"God Damn America" in Biblical Context: Reminding ALL Christians Who They Are

When it comes to religion, Barack Obama just can't seem to win. First he's attacked for allegedly being a Muslim, despite overwhelming evidence that he's a Christian. Then he's attacked for being a Christian... a black Christian with roots in a church tradition few whites (including me, mind you!) fully comprehend. (If you want to try, I suggest reading for starters James Baldwin's searing and painful novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain.) Or maybe better yet, try Richard Wright's Black Boy (no idea if he was part of pastor Wright's family tree), or his more bombastic Native Son, a Chicago story based on real events in 1940s Chicago -- the neighborhood Pastor Wright's church currently stands in.

For historical background, try a dose of Thomas Jefferson's writings on how blacks smell bad (I'm sure his slaves, after a day in the field, did smell pretty funky); then consider his slave / concubine / rape victim Sally Hemmings. (I guess she smelled good enough to Tommy.) Read the passages from our founding documents regarding blacks' designation as 3/5s persons -- a designation given so the Southern states would have greater representation in the House of Representatives, among other things!

Then take a long, cold drink of water. Calm down.

This post really isn't about Barack Obama. Barack has repeatedly distanced himself from his pastor's more incendiary comments regarding 9/11 and God's judgment on America. I'm not even going to further comment on Barack Obama's involvement with all this, because I don't think he is involved. Period. Obama never agreed, never said he agreed, and the comments made are specifically disavowed even in the content of Barack's own words during and after the 9/11 era, up through the present, and in his two books. At least this mess produced a great Obama speech (see my two previous blog entries.)

But let's leave that. And let's talk about the comments his pastor made, comments which are often made by urban black pastors, -- and a few white ones. These are comments rooted in the private intimacies and urgent secret murmers of slave churches over centuries of time, comments rooted in the music of a persecuted and oppressed people, comments rooted in Old Testament prophecy and New Testament Hope.

Empires (Egypt, Babylon, Rome, and even Israel itself), warn the biblical prophets and preachers, are not going to last. They are too often kingdoms built on gold and iron and enslavement, built on the cruel strength of men. But there is a kingdom coming which will crush that earthly might with the awesome power of a Holy God, intent on rescuing his people. That God goes to any length, whether parting a sea or dying Himself on a cross as a common criminal, to rescue and redeem. And redeem he will; judge he will; condemn the proud kingdoms of this world he will.

Have we so quickly forgotten that Christianity is not the Kingdom of America, but the Kingdom of Heaven? And can we imagine going to church to not just figuratively, but literally, lay down our burdens and expose our inner souls to one another in what is a mingled time of worship, mourning, and declamation of the works of the world (our oppressors' world!), the flesh, and the devil? Can we imagine a pastor who cries his or her sermon out in mingled anger, prophecy, mourning and praise?

Here is the sound bite run by ABC and Fox in particular from a sermon Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the pastor in question, preached:

"The government gives them 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."

Now. Replace "America" with Babylon, or Rome, or Israel (the nation God was arguably roughest on of them all). Has the light gone on yet? America is no less liable to judgment than any of these other kingdoms were. America is not "God-blessed" by default. And, in a very real sense, America as a people risks being "God-damned" for reasons much like those Pastor Jeremiah Wright listed. I don't say that for political reasons, but for biblical reasons. And I would note that his final sentence in the above quote -- this not pointed out by any commentator I've heard -- greatly softens what he said before, and makes his commentary into a call to repentance. Worse, however, is the fact that this sound bite is torn out of a sermon which, when heard more completely, makes the above statement far more understandable and theologically defensible. Here's a large chunk of that sermon:



In short, the sermon entire is a balanced, if intense, call to repentance. We hear these calls to repentance in our white evangelical churches all the time. In fact, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and others went further than Wright went in saying that God's judgment was meted out on 9/11. Their reasons had to do with homosexuality and the ACLU, among other things. Yet in this election cycle, we see them (or those like them, such as John Hagee and Rod Parsley) used by John McCain and the Republican party. It is written about, but without much heat or even general interest in the media.

