Here Begins The Lesson

 

“He’s quoted saying...hold on, let me read this: ‘We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.’”

Barack Obama, A Promised Land, Crown, New York, 2020, p. 120. 

That’s Barack Obama quoting David Axelrod quoting Jeremiah Wright from a sermon reported in Rolling Stone published just before Obama announced his candidacy for President. My opinions on the Rev. Wright and Obama’s treatment of him haven’t changed, but I don’t bring this up to reopen that old subject.  I bring it up because the reaction Obama records to this statement is telling about how far we have moved in 14 years.

He admires Wright, even in his memoir; but he distances himself from Wright’s words and ideas:

In the middle of a scholarly exposition of the Book of Matthew or Luke, he might insert a scathing critique of America’s drug war, American militarism, capitalist greed, or the intractability of American racism, rants that were usually grounded in fact but bereft of context.  Often they sounded dated, as if he were channeling a college teach-in from 1968 rathe than leading a prosperous congregation that included police commanders, celebrities, wealthy businesspeople, and the Chicago school superintendent. And every so often what he said was just wrong, edging close to the conspiracy theories one heard on late-night public access stations or in the barbershop down the street.  It was as if this erudite, middle-aged, light-skinned Black man were straining for street cred, trying to “keep it real.”  Or maybe he just recognized—both within his congregation and within himself—the periodic need to let loose, to release pent-up anger from a lifetime of struggle in the face of chronic racism, reason and logic be damned.

You can make what you like of his reasoning, his analysis, his explanation and interpretation.  Myself, I think it’s subject to criticism. But in the context of 2021, this analysis and the statement quoted in the Rolling Stone article take on a profoundly different meaning.  Obama says of that quote:  “Still, the language he’d used was more incendiary than anything I’d heard before...”

It is almost hard to imagine that language as “incendiary’ anymore. In 14 years we’ve become so accustomed to discussing racism in America, and there’s really very little about Wright’s quote that marks it as extreme, especially in the face of current events and the last four years. We’re also quite accustomed to conspiracy theories; which doesn’t make them more acceptable than they were in 2007, but makes us a bit more discerning between radical ideas, and conspiratorial ones.

Am I arguing that things have improved?  No.  I’m arguing things are more complicated than Obama considered 14 years ago, or than he did when he wrote and approved that passage for publication.  Obama’s preference is clearly for “scholarly exposition” over an impassioned cri de couer, and one has to admit his presidency is what put current events (and the last four years) in motion.  This passage makes something of a time capsule, a snapshot of America that is already gone by.  Are we back in 1968 channeling a college teach-in?  Perhaps the lesson is closer to Faulkner’s observation:  the past isn’t over; it isn’t even past.  1968 might seem like a long time gone to a man born in 1961, but history is considerably less fluid and water doesn’t really flow under the bridge and away as the metaphor might make you think.  Tiresome as it might be to people who were children in ‘68 (and Obama is still technically a “Boomer”), or even to those born long after, even the past of pre-Civil War America is still with us.  And it may be that the lesson here is that language that seems “incendiary” is actually merely truthful.

And we could certainly use more truth.

In the context of the more recent posts about church attendance and organized religion, I should also point out in this passage about Obama’s former pastor, Obama admits his “broader skepticism toward organized religion.”  That plays into his reaction, too.  But to me the interesting thing here is how little things have changed; and how little Obama seems to have reflected on that change.  Still, while it’s not a scholarly exposition, the pastor in me thinks there is still a lesson here.