Djelloul Marbrook

The squalls of hypocrisy accompanying disclosure that Barack Obama’s pastor of some twenty years has been inveighing against our cultural doubleness, one society for people of color and another for whites, is something like a national case of reflux.

Is it big news we live in two societies—black and white, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, big-mouthed and voiceless? Sure, it’s big news when the White House is within the reach of someone of color. But that’s the only time it’s big news, when we’re actually in danger of proving ourselves a democracy.

Is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright a bit on the loud side? Yes, like any number of big-mouthed, right-wing Christian preachers, like any number of ignorant Muslim clerics, like any number of extremist Israeli preachers. But we’re not all aflutter and agog because of those right-wingers, are we? We profess to understand them, even when we dissent. But when African-American preachers remind us of the arduous and unfinished journey of their people towards justice we see it as an offense to our delicate sensibilities.

In a fit of seeming fairness the pundits are saying it’s the appearance of Wright’s intemperate preaching that endangers Obama’s campaign, not the content. In other words, Obama appears to have sat for decades listening to racist screed, and that will tilt undecided voters
against him. Of course, the press isn’t engineering the tilt, is it? Was it racist or unvarnished?

If Barack Obama has been listening to a preacher inveigh against social injustice and imperialist policy, so have other people of color. Why? Because there is injustice, because they know what it feels like to live in an unjust world about which politicians are in convenient denial.

What the tsk-tskers so operatically complained about last Sunday morning on television was that here they thought we might have a token person of color running for the White House and now it turns out we might have a real person of color running for it.

And, in their gospel, that means he couldn’t possibly represent white America, or green or red or blue America, because, well, he would just be too different. And that would mean that a Native American would be too different, or an Hispanic. It would mean we really want someone who can fool us about who he is. Or who she is.

Throughout our brief history we have sat in pews listening to foul trash about Catholics, about Jews, about Baptists, Methodists, Christian Scientists, agnostics, you name it. Today we’re sitting in our pews listening to trash about Muslims. But when it’s disclosed that Senator Obama has heard his preacher talk about what the vast majority of African-Americans feel, well, suddenly it’s a major campaign issue.

Come on, who are we kidding but ourselves? I don’t want to listen to someone in the style of Jeremiah Wright yakking at me, but lest we forget, our sons and daughters serve in our armed forces to protect the right of someone like Jeremiah Wright to preach what he pleases, and that goes for the Rev. Pat Robertson and and the Rev. James Dobson, too.

Barack Obama has held out a vision of a post-racial America. We’ll see if this is too sweet for the media.—DM