Rev. Wright tells media: Black church is under attack
Regan Toomer and Arlene Edmonds
Tribune Staff Writer
Wright, who spoke before the D.C. media and an audience of Black church leaders at the National Press Club, sought to explain the significance of the Black church in the first of a two-day symposium.
“This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright,” he said. “It has nothing to do with Sen. Obama. It is an attack on the Black church launched by people who know nothing about the African-American religious tradition.”
Wright, who is the former pastor of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, also denounced the Democratic senator who has distanced himself from him, ever since Wright’s controversial sermons were leaked into the media about a month ago.
“He had to distance himself — because he’s a politician — from what the media was saying I had said, which was un-American,” Wright said. “He said I didn’t offer any words of hope. How would he know? He never heard the rest of the sermon. You heard it. I offered words of hope. I offered reconciliation. I offered restoration in that sermon, but nobody heard the sermon. They just heard this little sound bite of a sermon.
“Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls, Huffington, whoever’s doing the polls,” Wright added. “Preachers say what they say because they’re pastors. They have a different person to whom they’re accountable. As I said, whether he gets elected or not, I’m still going to have to be answerable to God Nov. 5 and Jan. 21. That’s what I mean. I do what pastors do. He does what politicians do. I am not running for office. I am not hoping to be vice president.”
He also noted whether he should apologize for shouting in a sermon “God damn America” for its treatment of minorities.
“God doesn’t bless everything,” Wright said. “God condemns some things. And dem, D-E-M, is where we get the word damn. God damns some practices and there’s no excuse for the things that the government, not the American people, have done. That doesn’t make me not like America or unpatriotic.”
The pastor addressed anyone who said he’s unpatriotic.
“I feel that those citizens who say that have never heard my sermons, nor do they know me,” Wright said. “They are unfair accusations taken from sound bites and that which is looped over and over on certain channels. I served six years in the military. Does that make me patriotic? How many years did Cheney serve?”
Wright recently broke his silence and is speaking out about the heavy criticism surrounding his past sermons. The former Chicago pastor granted PBS’ Bill Moyers his first interview after his comments aired last Friday and also was a keynote speaker at a NAACP dinner in Detroit on Sunday.
At the NAACP dinner, Wright labeled himself as “descriptive” not “divisive” when he talked about race in America.
“I am sorry your local political analysts and your neighboring county executives think my being here is polarizing and my sermons are divisive, but I’m not here to address an analyst’s opinion,” he said. “I am here to address your 2008 theme … of change is going to come.
“I’m not here for political reasons,” Wright said in Detroit. “I am not a politician. I know that fact will surprise many of you because many in the corporate-owned media have made it seem as if I have announced that I’m running to for the Oval Office. I am not running for the Oval Office. I’ve been running for Jesus a long, long time, and I’m not tired yet.”
In one of his past sermons that generated a lot of criticism, Wright said the government was to blame for the spread of HIV in Black communities.
He also said the U.S. brought the Sept. 11 attacks upon itself and said “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
Wright was also asked about his relationship with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and if he agreed with his views.
“I believe that all people of all faiths have to work together in this country if we’re going to build a future for our children,” Wright said. “He is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century. When Louis Farrakhan speaks, it’s like E.F. Hutton speaks, all Black America listens. Whether they agree with him or not, they listen.”
Wright was also asked what he thought about former President Bill Clinton’s comments on race in the presidential campaign, and he deflected his answer to say that he was there to talk about the “prophetic theology of the Black church.”
Some of Philadelphia’s Black leaders shared their reactions to Wright’s speech on Monday.
The Rev. Kevin Johnson, pastor of Bright Hope Baptist Church in North Philadelphia, shared the same sentiments of Wright by saying that the Black church is under attack.
“I think the Black religious tradition is under attack primarily because people are not seeing the breadth of the Black religious experience,” he said. “The Black religious experience is varied. The reason I am saying that it is under attack is because the media has turned Rev. Wright into the religious spokesperson for the Black community.”
Johnson said he thought the media was using McCarthyism to link Obama and Wright together and that they are of “two different worlds.”
“I think this is not the time for Rev. Wright to speak,” Johnson said. “I don’t think that America was ready to receive what he said. I love him as a pastor, but I disagree with his approach. I felt this is not the time to break the silence.”
WURD host Bill Anderson spoke about why Wright is speaking out now.
“I think that he is doing it now because the situation in North Carolina and the fact that the mainstream media refuses to let this go away,” Anderson said. “The hope is that you start to see more of the man and stop being able to reduce him to just a sound bite.”
Kali Nicole Gross, director of Africana Studies at Drexel University, told The Tribune that she felt Wright was not as big a supporter of Obama as she had expected.
“It was interesting to see Jeremiah Wright put out there that he is a pastor and Obama is a politician,” she said. “It was a cool response and I felt like it had the potential to almost cast Obama in this duplicitous light. It made it seem that Obama was disingenuous and that was concerning. I was surprised.”
Many of the Black community’s most vocal activists tuned in more than once to hear what the Chicago minister had to say in his first interview after being embroiled in controversy surrounding some of his remarks and his relationship with Obama.
Arnold Hall, one of the founding members of the Men of Day group in Northwest Philadelphia, former president of the Philadelphia Home and School Association and member of the St. Therese of the Child Jesus parish in Mount Airy, watched and listened.
“First, I don’t feel that Rev. Wright ever needed to justify himself,” Hall said. ”I am glad that he did the interview. I think he was very articulate, honest and clear in his answer to the questions at hand. I think it was the media who demonized him to distract from the real merits of the campaign. I’m glad he addressed the fact that when you take sound bytes out of context and play them repeatedly one is actually shaping the news rather than reporting it. He also pointed out that he is a pastor and Obama is a politician, which is an important distinction. He is not a politician so he does not have to play politics when he speaks.”
Sacaree Rhodes, the founder of Daughters of Fine Lineage, also tuned in more than once this past weekend to hear Wright.
Rhodes readily admitted that after growing up in the Jim Crow South, her perspective was colored by her overt racial experiences.
She felt relieved that Wright finally came out and made comments after the controversy.
“I felt that he did a great interview,” Rhodes said. “I am glad that he finally addressed the racist attacks against him. Some of these news commentators on Fox and the other networks and these so-called political analysts were blatantly racist towards an African-American Christian pastor who is only doing what the Black Church has traditionally done … telling the truth about being Black in America.” |