Had YouTube been in play when King walked the earth, he might very well have been slammed as an anti-American racist who allowed politics to get the best of his religion, the same way many view Wright today. Some may say that forty years ago King had better reason for bitterness than Wright does in our enlightened “post-racial” America. But that would put too fine a point on arguable gains. It would also prove just how much we do not know about the prophetic energy of the black church.
The black church was born when politics got the best of the white church and kept its leaders from extending Christian love to black folk. Blacks left a church that favored white supremacy over religious kinship to praise God in their own sanctuaries, on their own terms. Courageous slave ministers like Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner hatched revolts against slave masters. Harriet Tubman was inspired by her religious belief to lead hundreds of black souls out of slavery. For many blacks, then and now, religion and social rebellion go hand in hand.
For most of their history, the black pulpit has been the freest place for black people; the church has been the place where blacks gathered to enhance social networks, gain education, wage social struggle, and to express the grief and glory of black existence. The preacher was one of the few black figures free from white interests and unbound by white money. Because black folk paid his salary, he could speak his mind and that of his congregation. The preacher often said things that most blacks believed but were afraid to say. He used his eloquence and erudition to defend the vulnerable and assail the powerful. King richly enlivened the prophetic tradition.
Obama has seized on the early King to remind Americans what we can achieve when we allow our imaginations to soar high as we dream big. Wright has taken after the later King, who uttered prophetic truths that are easily caricatured when snatched from their religious and racial contexts. For instance, Wright built to his “God damn America” climax by probing the political roots of racism in his sermon. Wright’s homily rages against the oppression of vulnerable black citizens and scorns America for believing it is God, a mistake made long ago by Israel and Babylon. “The government gives [blacks] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”27 An incurable love fueled King’s hopefulness and rage and united them in his early and later periods. King’s example reminds us that as we dream, we must remember the poor and vulnerable who live a nightmare. And as we strike out in prophetic anger against injustice, love must cushion even our hardest blows.
Obama need not speak in rage to challenge white America to live up to its ideals, just as he challenges black America to do the same. But he may have calculated that King’s mantle was too much to handle. Again, the leader’s name noticeably disappeared from Obama’s speeches as he got nearer to the Oval Office. Though he may have choked up when rehearsing his acceptance speech for the nomination of the Democratic Party in 2008, timed to coincide with the forty-fifth anniversary of the March on Washington, Obama choked off formal recognition of King in his speech by referring to the leader only as the “young preacher from Georgia.” Where his speechwriter may have aspired to a felicitous turn of phrase that captured King’s vocation and expressed his race-less universality, Obama might have inserted King’s name as a metaphor for rescuing the unnamed from their anonymous fates.
If a man whose name adorns a national holiday can be slighted for fear that he will eclipse the moment or otherwise taint the transcendent aspirations of a campaign that his very blood made possible, it is a slight that should be called out. Obama may have felt that it was enough to set the tone of the night with the civil rights pageantry that preceded his speech, featuring John Lewis and King’s children. That does not, however, make up for failing to mention his rhetorical and symbolic benefactor once he arrived at the big dance, especially since he had borrowed King’s style and phrases to get there.
The slight was repeated and compounded the day after the celebration of King’s eightieth birthday, when his name was not mentioned at all in Obama’s first inaugural address. King should have been named, not because he was black, but because, like Lincoln—who was named, not referred to in the speech as a tall man from Illinois with a long beard—King was a great American who forged the path of destiny for a young black man from Hawaii who made Chicago his home before making the White House his castle, and who might not have had the opportunity to make that speech had King not been murdered in Memphis. The distance from King’s assassination to Obama’s inauguration is a quantum leap of racial progress with a timeline neither cynics nor boosters could have predicted. As Obama continues to mine the rhetorical riches of the prophetic black church and of King’s eloquence, he might offer the nation greater gain by sampling as well their courage, and learn to risk his reputation just a bit to tell the truth and serve his nation even better.
Obama’s dilemma of being leader of the free world while having sprouted from black religious soil raises the question of how much black sacred rhetoric can survive the flight from prophecy to political power. Much of the rhetoric of the black church has been drawn from the imagery of the oppressed and powerless. Obama said in his memoir Dreams from My Father that when he attended Trinity Church in Chicago, he “imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh.”28 Now he is in the unique position of having reversed the course: from the ranks of the oppressed has come a ruler. Pharaoh has yielded to Moses. David is now Goliath. Does a leader who sees himself as Joshua have the heart to carry the hopes of his people into the Promised Land? I will take that up later, but for now, I want to address how Obama brilliantly, shrewdly, and often disturbingly grappled with Jeremiah Wright’s ideas in one of the most famous race speeches in the nation’s history.