But back to theology. There are plenty of biblical examples where God through his prophets and preachers calls his people to repentance. Leviticus 26, for instance, offers one such biblical scenario echoed by Pastor Wright's words:

27 But if, despite this, you disobey me, and continue hostile to me, 28 I will continue hostile to you in fury; I in turn will punish you myself sevenfold for your sins. 29 You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters. 30 I will destroy your high places and cut down your incense altars; I will heap your carcasses on the carcasses of your idols. I will abhor you. 31 I will lay your cities waste, will make your sanctuaries desolate, and I will not smell your pleasing odors. 32 I will devastate the land, so that your enemies who come to settle in it shall be appalled at it. 33 And you I will scatter among the nations, and I will unsheathe the sword against you; your land shall be a desolation, and your cities a waste. [New Revised Standard Version]

The words of God's impending judgment crash and clang against our human institutions. Rev. Jeremiah Wright follows in many biblical heroes' footsteps in his denunciation of American sins. I would note that he speaks as an American -- a Black American -- and as a Christian. His words in the larger sermon's context have both compassion and challenge in them. It is a mainstream sermon and I've heard others like it... from even white pastors, I might add.

I would also note that Rev. Wright is speaking from a historic context, one which (among other things) finds one out of nine black males have been or are in jail vs. one out of 106 white males. Deeply consider that the next time you're in church; look around at the males and think of what it would be like to know one out of nine of them had been or would be spending time in jail! (You'd have to imagine ones who aren't there because they are in jail.)

Did ABCNews discuss the legitimate anger, rooted in history, behind the words of Rev. Wright? Of course not. They are busily playing the same game Geraldine Ferraro did a few weeks back. Remember? She said how lucky it was for Barack Obama to be a black male right now. Sure. Ask the black males in this country how lucky they feel to not only see Barack Obama so disparaged, but then on top of it to see a Reverend marginalized who told the truth about their plight, if in terms far more fundamentalist and simplistic than warranted.

Remember.... I'm just a white guy.

Back to Rev. Wright. He also said, speaking of American history:

"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye" (Sept. 16, 2001, sermon). He continued: "We have 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 to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."

The history is pretty accurate. The quote's underlying assumption that we deserve what happened because we have unjustly treated others is a seeming failure of Rev. Wright to attach his Christianity (specifically the doctrine of grace and redemption) to his message of judgment. But of course, that is only if we accept these snippets -- yanked from their overall context -- as being representative on their own. Again, I have to offer a slightly larger snip from the sermon to give a very different spin on the above quote:



What a stunning difference between an out of context snippet and a man's overall words, reflecting a warning *against* rage and violence, the very things he's being accused of promoting! Rev. Wright is in these quotes following a time-honored tool of preachers, and that tool is to speak prophetically to one's surrounding culture. The Apostle James, for instance, rails on the wealthy, telling them to weep and howl for the miseries which will come upon them. And frankly, there are a lot more verses discussing judgment by God on nations due to their lack of compassion for the poor and powerless than most Christians in this nation seem to be aware of. "Family Values" politics and preaching focuses almost exclusively upon matters of sexual sin, a legitimate but certainly not holistic approach to what the Bible has to say.

Yet somehow, we gulp down this lopsided "Christian Right" message with far less of a reaction than we have to Rev. Wright's more biblically rounded one. For instance, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, on Robertson's TV show, said, soon after 9/11:

JERRY FALWELL: And I agree totally with you that the Lord has protected us so wonderfully these 225 years. And since 1812, this is the first time that we've been attacked on our soil and by far the worst results. And I fear, as Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, said yesterday, that this is only the beginning. And with biological warfare available to these monsters -- the Husseins, the Bin Ladens, the Arafats -- what we saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could be miniscule if, in fact -- if, in fact -- God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.

PAT ROBERTSON: Jerry, that's my feeling. I think we've just seen the antechamber to terror. We haven't even begun to see what they can do to the major population.

JERRY FALWELL: The ACLU's got to take a lot of blame for this.

PAT ROBERTSON: Well yes.

JERRY FALWELL: And, I know that I'll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say "you helped this happen."

PAT ROBERTSON: Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government. And so we're responsible as a free society for what the top people do. And, the top people, of course, is the court system.

James Dobson, head of "Focus on the Family," nuanced his 9/11 commentary but the judgment on America thread is still there:

"Christians have made arguments on both sides of this question. I certainly believe that God is displeased with America for its pride and arrogance, for killing 40 million unborn babies, for the universality of profanity and for other forms of immorality. However, rather than trying to forge a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the terrorist attacks and America’s abandonment of biblical principles, which I think is wrong, we need to accept the truth that this nation will suffer in many ways for departing from the principles of righteousness. 'The wages of sin is death,' as it says in Romans 6, both for individuals and for entire cultures."

