Putting Jeremiah Wright In Context

Two more appalling statements from Jeremiah Wright. Here is how he describes the Fourth of July:

[Y]our celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy–a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Got that? A nation of savages. Small wonder Obama won't wear an American flag lapel pin. And here is Wright's disgraceful theological pretense for his Chomskyite anti-Americanism:

God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war…And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place…[God will say], "If you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power."

So the "hateful" rhetoric was hardly out of the ordinary for Wright. Obama must have heard it, or something like it, and continued going to church at Trinity. He should probably quit the race now, right? Except that the first remark is from a Frederick Douglass speech in 1852, and the second from a Martin Luther King, Jr. sermon in 1968.

Now that Douglass and King have been anointed saints in our civil religion, it's uncouth, to put it mildly, to speak ill of either of them. But if statements such as these — and needless to say, there are plenty more where they came from — were actually Jeremiah Wright's and preserved on celluloid, can anyone sincerely doubt they'd have made it into the media carnival this past weekend? That Fox News hosts would have worked themselves up to sexual satisfaction that much more quickly with the added material for their feedback loop? That Roger L. Simon would have squeezed out a couple more stanzas about how he wouldn't have personally given black people the right to vote if he knew Obama would attend church with such a psychopath? That Charles Krauthammer would have gleefully made use of the extra grist with which to excoriate Obama for "expos[ing] [his] children to…vitriolic divisiveness"? That enterprising radio talk show hosts and McCain staffers would have spliced such damaging goods into their two-minute hate already featuring cameos by Malcolm X and protesting black Olympic athletes?

How much conceptual space is there, really, between thundering "God damn America for killing innocent people" and ventriloquizing a promise from God to "break the backbone of your power," between declaring America guilty of "practices more shocking and bloody" than any other country on earth and framing the 9/11 attacks as "chickens coming home to roost"? And which remark from each pair would count as more "incendiary" under the standards Wright — but never, under any circumstances, his counterparts in the white evangelical community — is being judged?

By the same token, we need not suspend judgment about how the Krauthammers of
King's and Douglass's generations would have responded to justified angry black rhetoric even in the contexts of slavery and segregation, since we know how they did respond. In the wake of the church bombings in Birmingham, National Review warned darkly that "it now appears that Birmingham's Negroes will never be content so long as the white population is free to be free." As late as 1964, the flagship rag of the conservative movement bitterly inveighed against "the ludicrously named 'civil rights movement' — that is, the Negro revolt." (This is just scratching the surface.)

The vast majority of those who presently decry "chickens coming home to roost" rhetoric as instrinsically a form of hate speech have concluded on those grounds alone that Wright is a hatemonger with whom no decent person could ever be associated. Would the same crowd have watched King or Douglass denouncing the US in even stronger terms, and then taken a nuanced, holistic view of their lives and deeds? Please.

Barack Obama diagnosed Jeremiah Wright's errors with surgical precision:

[H]e spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow. 

Of course, the contexts in which Douglass and King spoke and wrote were very different from Wright's: slavery and pervasive legalized persecution, respectively. That discrepancy is what's objectionable about Wright's remarks. On the other hand, Wright lived through the latter experience, and was raised in living memory of the former. Moreover, King's comments were about Vietnam and had nothing to do with racial justice; so the context for them is not relevantly different from the context of Wright's denunciations of American foreign policy.

There is no form of reverse political correctness that requires us to feign ignorance about the reason — not the justification or excuse, but the reason — for Wright's antipathies. Or to pretend that the cartoon of Wright, devoid of any context or biography, accurately represents reality.