Wright Turns, Wrong Lanes
During the primary season of 2008 Obama did well on Super Tuesday and chalked up eleven primary victories across the nation in February during Black History Month as the candidate made unprecedented history of his own. But in March, black history gave way to white hysteria when snippets of old sermons by Jeremiah Wright were purchased from Trinity Church and reported on by ABC before quickly migrating to cyberspace, where they were endlessly looped on YouTube. Besides his infamous invocation that “God damn America,” Wright argued that America is run by rich whites, that AIDS was invented to destroy black folk, and that our country is “the US of KKK A,” even as he mocked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as “Cond-amnesia.” In the ominous shadow of 9/11, Wright lit a prophetic fuse by declaring that when America bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye.” Wright charged that the United States supported “state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards.” And with a dramatic flourish not uncommon in the theater of black prophecy, Wright twirled his hand above his head to punctuate his deliberately slowed cadence in declaring that “America’s chickens are coming . . . home . . . to roost.”
Obama bravely attempted to place Wright’s comments in a broader racial and social context.29 He claimed in an interview with the Chicago Tribune that Wright was like “your uncle who says things you profoundly disagree with, but he’s still your uncle.” Obama characterized Wright as an “aging pastor” who had reached maturity in the sixties, and like many black men “of fierce intelligence coming up” in that era, Wright carried “a lot of the language and the memories and the baggage of those times.” Obama said he “profoundly” disagreed with Wright’s views and that he, Obama, represented “a different generation with just a different set of life experiences,” who saw “race relations in
just a different set of terms than [Wright] does.” Obama acknowledged Wright’s religious influence and theological prominence while carefully separating his pastor from his political orbit. Foreshadowing the tack he would soon take in his race speech, Obama refused to disown Wright and voluntarily asked himself a question that was on the minds of millions: “And so the question then for me becomes what’s my relationship to that past? You know, I can completely just disown it and say I don’t understand it, but I do understand it. I understand the context with which he developed his views, but also can still reject [them] unequivocally.”30
Obama’s laudable effort to clarify Wright’s views blended nicely with the shrug offered by most blacks to Wright’s comments, knowing as they did that such thoughts routinely boom from the prophet’s microphone in the black church. It is true that pastors who address the spiritual and moral needs of their church members by praying for them when they are sick or counseling them through trouble outnumber ministers who do all of that and still find time to rail against society’s ills. But socially minded pastors often take to pulpits across the nation to object to unjust wars or unfair labor practices or to scold the powers that be for their neglect of the poor and vulnerable.
Even when black Christians do not share their pastors’ politics or agree with their slant on scripture to support an argument, they are not alarmed to hear clergy take on the government or powerful public figures. Prophets in the pulpit are like blues artists: they sing dirges that brim with irony and tragedy; they try to lessen suffering through comic gestures of defiance; they amplify, and then diminish, black pain through gut-wrenching poetry; and they trade freely in bombast and hyperbole to beat back the demons of fear and anxiety. Most black folk get the moral intent of black prophecy and believe that they and their divine mouthpieces have a God-given right to express their gripes in the privacy of sacred space. They do not mistake anger at America’s imperial excesses for hatred of the nation or a denial of the wonderful changes that can unfold in the country when courage weds imagination.
The Wright debacle proved that many citizens have no idea how instrumental the church has been to black progress. The black church is quite literally a sounding board for vetting ideas and voicing frustrations so black folk can stay sane in the midst of America’s denial of black humanity. Prophetic preachers also function as existentialist philosophers and absurdist novelists. Like homegrown Jean Paul Sartres and Frantz Fanons, prophets spout theories about what harms or unnerves us; at other times they weave stories about making the black self into something fiercely beautiful. Their sermons help black folk resist the evil seductions of white supremacy. Very few members go away from such homilies without hope for their future or belief in their individual importance. Very few leave without a sense of God’s care for their burdens and traumas.
But it quickly became clear that the white mainstream had little patience for either Wright’s existentialist blues or Obama’s dutiful deconstruction of them. When Obama’s literary criticism and cultural analysis failed to win the day, he turned to outright condemnation to distance himself from Wright’s controversial views.
But Obama would have to help bind the nation’s racial wounds by showing familiarity with the ancient injuries of bigotry even as he looked to a future unscarred by race. He would also have to reduce the swelling of trouble in his campaign caused by a combination of devilishly irritating forces: political foes in his own party, right-wing ideologues, an insatiable but poorly informed media, and an insecure public that was very nervous about how Wright’s words might have rubbed off on Obama’s humanity. Obama had sold himself as a conciliatory figure who could bring all sides together because of his biracial heritage and his unruffled demeanor. Now that promise seemed ruined; his chance for victory appeared slim, and there was grave doubt that he could make the kind of history millions had envisioned for him. If Obama had been searching for the right time to get the monkey of race off his back, he certainly could not have picked a more dramatic moment to cast off the metaphoric long-tailed mammal: he was getting battered in the media and was facing critical primary battles in April. With all that pressure Obama mounted a rostrum in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008, and rode into history with an eloquent speech that saved his campaign and ultimately got him elected president. Obama’s oration justly won wide acclaim while laying bare troubling aspects of his reading of the nation’s racial compact.
