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer details exhaustively in his first book, Imperial Hubris. Wright repeated the comments of U.S. ambassador Edward Peck, who said that 9/11 was a case of America’s “chickens coming home to roost.” Wright goes farther in that analysis than Scheuer or Peck, who are referring only to U.S. Middle East policies: supporting Saudi fighters and the Taliban in Afghanistan, support for corrupt leaders like Saddam Hussein, and Israeli policies that deny life and liberty to the Palestinian people.
Wright recognizes patterns of terrorism throughout U.S. foreign policy, from our inception as a nation all the way up to the events that have occurred in recent decades. For white male pundits who wish to protect the myth that U.S. foreign policy decisions are based on defending democracy, not on economic interests, Wright’s message is dangerous in its truth-shattering capacity and it has to be silenced with abject ridicule. It is one thing to start discussing, nicely, how certain people can rise above a biracial heritage, in a fictitious “post-racial” nation, but it is quite another to delve deeply into the dark abyss of race and imperialism, the places where Wright’s sermons dare to go. |
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© 2008 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete June 2008 Index - click here
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