I don't think Christians should be praying God Damn anything or anyone. To do so is to lose our hold on human love. That said, a Mother holding her mangled dead baby, in the aftermath of a smart bomb that wasn't so smart blowing her home and family to bits, might feel like saying "God Damn America." I can understand that. In fact, if she were a Christian Iraqi mother in the above scenario -- and there of course are some -- she'd be no less likely to say that than her Muslim counterpart. As a Christian man on 9/11, I prayed an imprecatory prayer to the Lord re Osama bin Laden and his buddies. I also prayed that the Lord would give me clarity on how to pray a better prayer for them than that, but admitted to Him that I could not at that moment pray any prayer but an imprecatory, raging, angry prayer. And as I prayed, I wept.

What I prayed most for were those innocent fellow humans, fellow Americans and others, who were destroyed in an instant or who had to leap to their deaths because the fire was so hot they had to escape it somehow. I think that Rev. Wright's prophetic voice may have failed most in his failure to mourn these people; a pastor is not only a prophet who speaks from God to the people, but also a priest who speaks to God for his suffering people. But we Christians as a whole tend to fail on that score. Strange, isn't it, considering the Lord's own example? He only spoke prophetically to the rich and powerful, it seems to me. His role as priest was the one that causes us to love him most.

In conclusion, I find Rev. Jeremiah Wright an often inspiring, sometimes rhetorically over the top, but mainstream and highly intelligent Christian leader. And I think those who criticize him in order to get at the man whom he led to Christ are barking up the wrong tree.

For more on Rev. Jeremiah Wright, I suggest visiting his church's website as well as reading Barack's two books, and particularly the second, Audacity of Hope.

Let me add just one more Jeremiah Wright quote to this post. "A government-sponsored religiousity makes you suffer from amnesia." This idea is behind me beginning the blog you are reading right now. Confusing nationalism with Christianity, making Jesus just one more additive to the peculiar Americanism which is not us at our best (putting it delicately), this is death to biblical faith. Christianity by its very nature is about constructing and establishing a Kingdom not of this world. While we may love our nation -- and we should, I believe -- we must not confuse that love with our love for God, His Word, or His Kingdom. Soren Kierkegaard warned of his native Denmark falling into the same trap. "Christendom," he called it. "Christianity without Christ."

Americans of all colors cannot afford to live in denial. That is what nationalism is. It ignores the nation's sins past or present and embraces a ideal best exemplified by the Nazi propaganda film, "Triumph of Will." It requires we close our eyes to history and today. Christianity requires the opposite. We must open our eyes, to our own sins and failings and weaknesses, and to our nation's. That too is love. "Faithful are the wounds of a friend."

Late addition: It should be noted that Reverend Wright's theology does, according to his Church's website, build on Dr. James Cone's ideas re liberation theology. I personally struggle w/ liberation theology sometimes recontextualizing Scripture in ways which seem not to honor the Word's own meaning. That said, there is also much good in liberation theology even for a theological conservative such as myself. The old idea of "eat the meat, spit out the bones" comes into play...

tag: 2008 election, ABC News, Barack Obama, black racism, context, Fox News, God Damn America, Jeremiah Wright, Ralph Ellison, Rev. Wright, Richard Wright

Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" Speech: Entire Text

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Below is the entire text of Barack Obama's speech on his pastor's controversial comments, his own beliefs and life, and the burden of America's racial past plus our opportunity to face it now. Barack gave this speech this morning, starting around 10:30 a.m. Chicago time. Already, many are stating it ranks with the great speeches of Martin Luther King. You be the judge...


[Photo above: Barack Obama as a child with his mother.]


“A More Perfect Union”
Constitution Center
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

by Barack Obama

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

"No Smiles" - A Chicago family living in poverty
in 1978 Uptown, Chicago.
Photo (c) 2008 Cornerstone magazine / Jesus People USA Archives,
used by express permission only.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has 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.

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

“People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.”

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their world view in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he 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.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today – a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a round table discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the round table that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.


tag: A more perfect union, Barack Obama, racial issues, healing race, racism, reverse racism, Geraldine Ferraro, black racism, white racism, obama speech, Jeremiah Wright, hillary clinton racism