Wright on Target

On Fox News, ABC, and most other mainstream media outlets, Reverend Jeremiah Wright has been cast as an anti-American spouting hate speech, a racist, a threat, and/or a lunatic. Yet what is missing from most of the “analysis” of his sermons is one crucial point: Much of what he says is simply factual.

Is it hatred to remind people that we are the only nation that has used nuclear weapons in an act of warfare? Is it anti-American to point out that we used these weapons on a civilian population—not just once, but twice? And that by doing so we killed many, many, many more innocents than were killed on 9/11?

Is it lunacy to believe that the U.S. has supported terrorist groups and oppressive dictatorships around the world for decades and decades? Is it racist to express outrage over the second-class status of people of color in the U.S.? When Reverend Wright suggests that the U.S. builds bigger and bigger prisons to house people of color in disproportionate numbers no criminologist or corrections official could contradict him.

When he says that the U.S. is controlled by rich white people is he lying? Are we so shocked by this revelation? What country do his disbelievers live in anyway?

I’ve mentioned the simple truth of many of Wright’s statements to friends and colleagues and the response is often, “Yes, but it is his tone, his outrageous rhetoric that bothers people.” So, let’s look at that for a moment also.

The sound bite that got played over and over, the sound bite that got the Fox “News” staff all sweaty and flushed, was Wright’s exclamation: “God Bless America? No! God damn America!” But let’s look at that in context. As an atheist, I don’t believe in a god that either blesses or damns anyone. But from Wright’s perspective he does not mean God damn America the way I shout “goddamn it” if I burn my hand on a hot stove. Isn’t he really saying that a God that cares about social justice and freedom and the sanctity of life would certainly not bless the purveyors of war and oppression but would damn them? Again, if you are a religious person, is that such an outrageous claim?

He says “Goddamn America for killing innocent people, Goddamn America for treating its citizens as less than human.” If you are a religious person (again, I’m not) would the God that you believe in not damn those who kill the innocent (it’s happened throughout our history and is happening right now in Iraq)? Would that God not damn a nation that treats its citizens as less than human (it’s happened historically and is happening right now in overcrowded prisons throughout the country)?

Let’s look at some other quotes:

“So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.”

“A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: ‘This is not just.’ The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.”

“A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Outrageous! Radical! Anti-American! I can only imagine how Sean Hannity would treat the man who uttered those words forty-one years ago at the Riverside Church in New York. I can only imagine how Sean Hannity and Chris Matthews and the rest of them would treat Martin Luther King, Jr.