Speech of a Lifetime
Obama stepped onstage at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center in full patriotic splendor with four Stars and Stripes adorning either side of the podium. Like Martin Luther King Jr. forty-five years before him in his “I Have a Dream” speech on the National Mall, Obama strove to link his language to America’s glorious if imperfect past. In King’s case, the dream metaphor cascaded down the mountain of history that loomed symbolically over his shoulder in the presence of Abraham Lincoln’s majestic memorial.31 The title of Obama’s speech, “A More Perfect Union,” rooted him in the vast reaches of the country’s origins and tied him to the Founding Fathers who once thronged a hall across the street from where Obama now stood to set a nation on its path to democratic adventure. Obama brilliantly condensed and conveyed the sweep of American history: the crafting of the Constitution, the stain of slavery on that document and the national conscience, the fateful specter of the Civil War, and the noble resistance of valiant souls in the civil rights movement. Obama boldly drew a direct line from history to his story to suggest that the nation’s future resembled his family past and present—a daring move that teemed with the sort of confidence of destiny that falls every so often on a national figure. His biracial story, Obama concluded, “seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts—that out of many, we are truly one.”32
Obama briefly described how his message of unity countered traditional lines of division in the South and a media hungry for signs of racial polarization—and suspicions about the candidate being too black or not black enough. Obama acknowledged that racial divisiveness had recently flared at two extremes. On the one hand, former congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic vice presidential candidate in 1984, and a Hillary Clinton backer, although unmentioned here by name, had made the accusation, in Obama’s telling, that his candidacy was “an exercise in affirmative action” driven by “wide-eyed liberals” who wanted to “purchase reconciliation on the cheap.” Ferraro had complained in March 2008 that Obama was receiving preferential treatment in the campaign because he was black. “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” Ferraro protested. “And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”33 It was eerily reminiscent of Ferraro’s dig at Jesse Jackson during his ’88 presidential run, when she said that because of his radical politics, “if Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn’t be in the race.” Jackson shot back with typical verbal bravura, “Some people are making hysteria while I’m making history.”34 On the other hand, his pastor Jeremiah Wright had used “incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide” but that also “denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.”
Obama instinctively knew how much terror Wright’s words struck in the heart of whiteness. He borrowed the sociological lens of W. E. B. Du Bois to peer into the souls of white folk. He slipped inside the chambers of their concerns and echoed their disgust at Wright’s words. He may have let them know that they were not crazy to feel as they did, but he also courageously told them that Wright was not nearly as crazy as they feared. It was an impossible balancing act, and one that Obama did not pull off perfectly, but the effort to do so proved his genius and his gumption. Obama knew that some whites understood that prophetic preaching was occasionally overstated to match the hugeness of the targets at which it aimed—nothing sho
rt of the national way of life that thrived on denying the views of black folk whose mistreatment made them what Malcolm X called “victims of American democracy.”35 But those whites were not the ones whom Obama sought to reassure; rather it was more middle-of-the-road whites who lived in the mythical heartland that Obama had in his sights. Obama surely knew that most blacks were not bothered in the least by Wright’s comments, except as they affected Obama’s chances to get to the White House. Many blacks and whites agreed with Wright that rich whites run America. All forty-three of the U.S. presidents before Obama were white. Most CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have been white. And most members of Congress have been white. Throughout history, white Americans have been dominant and nearly unchallenged in every quarter of power that matters.
Lots of black folk and many others—including former diplomat and Reagan appointee Edward Peck—agreed with Wright that America’s vicious misdeeds around the world had in part come home to haunt the nation in the events of 9/11. Like Peck, Wright was not celebrating the attack but using it to analyze our situation and warn us against future folly. In short, America’s suffering at the hands of terrorists was not praiseworthy but predictable. Wright noted in his sermon “The Day of Jerusalem’s Fall,” delivered a year after 9/11, “I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday . . . [point] out that what Malcolm X said when he was silenced by Elijah Muhammad was in fact true—he said American chickens are coming home to roost.” Wright offered his prophetic diagnosis with nearly the same phrase that journalist Mike Wallace used when he reported on the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X in the sixties in a documentary he called The Hate That Hate Produced: “Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y’all, not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people we have wounded don’t have the military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that.”36
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